Nota bene: Originally, I had planned more articles to wrap up the summer series on spiritual ecology. It is now my plan to collect what I have written and expand them in a larger project, so I am instead providing this last summative observation on this series, regarding the world’s existence in God, and God’s in the world.
So what may we say, having rebuilt our cosmos from the ground-up this summer? We have met the Wild God in brush and beast, beheld undine, gnomes, salamanders, and sylphs, and astral gods, demons and angels and those undecided, Evil and Matter and World Soul; all this, refracted in the human heart, just as the human is the kosmos in miniature, “has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his messiah” (Rev 11:15), as it were, the Spirit conspiring (literally: “breathing together”) in and through it all, the ascended Christ having filled it all with himself, and God the Father to be replete within it all when the poetic and plastic creations, the intelligible and sensible orders, give way to the sophianic ktisis. But it is precisely this overlap of hypostaseis—the way in which Spirit, Son, and Father are present in and to the created order, as well as in and to one another—that gives us the key to the whole enterprise.
First, one more new text to consider, this one again from South Asia: the Rasa Līla, India’s famous love song of Krishna and the gopis, dancing deep into the night in meditation on the love between god and devotee. It should be noted, as devotee and scholar Graham Schweig, probably the best English translator of the text, does, that the Rasa Līla is India’s equivalent to the Canticum Canticorum in the Western tradition; and just as Song of Songs indwells a liminal space in cultural consciousness between the erotic and the sacred, so too does Rasa Līla.1 Like Canticum, Rasa Līla’s history of interpretation shows some discomfort with the subject matter and a desire to sanitize, as far as possible, the erotic character of the imagery. To some extent this is probably the fate of any literature, music, or art produced by a deeply religious culture that celebrates or graphically depicts sexuality, as Canticum does, or even alludes to it heavily, as Rasa Līla does: more puritanical impulses in the wider society feel the need to control the text by diluting its sensuality into something more “religious” in nature. Canticum is, in its origins, clearly a love song about a passionate sexual affair between two unmarried youths, who describe one another’s bodies and their lovemaking in detail that would, and has, make many a rabbi, priest, and minister blush. (There’s a joke in there somewhere, I acknowledge.) Rabbinic sages of the early first millennium CE were in a tight spot with the book: on the one hand, the text clearly enjoyed enough value in Jewish society to make its simple abandonment unimaginable, but on the other hand, it seemed crude to the ancients to include a text so obviously erotic in character in the emerging corpus of sacred literature from ancient Israel, Judah, and Second-Temple Judea. The allegorical method provided a compromise here just as it had for the Greeks with Homer (a similarly treasured cultural resource) and as it would for Christians with the Hebrew Bible more broadly: the love affair of the poem is really between God, the young man or bridegroom of the poem, and Israel, the young woman or bride. Later kabbalists would recapture some of the obviously erotic character of the text, but still in a sacred or exalted mode: the lovers were really the divine masculine and feminine within the Godhead (and, in point of fact, they may in saying so have been closer to the imagined preexilic cultural background in which Canticum is set). Modern Jews are on the whole much more comfortable with the erotic character of such a text; there is something of an amalgamation of senses here, as the kabbalistic use of Canticum on erev Shabbat to welcome the Sabbath Bride (L’chah, dodi!) coincides with a tradition that the nuptial mystery is especially appropriate and blessed on the eve of the Sabbath. Early Christians largely followed Jewish strategies about the book, understanding it as an allegory about Christ and the Church or Christ and the Soul, dismissing its “carnal” interpretation (Early Christians in general had much more negative attitudes about sex than either pagans or Jews).
