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This is one of the most difficult books I have read in a long time due to my lack of a strong background in Western philosophy, and its use of unfamiliar technical philosophical jargon and describing the position of one philosopher using the positions of several other unfamiliar philosophers (especially the first half which deals with Gadamer). It seems to be aimed at an academic audience. Yet I feel it was worth the effort for the insights gained by looking at Rupa Goswami’s teachings in a new light. What are they? Let me explain using some brief excerpts since Jessica Frazier’s language says it better than my paraphrases would.

Philosophically understood, “realism” goes beyond simple thought about reality; it entails self-critical reflection on the very notion of realness. The conditions for realism and a realist debate arise where a thinker or circle of thinkers begin to suspect the possibility of something that is “more” real–even “ultimately” real, above and beyond the self-evident, everyday reality that is merely “there.” (8)

She says, “it is Gadamer’s Aristotelian affirmation of teleological identity-in-change that will be shown to share important insights with Rupa Gosvami’s cornerstone concept of rasa” (50).

Gadamer picks up on Plato’s Parmenidean portrayal of all things, identities, or unities as being ambiguously one and many, existing and not existing as such simultaneously, pointing to the same ambivalence championed as a solution to the problem of the One and the Many by those Hindu philosophers who “maintain that both identity and difference are true of the relation between the one and the many. (50)

We do not merely have the option of applying a spirit of passion to Being, nor is passion merely interwoven into the Being’s phenomenal fabric; our passions, understood as teleologies, correspond to the teleological essence of all forms and things. This is true for Gadamer much in the way that the world for Rupa Gosvami is explained as form (rupa and prakriti) proliferating through the “dialectical dynamic of love.” (67)

Through the language that Gadamer employs, and through its “fundamental” and “transcendental” character, this model of Being as the flux of unified and divided forms is subtly but surely apotheosised in Gadamer’s philosophy. Here, as in the case of various post-Vedantic schools that arose in India, a holistic, fundamental analysis of existence based on the evidence of sheer phenomena, yields a view of reality that must eschew radical dualism, and locate foundational and divine value in the finite, immanent world.

The fundamental structure of Being as “[ontologically] One and [ontically] Many is what Gadamer discovers in Leibniz in the idea that the monad is itself a universe, reflecting the world within itself. (68)

In Gadamer’s case, the implication is that non-finite absolute transcendence is a powerful religious ideal, but a false one, whereas Being as ubiquitous form, energy, telos, indeterminacy, meaning, beauty, and spirit–these are ideals into which we should be happy to assimilate our own identities. It has been written of Rupa Gosvami’s conception of the divine that it is really a “concentrated form of Being”–on a sufficiently attentive hermeneutic reading, the same might be said with regard to Gadamer. (76)

Rupa Gosvami’s synthesis of Samkhya and Vedanta philosophies yields a metaphysics in which apparent substances such as physical matter are themselves only forms of the one true ultimate substance that is the divine (brahman or Krishna).… some of the source texts of Rupa Gosvami’s tradition, such as the Brahmavaivarta Purana, play with the possibility that the proliferation of forms have a more foundational existence than the apparent ubiquity of substance. (80)

Rupa Gosvami never had to defend the idea that consciousness is universally and necessarily present, as it is a tenet discussed and recommended by some of India’s earliest and most authoritative philosophical texts. (81)

Gadamer’s universality of play is universal at all loci in Being and across all micro– and macro-cosmic levels in precisely the same way that the Platonic One and the Many, Hegelian dialectic, and the Caitanya Vaisnava doctrine of “inconceivable difference and non-difference” are universal–since as we will see, they are features of the same logical-phenomenological insight. (81–2)

both Gadamer and Rupa Gosvami, who riddles his treatises with verse quotations, draw on poetic examples–to draw us into the proper attitude of engagement, vitality, and listening to everyday life, and to enthuse us into an aesthetic state of immersion and self-forgetting. (110)

Rupa Gosvami’s worldview, which is widely claimed to constitute a dualistic theism, in fact, also formulates truths about the fundamental constitution of reality as form, motion, and teleology, and takes it as the ground of a eudaimonian ethics not merely of self-augmenting vitality, but of focused and intensifying passions. (113)

