I am study­ing Chai­tanya Chari­ta­m­rita with trans­la­tion and com­men­tary by Edward C. Dimock, Jr. I recently com­pleted the Chai­tanya Bha­ga­vat. I hope to deepen my under­stand­ing of Chai­tanya and his teach­ings from these two most author­i­ta­tive sources.
I am work­ing on a book pro­posal for Uni­ver­sal­ist Radha Krish­naism: A Spir­i­tu­al­ity of Lib­erty, Truth and Love, which […]

Divine love implies two things: the feel­ing of attach­ment or affec­tion for the beloved and hap­pi­ness. How­ever, divine love is not syn­ony­mous with hap­pi­ness as a kind of per­sonal sat­is­fac­tion. Rather than seek­ing any­thing for itself, it longs “to con­tribute to the happiness…of the beloved, even…at the cost of one’s own hap­pi­ness. It does not […]

Devo­tion “can­not, strictly speak­ing, be defined because it is tran­scen­den­tal.” Sages and scrip­tures var­i­ously described it as: “exclu­sive and intense lov­ing attach­ment to” God-dess; “the high­est and the most sat­is­fy­ing func­tion of the soul;” “the high­est end;” “inde­scrib­able love…and the grand­est and sub­limest of all human expe­ri­ences”; and “the only means for the attainment […]

A Note on the His­tory and Myth of Radha Krishna and Chai­tanya
Due to the late dates of the Bha­ga­vatam and ini­tial men­tion of Radha by Jayadev in Gita Govinda, I can safely say, the pas­times of Radha Krishna are a lovely myth con­tain­ing pro­found uni­ver­sal spir­i­tual truths. They are not his­tor­i­cally accu­rate on the phys­i­cal plane.
Chaitanya […]

Philo­soph­i­cal thought regard­ing the rela­tion between God-dess and humans, God-dess “and the world of finite expe­ri­ence, the noumena and the phe­nom­ena, is directed along two main lines. Some, empha­siz­ing the essen­tial dis­tinc­tion between the infi­nite and the finite, accept the absolute tran­scen­dence of the one over the other, while oth­ers, empha­siz­ing the iden­tity between them […]

The world is a man­i­fes­ta­tion of the mate­r­ial energy of God-dess and is there­fore real. God-dess intrin­si­cally tran­scends mat­ter, but mat­ter depends upon God-dess for its exis­tence. God-dess, the spir­i­tual abodes and asso­ciates exist before cre­ation. At cre­ation the uni­verse is pro­jected out of God-dess in what we now call the big bang. Mat­ter becomes […]

The dif­fer­ent forms described pre­vi­ously are non-differentiated par­tial man­i­fes­ta­tions of God-dess. The liv­ing enti­ties are God-dess’ dif­fer­en­ti­ated par­tial man­i­fes­ta­tions. The liv­ing enti­ties are the mar­ginal energy, dis­tinct from the spir­i­tual and mate­r­ial ener­gies but con­nected with both just as the shore is dis­tinct from land and sea but con­nected with both. The liv­ing enti­ties are […]

God-dess has infi­nite forms like parts related to the whole. Since God-dess “has no inter­nal dif­fer­ence, the part is not like a piece of stone chopped off from the whole. The part is…the whole–the same all-knowing and all-pervading being. Still, it is called a part, because the” self energy of God-dess “is not fully manifested […]

I was doing research, prepar­ing to respond to Kapoor’s first para­graph of Chap­ter VIII, deal­ing with expan­sions of God-dess, in terms of a holo­gram. I wanted to make sure my under­stand­ing of the rela­tion between a holo­gram and its part was cor­rect. I came upon this essay: The Uni­verse as a Holo­gram, by Michael […]

God-dess has no sec­ond. God-dess is the only real­ity. God-dess’ form is pure self-luminous con­scious­ness. God-dess is the eter­nal prin­ci­ple, the high­est good and the high­est bliss.
God-dess is an essen­tial unity above cat­e­gor­i­cal dif­fer­ence. There is no other being with the same nature as God-dess. The Absolute is one, but dif­fer­ent reli­gions call God-dess by different […]