The interpretation of Rasa Līla follows a very similar trajectory: like many stories about the youthful Krishna, it is both erotic and transgressive, defying societal norms through the relations between Krishna and multiple women, including multiple married women (including, probably, though she is unnamed in this text, Radha). When Krishna, “seeing those nights / in autumn filled with / blooming jasmine flowers, / Turned his mind toward /love’s delights,” and then “began to make sweet music, / melting the hearts of fair maidens with beauitful eyes,” we read, “their passion for him swelling, / The young women of Vraja whose minds were captured by Krishna, / Unaware of one another, / ran off toward the place / Where their beloved was waiting, / with their earrings swinging wildly” (Bhagavata Purana 10.29; RL I.i.1, 3-4).2 They left behind a great deal: “Some left abruptly, / while milking the cows—due to excitement / the milking had ceased. / Some left the milk as it boiled over; / others departed / leaving cakes on the hearth” (I.i.4). Then, more scandalously: “Some suddenly stopped / dressing themselves; / others no longer / fed children their milk. / Some left their husbands / who had not yet been served; / others while eating / abandoned their meals. / Some were massaging / their bodies with oils / or cleansing themselves; / others applying / ointment to their eyes. / Their garments / and ornaments / in utter disarray, / they hastened to be with Krishna” (I.i.6-7). Husbands, fathers, and brothers could do nothing: “their hearts / had been stolen by Govinda,” so “they who were entranced / did not turn back” (I.i.8). After some playful back and forth and theological interludes, Krishna eventually bathes with the gopis, and “joyfully awakened the god of love / in those beautiful young women from Vraja” (I.iv.46). This happens again after the dance (V.ii.23), and the text is even more explicit here: “He, who himself possesses all pleasure, / took pleasure in amorous love, / playing like the king of elephants” (V.ii.24; the elephant metaphor reaches back to stanza 23, and is repeated in stanza 25, and I have here abbreviated its more suggestive use in the text for modesty).
These scenes raise some moral concerns with the narrator and his audience within the text itself. The king listening to the bard asks: “How could he—the teacher, / executor and protector / of the limits of dharma— / O knower of Brahman, / act in contrary ways / by touching others’ wives” (V.iii.28)? But the narrator clarifies: “Apparent transgressions of dharma / in the acts of the most exalted souls / can appear bold or reckless. / Among such powerful beings,” however, “there is no adverse effect, / just as fire can devour anything / without being affected” (V.iii.30). Similar to Christian beliefs about Jesus as a portable vehicle of holiness, in other words, who sanctifies and does that which is normally reserved for God or unethical for humans in certain instances, Krishna’s antinomianism is not so much a model for emulation as a specialized revelation. While some minor sects have interpreted the story to be a literal injunction to free love, for the most part, Hindu tradition has incorporated the text into an overall fairly conservative sociocultural sexual morality, and has sometimes spiritualized the events to the exclusion of any erotic activity at all. But this is a clear misreading of the text, which straightforwardly describes Krishna’s actions and even has another character in the text express some degree of discomfort with the implications of those actions. Krishna, the humanized Vishnu and ultimate face of the divine in Vaishnav tradition, has explicitly done something that the majority of Hindus past and present would find unthinkable; how to square the scandal of bhakti with the demands of dharma?
Of course, in both Canticum and Rasa Līla, the interpretive notion that many kinds of interpretations cannot be simultaneously true is the bigger problem. Modern Christians should be able to see that Song of Songs is obviously, in its literal sense, about a profound, fundamental human experience of passionate love, and to hear in the ancient Jewish poem a celebration of that love’s strength rivaling death without feeling the repulsion their late antique forbears rhetorically feigned towards it (and at least for those Church Fathers who were married, one does hope it was simply a rhetorical posture, for their wives’ sake). And one can also, simultaneously, hold that the text is in fact about God and Israel, and perhaps even about some union of divine masculine and feminine (which has had numerous iterations in the history of Jewish and Christian traditions: YHWH and Asherah, YHWH and Chokmah, Christ and Mary, etc.), as well as being about Christ and the Church, and perhaps even more intimately about God and the Soul. Likewise, it stretches belief to an absurd degree to hold that Krishna, summoning the milkmaids out of bed in the middle