Rupa Gosvami not only incorporated the work of his predecessors within the philosophical and Vaisnava devotional traditions, as shown by the textual references woven throughout his major works, he also explicitly courted dialogue and friendly debate, harvesting the best insight of contemporary debate on reality and its translation into ethical terms. (133)

Rupa Gosvami was one of those many philosophically sensitive thinkers of his generation who was led to combine religious and philosophical modes of reasoning in sophisticated ways.…

In the Gaudiya Vaisnava tradition, … the synthesis of passion and reason was a central dynamic in the self-determination of the movement as a philosophically refined branch of bhakti. (136)

As in all “realist” soteriologies of the kind we are examining, including those of Gadamer and Rupa Gosvami, the ultimate human aim is to realise both in thought and action, our true natures as part of Being as a whole. (144)

Rupa lived in a multicultural, multireligious, geographically and socially mobile society in which his own experience had proved scholarship to be a valuable economic, social, and spiritual currency. He was an Indian “Renaissance man,” and in his hands the philosophy of religion was judiciously tempered both by the rigorous demands of contemporary logic on the one hand, and by a devotional readership on the other.…

In the same way in which Gadamer is a eudaimonian realist and optimist about ontology and ethics, so too is Rupa Gosvami.… Rupa Gosvami’s Hindu optimism stakes out a further postmodern possibility for realist belief, not as a Derridean waiting, nor an uncommitted Gadamerian vitality, but as a transformative, all-consuming passion. (152)

Rupa Gosvami’s bhakti philosophy incorporates the fruits of India’s own “Enlightenment scepticism” into a realistic worldview that draws added strength from the very factors that have had a demoralising influence on religious belief and realism in the West. (159)

He [Rupa] synthesises influences from a wide range of Indian textual sources, schools, disciplines, and religious orientations, while modifying and honing this mixture through extensive discursive engagement with other thinkers of his time. He distilled contemporary theological sources into a newly systematic, consistent, and comprehensive position by means of his own unique analysis of the nature of the divine, and the ultimate goals of human life. (160)

Rupa Gosvami’s earlier writings show that the prolific religious movement that had grown around Krishna already preoccupied his thoughts, and many of the ingredients of his later theological and philosophical thought predate the meeting with Caitanya. (161)

the world view that Rupa inherits combines this emphasis on embodiment, and its implicit humanist affirmation of the conditions of embodied personhood that define human life in the world (often explicitly contrasted with the ascetic practices of renouncers), with its philosophical resources. (162)

While Rupa and his sources were indeed practitioners in the process of (re)creating traditions, they were also syncretic, systematic, and philosophically discerning about their range of influences, and distinctively individualistic in the cast of their theologising. (165)

Rupa Gosvami’s philosophical position grew from Nyaya logical methods, and an engagement with the formal realist paradigms of Vedanta and Samkhya ideas that were prevalent in the Bhagavata Purana and a natural part of current philosophical-theological debate. (166)

As Shrivatsa Gosvami argues, contradicting Steve Rosen’s interpretation, acintybhedabheda is not merely a “supra-rational” concept, but in fact has a firm rational basis in the sophisticated ontological analysis that runs throughout the tradition. (168)

On the Caitanya Vaisnava model, sat-cit-ananda is rather a universal, infinite interrrelational plurality of which we are a part.… by Being we always mean consciousness, that consciousness by definition consists of contents in flux following a diachronic intentional structure that relationality is a universal and necessary feature of Being. (172)

The dynamic quality of Being is well established in the model of the divine as ultimate reality. Yet in most cases this necessarily shifting, transient, apparently “non-absolute” facet of the divine is relegated to a secondary status relative to the true, changing agent of change. Yet the Caitanya tradition, following the lead of the Bhagavata Purana, does not accept the thorough-going character of this separation; rather the form, quality, and movement of the world are the true essence of Krishna, as they are the true way to realising the divine ultimate reality. Rupa in particular presses this point through rhetorical strategies in his language and through his depiction of the sense-obsessed gopis as spiritual exemplars. This is precisely the kind of emphatically metaphysical point that is repeatedly obscured in translations of Rupa Gosvami’s works. Hence lines that are filled with philosophical terminology … lose their philosophical context when translated according to different interpretative priorities.  (173)

