Beyond all symbols and metaphors stands a profound truth at the heart of Reality: Sri Radha, the eternal feminine embodiment of pure devotional love. She isn’t merely Krishna’s consort or a mythological figure—she represents the highest expression of divine love possible, a love so powerful it captivates even the Supreme Person.
Through her perfect devotion, Radha reveals what it means to love completely, selflessly, and with one’s entire being. Her presence beside Krishna shows us that the ultimate reality is a dance of divine love, where the feminine and masculine aspects of the Absolute Truth exist in eternal, perfect relationship.
When we understand Radha’s position as the soul of devotion itself, we discover a revolutionary spiritual truth: the feminine aspect of divinity holds the key to the deepest mysteries of love. Her example illuminates how every soul can awaken its dormant love for the Divine, moving from theoretical understanding to living, breathing relationship with the Supreme.
The Secret of the Feminine Divine
The Supreme Feminine Divine Beyond Myth and Symbol
What if the most powerful force in Reality is the Feminine Divine?
Today we turn our attention to Sri Radha, the queen of Bhakti, who is the embodiment of the most exalted divine love. Krishna is known as the king of love, and Sri Radha is his counterwhole who is the queen of perfect love.
In the last episode, we heard about the qualities and characteristics of Krishna, who is the soul of all souls. Today we turn our attention to Sri Radha who is the very heart and soul of Krishna. She is the supreme power, and he is the supreme powerful.
According to Vedanta, Radha isn’t a myth, an archetype, or a mundane heroine. She’s not a goddess of the earthly, celestial, or underworlds. In other words, she’s not a goddess tied to certain cultures of this world. Neither is she a goddess of the moon, sun, night, day, justice, knowledge, the arts, power, fertility, sex, or birth and death. She’s not a ferocious goddess ruling war, revenge, or victory, sorcery, fate, compassion, the earth, the sick, or balance.
Her worship doesn’t grant material benedictions. We don’t petition Goddess Radha for things, status, or anything for life in this world. Radha is not of this world at all.
Radha as Divine Love Personified
But this doesn’t make her irrelevant, because she embodies what we most desire, what we most need to thrive: she is divine love personified. She is the very form of condensed euphoria—or the ecstatic bliss that arises from prema, pristine, divine love.
As we’ve heard in previous episodes, the atma—our true self—is a lover, and we can only fully thrive and experience undying happiness when we develop sacred love. And Sri Radha is the transcendental person who shows us the way.
Her character, behavior, compassion, and mercy inspire and encourage everyone who takes to Bhakti to achieve their fullest potential by achieving transcendental divine love. For those who are sincere, her blessings elevate them to exalted states of being. Therefore, bhaktas are keen to develop a personal relationship with her. And it is easy to cultivate that relationship by getting to know Sri Radha.
The Beauty and Virtues of Sri Radha
Bhakti texts describe that Radha is the bestower of all perfection, the most perfect, the source of perfection, and the perfect mystic yogini. Youthful Radha is an ocean of the finest intelligence, mercy, beauty, splendor, and grace.
She’s witty, full of compassion, bashful, humble, patient, graceful, playful, and respectful. We can hardly imagine a person who has so many beautiful traits and characteristics, but we find them in the person of Radha!
Her transcendental body is complete with other unparalleled spiritual qualities that drape her body like a fragrant flower garland. Her smile is effulgent; her musical speech is pleasing. She’s expert at joking and skilled in musical composition and dance. She’s an exceptional singer and vina player. In fact, all the residents of Gokula bow to her unmatched skills as a singer, musician, and dancer.
Sri Krishna says that she is his guru in the art of the dance of divine love. Her uncommon limbs blossom with sweetness and charm. Her anklets sing a captivating melody as she moves.
The Supreme Goddess Beyond Time and Space
She wears dangling earrings, a gold locket around her neck, bracelets, armbands, and rings with precious gems on her fingers and toes. Actually, her beauty beautifies the ornaments she wears. Poets say millions of soothing moons cannot compare to the golden luster of her body.
Indicating her great love for Krsna, her enchanting blue eyes are always roving in search of her beloved. The perfection of Radha’s life is the happiness of her beloved Krishna.
Sri Radha, the absolute goddess of the original, spiritual plane of reality. Transcendent to time and space, she is the source of all spiritual and mundane goddesses. And all goddesses pale in comparison to the boundless transcendental qualities of Sri Radha.
Her love for Krsna is so competent and pure that just once hearing Krsna’s name, she faints in a swoon. She is a mine of the valuable jewels of love for Sri Krsna. She is an ocean of ecstatic love, decorated with ecstatic love, the giver of ecstatic love, and the personified potency of ecstatic love. The ecstatic euphoric bliss of her love is greater than the happiness Krishna himself experiences in love. And for this reason, Sri Krishna makes a divine descent to this world to personally taste her experience of love.
The Power of Love That Conquers the Supreme
I’ll be speaking about this astonishing avatāra in the next episode. Although Krishna is irresistibly charming, Radha surpasses him in beauty, love, charm, and in knowledge of the arts. Her character and love are so exalted that Krsna fully submits himself to her. In other words, her love is fully capable of capturing Sri Krishna.
She shows us how if we develop our own pure love, we, too, can conquer the Supreme and draw him to our side.