of the night, stealing their clothes, dancing with them, bathing with them in the stream, and so forth is not amorous in the literal sense. But also, literal conjugation between Krishna and the gopis is only prohibitive of an allegorical meaning in the text pointing to the love between God and the devotee if one has already concluded that sexuality is devoid of spiritual meaning. It is of course the case that many religious systems—including Christianity, due to its Jewish apocalyptic origins—see ultimate human destiny as a transcendence of the state of being in which sexed existence, and intercourse as its remedy (and curse), are normative, and several of them encourage a kind of ascetic renunciation of that life even now for their who can manage it. But this is not necessarily a binary between good and evil; it can be understood as a duality between good and better. The four traditional goals in Hinduism—licit wealth or worldly success (artha), pleasure, inclusive of morally appropriate sexual pleasure (kama), righteousness and religious duty (dharma), and liberation (moksha)—witness to this sense of scale: one is supposed to pursue the goals in more or less this order, leaving behind focus on the former as one draws near to the ultimate goal of liberation, which ideally (but less frequently in practice) requires actual renunciation of the world (sannyasin) to really accomplish. Realistically, most religions advocating human transcendence minimally make room for the spiritual importance of a laity that will not renounce the world. Christians historically have expected married clergy, and capable married laypeople, to abscond to the monastery if widowed or separated (and sometimes have separated in order to do so); but otherwise, the life of the angels has not been reasonably expected of those able and willing to follow Christ as best they can. Likewise, most Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists are expected to marry. Religious ideals of renunciation and asceticism often break on the irreducibly specific pressures, anxieties, and hopes of real humans. Religions that cannot attend to the sanctity of the person, in fact, tend as a rule to die over time, because the personal is inescapable.
The passion of both Canticum and Rasa Līla are thus doubly transgressive: on the one hand, they undermine the norms of sexual relationships that govern the life of the secular laity, and on the other hand, they reinvest sexuality itself with sacramental power as a symbol of divine love: not as a tolerated, begrudged, but finally relented spiritualization of an otherwise reviled fact of human life, but as, again, the power that is as “strong as death” (Song 8:6). In fact, the sacred meaning of these stories is impossible under the ordinary social norms. Krishna cannot represent God as dancing alone and together with each individual devotee if he does not exceed and transcend, however scandalously, the ordinary rules of life in settled space that other humans have to follow; monogamy to a singular spouse would not communicate the spiritual point Vaishnav tradition aims for. The text itself says that: “He who dwells within the Gopis and within their husbands, / indeed, within all embodied beings, / As the internal Witness, / also acts in this world / through his divine dramas, / by assuming various forms. / In order to show / special favor to his devotees, / he reveals his personal / human-like form” (V.iv.36-37). Likewise, the urgency and marginal social location of the lovers in Canticum, both as pastoralists as well as unmarried youths, is the only way that they can symbolize, respectively, God and Israel, Christ and the Church, God and the Soul, etc.: it is precisely the narrative of the Hebrew Bible that God’s greatest intimacy to Israel has not historically been during the period of Israel’s settlement in Canaan but during her wandering in the liminal space of the desert; the Christian Church is supposed to be a society of wayfarers, “strangers and exiles”; a long tradition of biblical and post biblical persons, from Moses to Antony the Great, testifies to the wilderness as the place where God meets people as individuals, as the “still small voice” at the heart of one’s being (1 Kgs 19:11-13). In either text, a socially respectable love would have made, paradoxically, for a bad icon; the undermining of even the divinely underwritten forms of social arrangement is what allows the freedom and power of divine love to be most apparent. This does not have to mean an antinomian response on the part of the worshiper, and has not for most in either tradition (though it should perhaps problematize simplistic narratives of how we claim to know what the moral good is); rather, a provisionally divine antinomianism is the only means to break through the illusion by which we frequently mistake our own norms for divine or eternal ones, as though heaven shared our customs (even if it was heaven that gave us our customs).