This is a typical mode of expression for Rupa, multifaceted and neatly mixing what we might call theological, metaphysical, and poetic discourses. It is in this way that his philosophy has to be teased out of his writings. (174)

Like every deity, but perhaps preeminently so, Krishna is not only considered to be a divine personality, but is in addition a thematisation of the philosophy of the divine, and also a meta-discourse on the nature of the bhakti mode of worship itself–psychologically, theologically, sociologically, and, of course, metaphysically. (181)

We have seen that Rupa’s main idea, the ontological and soteriological importance of rasa, is a way of enacting the essence of Being.… The progressive, dialectically structured movements of love, and of an aesthetic love of love, are intended to be a quantitative and qualitative augmentation of Being itself. (182)

Everywhere, in Caitanya Vaisnava literature as in its practice, the marks of a type of pantheism are evident. God does not dwell in objects as an obscured hermetic essence–purely purusa, “spirit” seeking to escape the impurities of prakrti, “matter,” “form”–but rather is enacted, augmented, and instantiated in the dialectical movement that is the existence of each entity. (189)

Krishna is entranced by his own divinity dialectically coming to light in the world. In the Uddhava Sandesa he is portrayed as the exemplary devotee, as full of weakness, excitement, and imaginal yearning as are his consorts and worshipers. Much is made of the theological twist whereby Krishna becomes the devotee to Radha’s deity. But we must see this too as yet another manifestation of his essential nature–dialectically taken up into the fundamental ontology of rasa. (190)

In a more dualistic context we would say that rasa is why the world was created, but here we can say that it is what the world is. We can understand rasa as the eternal third term of all dialectic, a concept of synthesis and relation personified by Radha. As this third term of the dialectic, love itself transcends Krishna as lover and object of love, and takes priority, which is why the haladini shakti, his power of enjoyment, is said to be his true nature. (191)

For Rupa, religious belief is on a continuum with our everyday truths and processes of reasoning, because it is derived from transcendental metaphysical truths that pervade them.…

Rupa Gosvami’s works stand within a discourse of radical questioning, which has centuries of precedent and arguably a greater range and depth of interrogation in India than in the tempest of modern Western debates. (194)

As is so widely noted, Krishna’s role in this theology is almost diametrically opposed to his message in the Bhagavad Gita, in which he features as the paradigmatic advocate of order, duty, and detachment. (200)

Here we have an image of a god who does indeed need and desire; who “flounders” rather than acts; who is involved essentially and purposefully in the world order, caught up by phenomena rather than merely on display in them. His actions are serious. He is fettered and conditioned by his love. Above all, he is helplessly engaged in a loving activity in separation from his beloved that is intrinsically unsatisfying. And these experiences, as Rupa Gosvami’s literature shows, are mirrored in those of humanity. (206)

Rupa’s texts form a post-sceptical, dialogical discourse in that they allow those who suffer to voice the theological doubts of the reader who sees little to celebrate in a world consisting of attachment to elusive, finite, and situationally circumscribed phenomenal objects: a life of necessary dissatisfaction. But in so doing they intuitively demand a justification or theodicy of the suffering caused by this religious mode that he so eloquently champions. (208)

In Rupa’s literary portrayals of viraha, separation is not primarily a theological gap that must be bridged by some soteriological device such as grace. It is an ontological mode of particular being, and a mode of general Being. (213)

Radha, who has theological connections with prakriti and Krishna’s power of creation, suffers her separation from Krishna as a sort of sublimation of creation’s continuous birthpangs–a pain in which we all share. She is herself a symbol of realist approaches to the world, for what she does (as devotional exemplar) is never separate from what she is (as the ultimate truth of existence). (215–16)

Rupa is concerned that we become galvanised, and he is clear that those who feel less than profound passion in their everyday activities are treading a lower path. (220)

