This book is suf­fi­ciently impor­tant that its wide dis­sem­i­na­tion amongst devo­tees is a desider­a­tum.… old beliefs are given appar­ently rad­i­cal new inter­pre­ta­tions that widen their scope and poten­tial for mean­ing.… Subal [Steve Bohlert] has done a great ser­vice by intro­duc­ing or nam­ing the Vaish­nava con­cept of deity as panen­the­ism.… I favor rāgānugā [nat­ural devo­tion], as it seems does Subal, pre­cisely because it … is about reform­ing the id-controlled ego into a love-permeated ego.… There is no doubt that Subal’s is an impor­tant brick in the wall of reli­gious dis­course … His great con­tri­bu­tion … is that he has gone out on a limb and attempted to make a coher­ent and sys­tem­atic pre­sen­ta­tion of Radha-Krishna accord­ing to his vision. This means of course that he has set him­self up for crit­i­cism, but that kind of courage is what is needed to push the dis­course fur­ther. — Jagadananda Das/Jan Brzezin­ski, trans­la­tor and anno­ta­tor of Mys­tic Poetry: Rupa Gosvamin’s Uddhava-sandeśa & Hamsadūta.

In the Chai­tanya Chari­ta­m­rita (2.8.226–27 & s 52) Prabhu replies to Ramanand, “The mahab­ha­ga­vata looks at ani­mate and inan­i­mate objects, and every­where is the glow­ing of Sri Krishna. They look at ani­mate and inan­i­mate objects, but do not see those images; rather every­where they see the blos­som­ing of their own ista-deva. ‘He who sees his […]

God-dess para­dox­i­cally indi­cates union of the oppo­site ideas of dif­fer­ence and non-difference lead­ing to a higher, fuller unity. This means per­fec­tion, or the abil­ity to encom­pass all extremes of expe­ri­enc­ing reality.

Uni­ver­sal­ist Radha-Krishnaism offers a panen­the­is­tic the­ol­ogy. The per­sonal Absolute enfolds even the form­less, attribut­e­less Absolute, which we call Undif­fer­en­ti­ated One­ness. God-dess’ power to rec­on­cile the irrec­on­cil­able rec­on­ciles our imper­fect, con­tra­dic­tory ideas of qual­i­fied and unqual­i­fied Absolute in a higher synthesis.

Some ideas of how to under­stand where Uni­ver­sal­ist Radha-Krishnaism fits into a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent con­texts. As Uni­ver­sal­ist Radha-Krishnaism is based in flu­id­ity, I encour­age fur­ther think­ing about and cri­tique of what I have here written.