Eros in both Canticum and Rasa Līla is indicative of the divine nature; this has been challenging for many in both traditions ever since, but when it has been embraced as an insight it has led to joyous theology and cosmology. In the Christian tradition, Ps.-Dionysios’ concept of the divine eros, as first the desire binding Father, Son, and Spirit together and second as the desire of God for the world and the soul in the world, both summarizes the essence of prior Greek philosophy (pagan and Christian) as well as extends it, attributing to the emanative powers of the dynamic One that is also the divine triad of hypostaseis or tropoi hyparxeos an intentional character. It is not the case that God created by accident: freedom and necessity are reconciled in God, and so too are nature and work, creation and emanation: God knows and wills himself, and in knowing and willing himself, knows and wills necessarily but also freely and even erotically all those things that can come to be from him, in and through the Son and by the Spirit. If Father is God as satt, Son is God as citta, and Spirit is God as ananda, then the Father, like the brahman of the Upanishads, desires to become many, inexhaustibly and infinitely emptying himself in the generation of the Son and, knowing himself in the Son, infinitely desiring by the Spirit the union with the One, Being, Truth, Goodness, and Beauty that the Son, as the Father’s perfect image, is. It is that simultaneous tranquility of perfect emptiness and fullness in God, as well as the ascetic heat, so to speak, that God produces through the eros that does not leave the divine nature itself, but simply surges back and forth in eternal exitus and reditus between the divine subsistences, that is the ground of creation’s being, the analogical possibility of its own exitus from the Father and reditus thereto, in and through the Son and by the power of the Spirit. And so the world is born from the divine eros; it exists in the divine eros; it is the divine eros, simply in a naturally finite mode. All things are bound together by it; as Ps.-Dionysios says: “The divine erotic force also produces ecstasy, compelling those who love to belong not to themselves but to those whom they love” (De Divinis Nominibus 4.13).3 Divine love is impassible, to be sure: God’s eros proceeds from fullness rather than lack, where creatures, particularly creatures like ourselves, all too often experience eros as pathos or tancha, desire proceeding from lack, “craving.” But for precisely this reason divine eros and divine caritas are the selfsame love: for God, whether as Krishna or the lover of the Song of Songs, sex is not a craving of his own but at one and the same time the means of his celebratory desire to realize the divine nature in the devotee and to show compassion for the devotee’s lack as the creature experiences it. The radiance of rotating forms that emerge, submerge, and remerge in the sensible world, the diversity of souls and life and worlds and kingdoms, the many-sided multiplicity and omnicentricity of the contingent creation, are all, when experienced as boundary, indeed, true privation; but when experienced as the divine līla, Krishna dancing with the gopis, God’s suggestive laughter with Sophia, the true nature of the created world begins to shine through as far as we are able to see it. This is the divine perichoresis, the circle-dance of the Trinity, as it overflows into the created: and hence, the created experience of what it is like to be creaturely, the push and pull of eros and eris (as Empedocles named them), and also the experience of God’s descent into this order to redeem us from the illusion of separation our ignorance convinces us of in the face of creation’s multiplicity, all provide for us an in to that Trinitarian life, a revelation of some of its contours. If effects pre-exist in their causes, then God cannot but know and transcendently enjoy eros and its fruits, albeit beyond the limitations of a nature defined by potency and act; God must in fact be eros, the true, heavenly eros of, say, the Symposium as opposed to the lower daimon who is the terrestrial Aphrodite’s son. But once this is established, the cosmos becomes clearly, and understandably, the garments and instruments and song and floor and sweat and heated breath of the divine dance. It is for this reason, perhaps, that Origen was ultimately right to deny, along with Plotinus and other Platonists, that either the intelligible or the sensible worlds really had a beginning in time: not because either is the fully, eternally realized creation that is for us eschatological, but because the Trinitarian relations are eternal and so the worlds which come to be and pass away or are changed like garments (Ps 102:26) must logically have had neither true beginning nor true end in time, but rather their only beginning and only end is none other than Christ himself, the union of the divine and the creaturely natures and the subsistent locus of the world’s existence itself. It does not matter how many kosmoi the dance has sparked along what we take to be a linear timeline, nor how many exist “simultaneously” with ourselves; for God, it seems logical to conclude that every world that can logically come into being does so, by his eros that the divine nature should be infinitely realized not only in the consubstantial subsistences of Son and Spirit but also in the finite which, logically, must be numerically infinite in potency, since God’s Oneness is by nature beyond number. Worlds are born, destroyed, and remade in the divine dancing, perhaps by Vishnu’s dreaming or by Shiva’s tandava; after each kosmos falls once more to darkness, “in a beginning,” when God begins to create, the Spirit flutters once more over the waters of chaos and the bat qol announces “Fiat lux.” God perennially dreams forth the intelligible and imaginal realm in the Son, whose forms and qualities aggregate into what we experience as the corporeal and material world; matter is the interstitial nothingness out of which that creation emerges and from which its experiences proceed, and which God tames, if not within the history of a sensible world, then at least in that horizon where all sensible worlds are fully united with their archetypical Nous and nothing is lost, but all feast alike together when, through Christ, God is “all in all” (1 Cor 15:20-28). Cosmogony is for God simply the erotic play that makes possible our own steps in the dance; chastity and profligacy alike witness to the universality of that love by which God inexhaustibly calls everything forth and sustains it in being.
