The Highest Moods

Some yogis have characterized the nerve change as: “A 110-watt bulb must become an 1100-watt bulb.” Not only does your nervous system have to be transformed, the fiancé to fiancée mood must further strengthen your body, mind, and heart in order for you to enter these extremely advanced dimensions of life. As always, the science of yoga is particularly helpful in increasing your abilities.

Bliss Changes You

Continuing your fiancé to fiancée mood, ecstasy fills your body from brain to toe tips. The bliss changes your cells so they can contain such a great rush of energy and devotion. Seekers who cannot handle the higher energy shake, tremble, weep, and sometimes roll around the room. Occasionally, their bodies leap up off the ground even when they are seated. While these involuntary actions can appear to be interesting oddities, or even signs of holiness to some, a nerve problem is indicated and your nerves must be toned so higher states can be held calmly — without jerking, shaking, or trembling.

Please keep in mind only a few dozen people in the world are capable of maintaining the level of consciousness we are describing here. We’re not describing other phenomena which may also involve shaking, jerking, and the incapacity of the nerves to handle even a small amount of energy.

The Divinized Body

Your transformed body, developed through high states, is generally called the divinized body, spiritually made more subtle, able to experience and express higher consciousness. When this transformation of your physical vehicle occurs, it seems to emit a mellow glow, and the rush of ecstasy in your cells is continually felt.

Sri Ramakrishna, for example, began to radiate so much light from his body that people used to gather around his doorway just to catch a glimpse of him as he went outside. On one occasion, when he asked Mahendra Nath Gupta about their extreme curiosity, he was told they had gathered there specifically to see the light shining from him. He immediately ran back into the house, saying he was disgusted with this kind of fame. He prayed that his effulgence be taken away, that he in no way wished to become some kind of marvel or curiosity. And, within a few months, his distinct glow was reduced — likely interiorized.

A Few People In Our Time

The next stage of intimacy with the higher consciousness can only be imagined when you are in the fiancé mood. The more developed you are in any of the relationship moods, however, the more you will be able to anticipate the nature of these new moods. Sri Ramakrishna was humanity’s main teacher and demonstrator of these high moods.

He said that at some future time people may commonly experience these relationships. But, it probably would take thousands and thousands of years — perhaps tens of thousands — before these moods were widely experienced. He, however, suggested that a few people in our time will be able to achieve relationships with the higher consciousness which are supremely intense and intimate. He did caution that people who are unprepared and who presume to live at an intensity beyond their capacity might well suffer health problems and even go mad.

Bearing his caution in mind, are you ready to engage your thought in something most wondrous and sublime?

Kama Radha — The Transformed Lover

Using Sri Ramakrishna’s terminology — because of his knowledge and because his is the only available vocabulary regarding the extremely advanced higher states today — let your mind, in partial satisfaction, savor a marvelous progression: the possibility of becoming God’s spiritual playmate.

You, surviving the fiancé mood, having successfully matured and been transformed by the intensity of your love play, now possess a subtly changed body in which to work and express. In a sense, you’re a member of a new species or the next plateau of the human species. Sri Ramakrishna called these individual souls Radha. He used the term Radha because the individual soul is the beloved of God, just as the ancient devotee, Radha, was the beloved of the Incarnation, Krishna. So, by Radha, Sri Ramakrishna means you — the devotee, the individual soul.

Keep in mind, too, please, that by the time you have passed through the fiancé to fiancée relationship, incredible transformation of your sense of self has occurred. After all, you have surrendered yourself at the servant level and then a deeper, truer sense of self has developed through the friend relationship into the son or daughter mood. Then you went through the married relationship into the fiancé intensity. Thus, a great amount of transformation and self-surrender has already occurred. Now, in most senses a new being, you enter the Radha relationships.

A New You Is Necessary

Before, your physical eyes, ears, fingertips were sensitive to the vast panorama of creation in very limited ways and were only capable of sensing a small portion of the spectrum of energy in which you lived. Naturally, to be aware of realities beyond the visible spectrum — which scientists are regularly able to measure and which they assure us do exist — you need to have changed eyes and ears. Also, you must have a capacity to feel far beyond the very limited range of normal human sensitivity.

The transformation process through the previous relationships has accomplished a much increased awareness of the levels of electromagnetic energy (in the body and the universe) far beyond science’s projections at this time. Hopefully these Radha moods of extreme awareness will reveal the keys by which science, art, and religion will merge — each satisfying its own disciplines and each enriching the other two.

The main point is that a new being, a new you, is necessary for the Kama Radha relationship — Kama meaning true fulfillment of desire, or desire itself; Radha meaning you, the individual devotee.