Let’s stop a minute and consider this: If Radha’s beloved, who is the self-manifest origin, controller, and maintainer of the material and spiritual worlds, is captivated and captured by her love, how exalted must her love be?
Isn’t this charming and amazing to hear? Have we heard details about this kind of love anywhere else? What is your reaction hearing this about Sri Radha? Please let me know in the comments below.
Love as the Highest Truth
In the West, we often think of the Supreme as the ultimate authority—omnipotent and beyond reach. But Bhakti reveals a surprising twist: the Supreme Person becomes vulnerable to love.
In the highest domain of true love, Radha has conquered the Absolute. She is supreme. In this way, Radha reveals the highest philosophical and theological truth to us: love is greater than God.
Let’s stay with this thought for a moment. You could even pause or close your eyes as you consider this again: Love is greater than God. Love is supreme because it conquers the Unconquerable. Its power is factually inconceivable.
And invested with the inconceivable power of Radha’s love—by her grace—we, a finite soul, can defeat the Infinite.
The Heart of Bhakti and the Invitation of Sri Radha
We may not aspire to conquer the Supreme, but his natural characteristic is to become overcome and indebted by pure love. And in loving, we experience the highest bliss in the company of our Source, the Sweet Absolute.
In transcendence, the feminine divine—the fountainhead of all śaktis, or potencies—Sri Radha, occupies the most exalted position in reality. A goddess dances in love at the apex of reality as the supreme controller! She dances circles around Him, who is all-powerful.
Rādhā is not merely Kṛṣṇa’s consort. She is His counterwhole—the feminine half of the complete Absolute. In reality they are One. Radha is the very heart of Krishna, who becomes personified so that they can exchange love. The One becomes Two in love.
Together they are the perfect union of divine love and the beloved; feminine divine and masculine divine.
Taking Shelter of the Queen of Bhakti
Krishna always remains within Radha’s orbit, however—she goes outside His orbit to give herself to us so that we too may drink the nectar of the unequaled ecstasy of divine love. Following her heartfelt lead, Sri Krishna gives himself to those who take shelter of her. Krishna accepts us when Sri Radha says, My beloved, accept this person.
Therefore, those who want prema-bhakti take shelter of Sri Radha. The devoted think, “I belong to Radha and Radha belongs to me.”
They have an intimate relationship with her and seek to engage each thought, word, and action—always—in her service. And because she is tenderhearted and powerful, she personally empowers our Bhakti practices.
Desiring to conquer and satisfy Sri Krishna, the king of love, spiritual aspirants sing and dance in hopes of embodying even a particle of Radha’s prema, or divine love. Radha’s love and service is the ideal that any devoted practitioner of bhakti aspires to emulate, and her service is what he or she aspires to attain.
Love Without Selfishness: The Path of Radha
She is the exemplar lover, the shelter of all affection, and ultimately, for many bhaktas, the transcendental goal. Doesn’t this make sense?
We can achieve our greatest happiness by serving and pleasing the goddess of Bhakti, who is extremely compassionate, generous, and merciful. Sri Radha is our intimate friend, and, as the compassionate nature of Sri Krishna, she is easy to please.
If we wish to approach her, we’ll have to express our own love, relinquishing every bit of selfishness and tendency to exploit. To enter her plane of love, we completely abandon the taking ego—the false ego—and embrace a serving ego. Without a serving tendency, where is the possibility of love? And without love, how can there be happiness?
Radha is to be approached with a devotion free of selfish calculation. We approach only seeking how to be of service because love is not about taking but giving without expectation of return.
The Invitation to Ecstatic Divine Love
Radha can lift us from our karmic bond, but even so, we don’t approach her to gain liberation from our suffering. We approach only to serve her: we choose love.
For some of us, the ideal of love as a state of being seems utopian and unachievable. But loving unconditionally and being loved unconditionally are every person’s most profound yearning.
The fact that all of us have this universal drive suggests there’s an answer awaiting us; there must be a path to fulfilling our common, existential need.
As the possessor and controller of the purest love condensed to its thickest, sweetest state, Radha wants to imbue us with her own exalted experience. She can share the recipe, and she can give us the taste of ecstatic divine love.
Therefore, she extends an invitation to us to mold our self as a pleasing instrument in the harmonic orchestra of divine love—to gain a place in the world beyond matter, where we’re invited to enter the bliss of loving relationships with Sri Radha, Sri Krishna, and their host of transcendental friends.
To approach Sri Radha is to approach the heart of God. So we approach Radha with a humble petition, Please accept me. Please show me the way. Please help me.
And when we accept her invitation to love without selfishness, we begin to uncover the blissful destiny waiting us.
Thank you for joining me for this sacred episode of Exploring Bhakti. If you’d like to know more about Sri Radha and ways of serving her, have a look at Bhakti Shakti: Goddess of Divine Love. In the description I include a link where you can get your copy.
I leave you with a contemplation: If love is greater than the Supreme, what does it mean for how you approach the Divine in your own life? What shift could you make this week to deepen a relationship with your Divine Beloved?
In our next episode, we’re going to introduce Sri Caitanya, who embodied the mood of Radha. Did I raise any questions for you in this episode? Please leave a comment below.
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Until next time, svasty astu viśvasya: May there be good fortune throughout the universe and for you.