Having dealt with the Caitanya bhakti, Vedic, and Vaisnava reasons for Radha’s importance, he [Rupa] shifts into the discourse of puranic Samkhya by pointing out that as the hladini-shakti, she is the best and the truest form of all the great shaktis of Krishna. Here he is restating explicitly what has been said previously in the text and elsewhere in his works: all powers or energies are really the power of hlad–enjoyment, gladness, exhilaration, and delight. (225–6)

Thus it is important to note the theological point embedded in the devotional exaltation of enjoyment–it is not that enjoyment is the best way to worship Krishna, nor that it is his most characteristic quality, nor even that it is his best. It is that he himself is the quality of enjoyment. Only in enjoyment, in experiencing or “tasting’ him, can we both be and see him.

If Being is enjoyment then we can enjoy as much as we like, wherever and whenever we like, indiscriminately and without prejudice as to the object of our desire. But if it is also attachment, directedness, telos, then this too must be exemplified in an appropriate attitude to our object(s) of desire. (226–7)

In many respects, while this study aims to draw limited but instructive parallels between Rupa Gosvami’s and Gadamer’s positions, it often seems that Rupa Gosvami’s insights are the more critically modern of the two; his optimism resonates with that of many of Gadamer’s contemporaries and successors. He displays an eagerness to affirm the validity and importance–indeed, the ontological importance–of emotion as our epistemological guide to the centrality of value in ontology. (230)

Again and again, this study has used the term “realism” in the sense of a perspective that locates the highest value, and the foundation for all other knowledge and action, in the correct apprehension of ultimate reality. Here we see a religious expression that is too easily identified as “devotional” without acknowledging the concurrent “philosophical” dimension of such religiosity. Krishna speaks simultaneously as deity and ultimate reality. (233)

Radha is an exemplary model of Tillich’s classic definition: “Religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the question of the meaning of our life.” Rupa describes the experience of being impassioned and possessed by a religious ”reality,” reminding us of a neglected cornerstone of realist religious experience. (234)

Radha’s reason then is a “passionate reason” leading her to choose, on rational as well as purely involuntary, instinctive, and psychological grounds, to be guided by her passions. Her courageous choice to abandon freedom, a blank plain on which no values can be found, for an unending pilgrimage through the rich topography of the passions, is the “choice” that Being has already made, and it is a path that, for Rupa, it is our most fitting destiny to follow. (236)

It shows us that truth is not elsewhere, eluding capture by our falsifiable beliefs and metaphors. Rather, it dwells in our existence and must be captured according to our own particular, problematic, phenomenal way of knowing and acting. (243)

Indian philosophy has, from its earliest periods and throughout its history, incorporated sophisticated arguments for varieties of scepticism, nihilism, and relativism. Recognition of this rights a longstanding prejudice regarding the supposed credulity and lack of complexity in Indian thought.… Rupa Gosvami was part of a fruitful contemporary dialogue exploring particularly sophisticated, self-reflective versions of these debates, and his theology is founded on a particularly rigorous understanding of the wholesale finitude, relativity, ontological unity, mutual constitution, relationality, and innately teleological, prejudicial, or passionate character of Being. (244)

In previous ages such a statement would be considered blasphemous, or at least most fantastic and highly improbable. The world then was ruled by firm laws of physics for some, and yet for others the world was ruled by a firm hand of God. Religions and science have determined the scopes, reaches and boundaries of the world and everything else within — including human existence and our right to live, breath, see, to hope, even to dream — was interpreted through the resulting worldviews. Fearful, we too have helped create such a limiting world around us.

But something strange has happened just over a century ago. Astounding insights by remarkable men in modern physics, confirmed by numerous experiments, have revealed us a wholly different stage of the reality theatre we’re all playing on. Humanity has made a gigantic leap: from the simplistic, deterministic reality of the pre-20th century world, through the relativistic world of the early– and mid-20th century, into the quantum world of today. We rightfully call it a quantum leap.

