The Legend of Radha and Krishna

For the western psyche, the idea of devotion does not exist in its purity of form. It is rather a lower movement, a turbid stream of perverse joy exalted in the lower nature than a sublime movement of the purified heart, a silent longing for the Divine without outward drama or emotional breakdown. It is no wonder, therefore, that it is not able to appreciate the native movement of the Soul towards the personal Divine.

Not love, but fear of God is the gospel of western doctrine; for love is an inner movement of the Soul within, a native impulse of the human individual towards the all-Individual.

The Soul enjoys the Divine in the secrecy of ineffable love, but if there is at all an outward symbol of it possible, it is found in abundance in the legend of Radha and Krishna.

The conception of Krishna and Radha is not an allegory or else a tale told and retold by the imaginative minds of the past but a symbol of a spiritual fact affirmed in self-experience by men of solitude and extolled in the heart for the Divine Paramour.

But men would have us believe that Radha is only a figment of poetic imagination and Krishna, a debaucher.

The crass western mind, submerged in dry theology, sees only its own impurity reflected everywhere.

Western theology may think that it is closer to God and Existence by dissecting them through reason and rigorous logic or by imposing on the world its monotheistic idea of God, but my inner experience of the personal Divine contradicts Monotheism as the ultimate truth of God or Existence, but only a certain representation of God in His infinite multiplicity.

It is only in a deeper and profounder self-experience of the Divine within that we can discover the intense ecstasy of the spiritual union with the Divine Godhead and not in any loose religious symbolism and mental perversion, to which the vital mind of man has a natural attraction.

If inner devotion does not appeal to the western mind, it is because its basis is inner and not outward. Occidental philosophy deals primarily with the sensibilities of the thinking intelligence, more to the semi-occult than to the inner heart.

The symbol of Gopis in the legend of Krishna is a symbol of a conscious multitude, aspiring and reaching the feet of the supreme Lover, and yet, each Gopi is a symbol of a certain unique movement of the Soul, expressing a certain higher devotion and larger self-surrender to the personal Divine.

Radha was unique in that she was the acme of a collective aspiration, so intense and so passionate that it had pulled the Divine into her servitude of love.

Krishna was Radha’s Spirit-Husband, as He was to all Gopis. It was the union of the souls with the all-Soul that was celebrated there and their bodies were only a symbol of a visible adoration of the Divine.

How can history dream of recording or even understanding the symbol and legend of Krishna and Radha?