Here below we do not, as a rule, always enjoy the theoria of all things in God and God in all things, pulsating with original and consummate divine love. We do not even usually enjoy the clarity of vision by which ancient and medieval people saw the material world in its spiritual essence and populated with many kinds of beings, chthonic, terrestrial, heavenly, cosmic and hypercosmic, whose interpolations might justly make us wonder if indeed love is that force that moves the Sun and other stars. For many of us what we have are mundane sufferings and mundane reliefs, by turns more or less acute dependent on our particular experiences of providence in its various shades; our experience of religion, even a religion that notionally believes in the extramundane, is all too often disenchanting, reinforcing for us the illusion of separation between self, world, and God. Indeed, knowing more articulately than our pervasive sense as a species that the world is more than it appears to be can even have a negative net effect on an individual, especially one particularly oppressed by life in the ordinary world. It is harder to stay put, put one’s nose to the grindstone, play one’s part in the social fantasy, and be a productive member of society (TM) when one has some sense of how much bigger reality is. When one knows the truths of nondualism, panentheism, and idealist panpsychism, when one has a cosmically reaching Christology, when one knows the Spirit blowing where it will through all the beings of the universe, it becomes nigh well impossible to have anything more than a temporary and pragmatic allegiance to the middling structures of human culture, the abstractions of institutions like government, political parties, and reified, fossilized forms of religion. It is difficult to have anything more than a practical interest in the amount of money requisite to ensure one’s survival, basic needs, and modest flourishing; it becomes very difficult to justify, say, the destruction of rivers and fields and flora and fauna in the name of “development” or “progress,” and excessively difficult to feel inspired to fight, kill, or die in the name of any such institution or ideology other than in a situation of necessity contradicting one’s ideals. Expanded consciousness can, in addition to making much of human life simply alienating to experience, also make it very difficult to function as the sort of person contemporary society on the whole requires one to be. It would be hubris, short of leaving the world for the monastery or the desert (though those too can be hubris), to assume that such expansion does in fact free one from the duties of household and polis; we owe it to our families and neighbors to try and help to build the social order most in alignment with the transcendent Good and therefore most devoted to the common good that we can. We ourselves depend on such a society for whatever leisure affords us the opportunity to know the real world anyway. But much like one who takes, for instance, the Bodhisattva Vow, there is a definitive before and after to the vision I have here tried to describe; one is unlikely to immediately arrive, and those who claim to are rarely if ever to be trusted, but once one has begun down the path, one will become a Buddha, however far off in the future. And being surrounded by those, even those one loves best, who have not seen or tasted or begun to be initiated can be deeply isolating, as well as tempting to the Vice of pride.