Quantum leap profoundly changes our perspectives, and anything we knew (or at least we thought we knew) must now be revalued, realigned, repositioned. Any modern metaphysics that tries to embrace the totality of human existence, its possibilities and the experience of it, must as well embrace the quantum view of reality. Anything falling short of that is not even worth considering as a candidate for a serious, comprehensive worldview.

How this considers you, or me? To paraphrase a modern physicist, our knowledge of a situation changes the situation instantly. By becoming aware, we alter the outcome of the situation. In following paragraphs I’ll continue my previous article (Stubbornly persistent illusion) and scatter some remarkable insights of modern physicists and philosophers of science. I’ll use them as reference points in my forthcoming essays as well, where I’ll reflect upon them in further exploration of different subjects.

To express the scope of quantum physic in one page is impossible, of course, hence I encourage you to explore books and online material to your best ability. Now you know it, you’ve been warned, and let’s see how it will change your reality.

The observer and observer’s universe

Atom?
When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.
– Niels Bohr, physicist, Nobel prize laureate and one of the pioneers of quantum physics

Physicist?
A physicist is just an atom’s way of looking at itself.
– Niels Bohr

A tendency to exist
The probability wave meant a tendency for something. It was a quantitative version of the old concept of “potentia” in Aristotelian philosophy. It introduces something standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a strange kind of physical reality in the middle of possibility and reality.
– Werner Heisenberg, physicist, author of the uncertainty principle in quantum physics

Fold, unfold, fold again .. unfold again
Classical physics says that reality is actually little particles that separate the world into its independent elements. Now I’m proposing the reverse, that the fundamental reality is the enfoldment and unfoldment, and these particles are abstractions from that. We could picture the electron not as a particle that exists continuously but as something coming in and going out and then coming in again. If these various condensations are close together, they approximate a track. The electron itself can never be separated from the whole of space, which is its ground.
– David Bohm, physicist, venerable contributor to philosophy and neuropsychology too

State of flux
The quantum theory shows that the attempt to describe and follow an atomic particle in precise detail has little meaning. The notion of an atomic path has only a limited domain of applicability. In a more detailed description the atom is, in many ways, seen to behave as much like a wave as a particle. It can perhaps best be regarded as a poorly defined cloud, dependent for its particular form on the particular environment, including the observing instrument. Thus, one can no longer maintain the division between the observer and the observed (which is implicit in the atomistic view that regards each of these as separate aggregates of atoms). Rather, both observer and observed are merging and interpenetrating aspects of one whole reality, which is indivisible and unanalysable.

In this totality, the atomistic form of insight is a simplification and an abstraction, valid only in some limited context. The new form of insight can perhaps best be called Undivided Wholeness in Flowing Movement.
– David Bohm

When you look at it, and when you don’t look at it

In quantum physics there is something called a “wave”, an intangible, irreducible field of probability, from which all physical matter and energy arise. The “waves” of quantum physics are ways of thinking. They’re not what’s going on in the physical world. Particles — that’s real in the real world. Waves are convenience; they’re a way of thinking. Waves of possibility. Waves of probability. When you aren’t looking it’s like a wave. When you are looking, it’s like a particle.
– Fred Alan Wolf, physicist and author of many books on nature of consciousness and quantum theory

Reality
Reality is not just the physical world; it’s the relationship of the mind with the physical world that creates the perception of reality. There is no reality without a perception of reality. Would you be here, exist in a physical form, if no one observed you? In a real sense, the answer is no.
– Fred Alan Wolf

Observer
Mere observation is enough to alter the history of anything or anyone, even a whole country. By observing, each observer separates into a self and a thing. Often that thing is one’s own face, body, or personality/belief structure.
– Fred Alan Wolf

The observer effect
The observer effect says that there is no reality until that reality is perceived. This profound insight tells us that we alter every object in the world simply by paying attention to it. In this alteration, both the object of our attention and the mind of the observer change. Because we usually don’t pay attention to ourselves in the perception process, our immediate experience usually won’t seem to indicate that our actions of perception changed anything. However, if we construct a careful history of our perceptions, they often show us that our way of perceiving indeed changes the course of our personal histories.

