An Analysis of the Brahma Sutra - 5.3.- Swami Krishnananda.

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Thursday, November 10, 2022. 06:30. 

Chapter 5: Towards Liberation :3.

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God can be meditated upon as the Greatest of Powers and the Greatest of Beauties. Truth, beauty and goodness are considered as the highest characteristics of God. Truth means not truth-speaking merely; It is an eternally existing Principle. A thing that passes away sometimes cannot be regarded as Truth; that is relative truth. The Goodness of God, the Power of God and the Beauty of God – it is difficult to conceive these together!

How could you imagine the extremely powerful God being compassionate, good and loving also? This is why we cannot conceive God fully. But when we try to conceive God in our meditations, we segregate these qualities. All of these things do not come to the mind simultaneously.

Madhurya-pradhana bhakti is the type of devotion where the Beauty of God and the Bliss of God is the object of meditation. 'Beautiful! Beautiful! Beautiful! Oh! Tasty, tasty, tasty! Honey, honey, honey!' There were some saints who used to call God as honey; 'Oh Honey! Oh Honey! Oh Honey!' What can you say? In what way do you call God? Because in this world, the most delicious thing is supposed to be honey; – so you consider God as most delicious. 'Honey, honey! Mighty honey! Come, come, come, come!' 'Oh! My dear', people cry – as a mother cries for her little child – 'Oh! My dear! Oh, my Beloved!' There are no words to describe God!

You can consider God as your Supreme Father. Most religions consider God as Father; 'Father in Heaven! Hallowed be Thy Name; Thy Kingdom come.' Some people consider God as their Mother; – 'Devi, Bhagavati, Virgin Mary'. God is Father and Mother also. Protectively He is Father and lovingly He is Mother.

He is also your Friend, and Arjuna and Krishna were of that relationship. You can ask Him to do something for you, and He will do it for you. 'My dear friend! Will you kindly do this service for me?' The friend will do it for you. You will be amused: can I tell God like that? He will sweep your floor; He will do that also. You should not be amused to hear all these things.

In Maharashtra there was a saint, whom Sri Krishna served as a little boy, washing his clothes and sweeping the floor and cleaning the vessels and the like. Another saint went to Pandharpur to have Darshan. A voice told 'Vitthala is not here! He is serving the other saint there and washing his vessels; His name is Srikhandiya.' The saint ran to find out where Srikhandiya was; by that time the boy vanished from that place. You can consider God as your friend, as your beloved, as your father, as your mother or as your master.

In the 'Song of Songs' that we have in the  'Gita Govinda' of Jayadeva and in the 'Rasapanchadhyaya' of the Srimad Bhagavata, we have another type of devotion described. It is the lover and the beloved relation – impossible to describe. They are not meant to be described at all because when you start describing things, they become mathematical like an engineering expert describing a house and a project. It has no meaning. Beauty cannot be described mathematically. So this kind of madhura, rasa – the beauty and tasty aspect of God's Love – is incomparable.

All these come under what you call saguna bhakti. There is an 'otherness' of God to some extent here. Whether He is a father or a mother or a beloved or whatever He is, He is 'other' than you. A distinction is maintained for the time being. You attain to Brahma Loka with this kind of devotion – you are not the Creator, Brahma, yourself.

At the end of the universe, when the universe is dissolved; everything gets absorbed and the purified soul which was living in Brahma Loka as a scintillating part of the Cosmic Being merges in the Absolute.

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Next -Chapter 6: The Controversy Over Action and Knowledge

To be continued 

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