So the things that gift us with the call of the divine eros—beauty, poetry, Scripture, philosophy, music, art, passionate love, and so on—can also make us feel definitively forsaken by a world with which we long to commune but between which and ourselves we feel rather as though an unbridgeable gap stands fixed. What to do? There are broadly three kinds of responses we can have to the dissonance between the world as we usually know it and the world as we are gifted to know it in extended exercise of reason and revelation. The first is mechanical: this is the dream of technological deification, realizing the mythic past of human imagination in the utopian future, here and on other worlds of the sensible plane. Perhaps indeed such awaits us, and sometimes I hope so, though I find there to be good cause for skepticism; in any event, the narratives on offer now for such a future are far more driven by ego, greed, and bloodlust than by the genuine desire to better and further humanity. The other, related, is magical: to compel the powers to show themselves, come what may. Ancient Christians found in magicians a distinct threat to the message of the Gospel; they were not prudes in this regard, as most pagans and Jews did as well, but it is worth revisiting their setting and causes for antipathy for wizards. Antiquity was a time that already sensed itself to have lost a good deal of the magic and divinity of the world to the changing cycles of time, but which did not yet lose a sense of the powers themselves resident within nature and in its higher realms. There were no new, or very few and very different, demigods for first-century people; but one could exclaim Herakles’ name, as Socrates does in the Euthyphro, and count on his saving power. The river god might not appear and converse with St. Paul, as Skamandros did with Achilles, but he will fight him nonetheless (2 Cor 11:26). In that context the abolition of magic could not have foreboded what it says to us now: it was the elimination of a spiritual rival (one also not well regarded by Plotinus or Porphyry) in a still obviously spiritually charged world. In our day the aspiring magus might seem benign, friendly, even a welcome addition to the landscape devastated by the mechanical world. Whatever magic is, whether and however it works, whatever it is designed to accomplish, are all somewhat beside the point; in all likelihood, like anything else, magic admits of frauds and fiends, fools and fair folk, all of whom potentially engage with more than what they reasonably know how to handle, some of whom perhaps with tact. But more to the point, the rise of neopagans and new publicity of magical practitioners may well testify that we live in a transition away from what Owen Barfield might have called an age of withdrawal and towards one of reciprocal consciousness, in which we experience both a sense of independent moral agency as well as the sense of a living universe. Sorcerers and theurgists and diviners all may well know what time it is somewhat better than the parochial Christian content only to await postmortem heaven and to dally with the zeitgeist in the meanwhile.
But there is also a third option, beyond mechanism and magic: namely liturgy. By this I do not simply mean a particular liturgical rite, or any particular form of one: but rather, sacred participation in the order of reality in community with others and for the common good. Liturgy, of course, includes mechanical and magical sorts of things: there are protocols to ritual, and in most cases the line between ceremonial, publicly licit magic and liturgical worship is effectively non-existent. The priest saying Mass is leading the common ritual of the magical lodge that is the parish, whatever else he (or she) is doing; there is a techne to doing so that, without devolving into legalism, preserves the constantia between intelligible and sensible in the rite. But liturgy does involve a higher element, which is the desire to participate in rather than manipulate the divine oikonomia of the world. Even the good magician seeks, as far as possible, the reshaping of provident fate according to the particular boon sought; priests and parishioners might also treat liturgy this way, it should be said, but ideally liturgy provides something higher, the encounter with the divine eros in the desire not so much to get something from God (though there are certainly liturgies for that) nor even to give something to God (though, again, there are liturgies for that as well) as to simply participate in God, and by participating in God, to participate in all that God gives rise to. “Liturgy” thus names a mode of response that properly encompasses not only, say, the Christian eucharist and ritual prayer or Jewish tefilah or Muslim salat, but also samadhi in Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism, also mitzvoth, also the corporal and spiritual works of mercy, also the worldly life lived from bhakti, also the ascetical life lived in jnana. Liturgy is an attitude not so much of wanting to tweak things for one’s comfort as of wanting to whirl together with all things out from God and back to God (though it is also, it should be said, not an attitude of quietism which would ignore injustice and not actively work for a liberated world order, either). The liturgist, in other words, acts in the spirit of the gopi or the Shunammite woman: longing for the Beloved Lord from a place of need, receiving his eros as his charity, and coming, through that erotic force, as Ps.-Dionysios says, to “stand outside” of the self and belong to the Lord, and through belonging to the Lord to be capable of initiating the world about into the selfsame mystery. For Christians at least, the goal of cosmology is not finally to get lost in the world’s beauty and diversity, across the realms and planes of existence—though it is desperately necessary to do so, at least for some time, by way of therapeutic rehabilitation in the sometimes nightmare of the modern world. It is rather to come to know the Lord whose world it is as the source and object of all our longing, and to find our selves, even in our alienation, ever enfolded in that dance that all things are.