Thus the world is really not as it seems. It certainly seems to be “out there” independent of us, independent of the choices we might make. Yet quantum physics destroys that idea. What is “out there” depends on what we choose to look for.
– Fred Alan Wolf

Observables and observation
Observables are the consequences of our actions. We “do” to observe. We must bring out or cause something to occur in order to observe anything at all. Observation or measurement implies an observer with intelligence, a mind capable of discerning and thereby getting an impression or a perception of things. And that is what makes something go from anything possible to something actual. In other words, observation must be the creator of reality. This popularised the idea “you create your own reality” and that quantum physics and consciousness are related. This gets spiritual when you consider who or what the ultimate observer can be.
– Fred Alan Wolf

Recorded seeing
We don’t see what we see; we see what we remember we see. And you can replace this phrase with “smell”, “taste”, “hear”, “sense”, and perhaps even think. When we see objects “out there”, we not only see them, we replay all the previous information connected to them through past information “recordings”.
– Fred Alan Wolf

Consciousness can alter reality
With all the new medicines coming out, and the new insights we’re gathering about what constitutes health, quantum physics may just be what we need to really grasp how ancient spiritual views of the body and modern scientific views prove that consciousness can alter the reality, and so all illness (both physical and social we can add) may become as outdated as smallpox is today.
– Fred Alan Wolf

The power of illusion
The notion that all these fragments are separately existent is evidently an illusion, and this illusion cannot do other than lead to endless conflict and confusion. Indeed, the attempt to live according to the notion that the fragments are really separate is, in essence, what has led to the growing series of extremely urgent crises that is confronting us today. Thus, as is now well known, this way of life has brought about pollution, destruction of the balance of nature, over-population, world-wide economic and political disorder and the creation of an overall environment that is neither physically nor mentally healthy for most of the people who live in it. Individually there has developed a widespread feeling of helplessness and despair, in the face of what seems to be an overwhelming mass of disparate social forces, going beyond the control and even the comprehension of the human beings who are caught up in it.
– David Bohm

Both past and future are not certain
Physicists Albert Einstein and Richard Tolman showed that if quantum mechanics describes events, then even the past is as uncertain as the future.
– Fred Alan Wolf

Afterthoughts

We create past, and change past, same as we create future and change future. Sounds impossible, because we ‘know’ that past is gone, and is, well, behind us. However, the logical proof of this notion above is quite simple: if the past is gone, and determined, how can such a deterministic set called ‘past’ be a cause for the indeterministic future? Or to put it in parable: if we had apples only in our kitchen yesterday, how we can make an apple, cherry and pear pie today? How we can have more possibilities now than we had them in the past? That past is gone and determined is thus an illusion, but we choose to believe it because our memory is selective and attention span usually short. We obviously didn’t see we have cherries and pears on the shelf somewhere and believed there were none.

To paraphrase Fred Alan Wolf, the past is within vast fields and windmills of our mind. Every day we discover something new about our past, and that in effect changes the course of our future. Thus past indeed is undetermined because it will appear differently as we observe it differently. And vice versa — we imagine some future possibilities that reflect in us some memories from the past, which then cast a new light on a thought, “Ah, I should have done it this way …”. And we do it. We do it now. In one go we change both past and change the course of future.

Nothing is determined.

– Zvonimir Tosic

Perhaps, this is where faith comes in. Everything we experience is a product of our individual and collective imaginations. If we can imagine something better–excellent. If those imaginings can be actualized in this life–great! Some things we imagine, dream of, desire, and long for may not be realized in this life, but we have faith that they will be realized in the next. Our desires are what manifest.

I simply offer a way to increase our desire for Radha-Krishna by imagining ourselves as their intimate friends. We cultivate a higher taste like when we enjoy music, literature, plays, art, and poetry. Free the mind from the dross, and learn to taste the ineffable beauty and bliss of spiritual life. We may experience it ourselves and enrich our life by it, but we may not be able to prove it is real. We are dealing with the individual and collective accumulated descriptions of this reality, which are necessarily inadequate representations of the currently incomprehensible Ground of Being. If we could actually comprehend God-dess, he-she would not be God-dess.

