The Rasa Panchadhyayi of the Srimad Bhagavata Mahapurana: 2. Swami Krishnananda.

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Monday 28, April 2025, 11:00.
Article
Scriptures
The Rasa Panchadhyayi of the Srimad Bhagavata Mahapurana: 2.
Swami Krishnananda.
(Spoken on April 28, 1985)

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What distresses people in the world is essentially a lack of affection, love. They do not require other things as much as they require a consideration for what they are and not necessarily for what they need, what they have, and what their external appurtenances are. My love for you is a greater essential for you than all the wealth that I may pour upon you. Many of the distresses of people are caused by a lack of social affection or personal regard, what we call mutual love. Love rules the world. It is not authority that rules. Power does not rule, finally. Though it appears that it is power that executes the magic performances of administration in all the levels of life, it is not actually true because the power of empires which were bereft of affection and love in the heart fell and went to dust.

It is a peculiar indescribable operation of the heart of the human being which we call love and affection. It cannot be medically diagnosed, anatomically described or chemically examined. No one knows what affection means, what love is, but it is the ruling factor in life. There is an accommodating atmosphere which we call the manifestation of affection, love, regard, charitableness and accommodation.

But the religious scriptures mostly adumbrate all that is grand and glorious and magnificent in God, and not so much the love aspect, the beauty aspect. Have you heard anywhere of God being described as the most beautiful of beings? We have never heard this adequately described. How could God be beautiful? The beautiful things are in this world. All the aesthetic attractions and the magnificences of aesthetic grandeur are in this world. How could God the Creator, the Mighty Potentate, be beautiful? The mind cannot conceive that it is a practicability because we are accustomed to think of God as a judiciary, as a creator, preserver, destroyer, not as a beautiful person, not as attractive, enchanting, enrapturing, melting our hearts, or pulling us from the root of our being. Such a thing we have not been taught. We cannot imagine that God can melt our hearts with love and affection.

The nearest approach to God, the greatest bond that can connect us with God is considered in scriptures of divine devotion as that inexplicable, non-calculable, unequalled super-physical and super-arithmetical inward operation which is the melting of one's being. In love we melt; in authority we become hard like flint. We become strong when we exercise power and we have the authority to do so, but we do not melt. In love we melt into a maelstrom where our personality dissolves.

The apex of love may be an aesthetic sense reaching its climax through listening to a beautiful recital of music. We may be enraptured beyond the capacity of our imagination by a beautiful sculptural piece. We may not be able to take our eyes away from that beautiful marble statue, inanimate though it is. There are such marvellous sculptures that we will not know what happens to us when we see them. We will not be there; we will be simply transfixed on that statue. We will be transfixed on a beautiful painting which may absorb our attention to such an extent that we will not know that we are existing there. We will be in the beauty of that painting, the inexplicable thing that pulls us and melts us down to such an extent that we do not exist at that moment. In all aesthetic appreciations, the appreciator ceases to exist for a moment, and in loves of every kind which have reached a particular measure of intensity, the lover ceases to be. A lover who is conscious of himself or herself is not a true lover because, in love, egoism melts.

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Continued

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