See Graham M. Schweig, Dance of Divine Love: The Rasa Lila of Krishna from the Bhagavata Purana, India’s Classic Sacred Love Story Introduced, Translated, and Illuminated (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), especially the introduction, 1-22. As stated above, the parallelism between the two texts is Schweig’s insight.
The translation and demarcation of Act, Scene, and Stanza, which I will henceforth exclusively use, are Schweig’s.
Quoted in John Behr, Becoming Human: Meditations on Christian Anthropology in Word and Image (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2013), 82.
A remarkable article for many reasons. You correctly point out many of the things that make Vaishnav theology so unique, which also bring out beatiful aspects of other traditions, notably Christianity. The Song of Songs often pops up in my guru's reflections on rasa, so it was interesting to find a careful examination of these parallel texts.
Allow me to summarize some of the conclusions of our Gaudiya acaryas, following in the wake of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's astonishing revelations regarding rasa:
- Rasa, or the aesthetic relishment of spiritual loving emotions, is the highest experience that a living entity can aspire for. Mahaprabhu sinthesized centuries of aesthetic theory and metaphysical discussions into this insight into the nature of divinity, which was given a brilliant, thoroughly systematic articulation by the great Rupa Goswami.
- Krishna, rather than a humanized form of Vishnu, is "Bhagavan svayam": God Himself in His original, most perfect and complete form. He has these humanlike form and pastimes to relish rasa, because He is rasik-shekar: the trascendental connoisseur of all the flavors of love. Greater than being great is being loved, as my guru often says. (Of course, it is actually us that are made in His likeness, as the Bible says... We take this quite literally!)
- The rasa-lila and other pastimes performed by Krishna when He comes to this world are always being eternally executed in the highest abode of heaven, where God and His associates play as ordinary people, oblivious of Krishna’s bhagavata (Godhood), which would bring about an inevitable contraction of the love They are perpetually sharing. Actually, Krishna doesn't "come" to this world but merely projects His eternal pastimes here so that we may all see them and thus become spiritually cleansed and inspired.
- The ultimate goal of life is to attain pure, unconditional, ecstatic love for God. This prema is the param-purushartha, the culmination of the other goals of human life which you have correctly described as a gradual hierarchy. Gopis, specially Srimati Radharani, are the embodiment of the most exalted form of transcendental love. She is actually one in soul with Krishna; They take two bodies only for the sake of relishing rasa. This is why Their amorous pastimes are actually completely pure and transcendental, and should not be mistaken for worldly lust, which is but a distorted material reflection of an eternal, immaculate truth. Our acaryas have warned against meditating on these pastimes in an unripe spiritual condition, before having assimilated all the appropriate philosophical conclusions.
- Because all souls share a common intrinsic nature of being eternal loving servants of God, and bhakti is the path that both reawakens it and fully expresses it once realized, bhakti is jaiva dharma, the actual function or correct behavior of the soul. Worldly dharma is a temporary, necessary support. This doesn't mean that fully awakened souls can behave immorally (scriptures warn us against imitating Krishna in any way), but that morality is not the primary motivation behind the immaculate behavior of pure saints. Paramour love is adharmic, but not for Krishna, because it warrants an exponentially greater relishment of rasa.
- This world becomes sacralized to that devotee who has the correct vision that everything here is a reflection of that pure spiritual realm where perfect, eternal love exists. For example, friendship here can only be temporary and, to varying degrees, selfishly motivated. But it is an imperfect reflection of the friendship found in heaven, where all of Krishna's eternal friends are pure devotees who do, as we should also do, everything only for His pleasure and not their own. And, in doing so, they experience the greatest bliss only incidentally; which is why Krishna accepts all their services and pranks, because He knows that by giving Him joy they will experience great ecstasy, and He is very affectionate toward His devotees.
Hare Krishna!
Random question. Can you recommend a good translation of the Bodhicaryavatara?