They manifest in different forms with countless conceits to experience unlimited pastimes. These expansions of God-dess live in their own spiritual abodes where they engage in eternal pastimes with their devotees. The different religions are based on experiences of various forms God-dess revealed according to time and circumstance. This accounts for the different descriptions of God-dess who manifests in the material world to create and maintain the cosmos and impart spiritual wisdom. They are not subject to material energy. They operate in the realms of consciousness and sometimes manifest on the material plane through highly evolved humans such as Jesus and Chaitanya.

These archetypal forms live in the Cosmic Consciousness and appear in our consciousness to communicate with us. Since we are also parts of Cosmic Consciousness, sometimes they possess a person and appear in human form through that person. His devotees consider Chaitanya the incarnation of Radha-Krishna who appeared in the guise of a devotee to teach the religion of divine love. Sometimes he experienced the mood of a human devotee. At other times, he was completely possessed by God-dess. He manifested the moods of Radha-Krishna as well as other divine manifestations. He was seen and acknowledged as God-dess by learned devotees and scholars in his own lifetime, and this belief continues today among many of his devoted followers all over the world.

The innumerable manifestations of God-dess are all perfect, but they manifest different degrees of perfection based on how many divine qualities they manifest fully or partially and how many we can perceive and relate to. Radha-Krishna remain the source of all manifestations and all divine qualities fully manifest in them.

Radha-Krishna constitute the supreme reality. They are both concrete and expansive. Their infinite nature encircles the whole universe, but that infinitude is centered in concrete form. Their being consists of an all-embracing, organic unity. Their concrete form does not limit or restrict their freedom because the modulations of their being pervade the infinite expanse of existence. They combine breadth of spirit, intense modulations, eternal peace, and calm perfection with dynamic, eternally self-revealing, self-fulfilling creative activity, and quickness of movement with intense harmony and grace. Radha-Krishna awaken these modulations in us, satisfying our longings for love, knowledge, and peace in an integrative synthesis. They awaken freedom, flexibility, harmony, and everything needed for a rich, full spiritual life.

They manifest in different forms with countless conceits to experience unlimited pastimes. These expansions of God-dess live in their own spiritual abodes where they engage in eternal pastimes with their devotees. The different religions are based on experiences of various forms God-dess revealed according to time and circumstance. This accounts for the different descriptions of God-dess who manifests in the material world to create and maintain the cosmos and impart spiritual wisdom. They are not subject to material energy. They operate in the realms of consciousness and sometimes manifest on the material plane through highly evolved humans such as Jesus and Chaitanya.

These archetypal forms live in the Cosmic Consciousness and appear in our consciousness to communicate with us. Since we are also parts of Cosmic Consciousness, sometimes they possess a person and appear in human form through that person. His devotees consider Chaitanya the incarnation of Radha-Krishna who appeared in the guise of a devotee to teach the religion of divine love. Sometimes he experienced the mood of a human devotee. At other times, he was completely possessed by God-dess. He manifested the moods of Radha-Krishna as well as other divine manifestations. He was seen and acknowledged as God-dess by learned devotees and scholars in his own lifetime, and this belief continues today among many of his devoted followers all over the world.

The innumerable manifestations of God-dess are all perfect, but they manifest different degrees of perfection based on how many divine qualities they manifest fully or partially and how many we can perceive and relate to. Radha-Krishna remain the source of all manifestations and all divine qualities fully manifest in them.

Radha-Krishna constitute the supreme reality. They are both concrete and expansive. Their infinite nature encircles the whole universe, but that infinitude is centered in concrete form. Their being consists of an all-embracing, organic unity. Their concrete form does not limit or restrict their freedom because the modulations of their being pervade the infinite expanse of existence. They combine breadth of spirit, intense modulations, eternal peace, and calm perfection with dynamic, eternally self-revealing, self-fulfilling creative activity, and quickness of movement with intense harmony and grace. Radha-Krishna awaken these modulations in us, satisfying our longings for love, knowledge, and peace in an integrative synthesis. They awaken freedom, flexibility, harmony, and everything needed for a rich, full spiritual life.