Only For Him

The fiancé to fiancée relationship was so powerful it transformed you and, as you now grow in love, you are compelled by your new nature to love even more dynamically, even more intimately. And so, the Kama Radha relationship between the individual soul, Radha, and the higher consciousness happens. Ramakrishna would urge that Kama Radha be recognized as a mood between the individual soul and the Lord. Sri Ramakrishna would also have a much larger vocabulary of subtle terms to use than our English language allows.

Endeavoring to approximate Ramakrishna’s terms: in the Kama Radha experience you become such an intense, transformed lover you only care about one thing, you only live for one thing: the Lord and your love of him. He (or She) seems your all in all. You conduct your life only for him. You live or die for him only. Your actions are for him — your conversation, your exercise and study. You eat for him. Your thoughts are for him. You think only out of love for him. You have the conviction you exist for him only.

But believe it or not, there is a tinge of selfishness in the blazing love of Kama Radha — your spiritual desire for your Beloved. The selfishness concerns the quality of your love. However high you may be and however deeply deserving of the respect of all humanity, your love has a shortcoming. If your lofty love play with the Lord grows progressively, you are happy and all is well.

Will You Still Love Him?

However, if your Beloved withdraws himself from the relationship for a time, and if you cannot experience your exquisite love play, will you still love him?
In Kama Radha, according to those who have been in it, you, the individual soul, stop loving and stop giving if for a prolonged time you feel there is no response, no appropriate love play from your Lord. You wonder why you have loved so long, and how the Lord could be so thoughtless of his devotee, the Radha. All this occurs at a very high level, however primitive the selfish response may seem to our minds as we strive to equate it with normal human emotional terms.

So, even at a sublime height, a person in Kama Radha, a mood which seems to be one of total loving and giving, there is, even in your reformed sense of self, an expectation or a demand which you are placing on the Lord. You become agonizingly frustrated and your heart feels stretched beyond its ability to stretch.

Your sudden self-preoccupation as a thwarted lover sometimes takes a long period of time to grow out of and the whole sincerity of your love, even at this colossal level, is brought into question. The entire progression of your love and intimacy through the moods seems a contradiction. You lament your Beloved’s absence and endure while experiencing extreme suffering.

Prema Radha — The Joyous Lover

Though you live in anguish, usually you persevere and do not angrily spurn the Lord.

Then, in his own time, your nurturing Lord returns. In a while your love and play, soul to Lord and Lord to soul, resumes at progressively more wondrous levels.

However, you remember your sense of loss and exasperation when the Lord seemed absent, unreachable, and uncaring. Your love grows as you realize that, in Kama Radha, your love was not true self-giving but had a sharp hook in it. You subtly wanted to fulfill your self-centered desire for spiritual gratification, to control the Lord’s actions and responses to your love. You were not asking for material things but you did expect the Lord to satisfy your intense desire for a delightful, all-satisfying relationship. Seeing this insidious fault clearly, you love the Lord more purely. You are able to love with greater self-giving. An even greater power of love grows. You dedicate yourself to the Lord without a tinge of selfishness. You rejoice in being able to love your Lord, whatever his response. In this state, Prema Radha begins. Never before have you enjoyed loving the Lord so.

A Joyous Lover

The Prema Radha state is one in which you, the individual soul, enter into a mood of awareness something like this:

“I love you totally, my Lord. I deeply enjoy loving you. You may come or go. You may do as you please, but I enjoy nothing more than loving you.

And in my enjoyment of loving you, my enjoyment alone is enough for me. I will love you whether you are present in my consciousness and we are in our love play, or if you go away for a thousand eons. Always, I will enjoy this constant state of my love. I can enjoy loving you whether you are here now, or whether I never see you again, my Beloved. And, if for some reason you choose to place me away from you, from this moment through all eternity, still I will enjoy loving you.”

I Love to Love You

Who knows what number of people have attained this level of Prema Radha? Possibly fewer than two dozen. Sri Ramakrishna said hardly any mortals can withstand the rigors of Prema Radha.

Who could think there would still be a shortcoming, or flaw, in such a love as Prema Radha? Can you see what the flaw is?

Well, such a great love still has to be developed and perfected. So, once again, through the course of love, you develop a profound sense of separation. At some point you feel as if the Lord has gone away to some other corner of the universe, or perhaps to a different universe entirely, leaving this one to spin itself out.

“That’s alright,” you say, as a great devotee in Prema Radha:

“That’s fine, my Lord. I love you whether you are here or whether you stay away forever. I can still enjoy loving you. I love to love you. I love you, my Lord, whether you treat me well or ill. I enjoy loving you. My joy in loving you is not diminished. I don’t need your response. I enjoy loving you so. Hide as you wish. I love you.”

Nitya Radha — The Eternal Lover

But, after a long time your joy peters out. You were capable of enjoying the love play so much that even when the Lord made you unaware of his presence or seemed to act contrary to your lofty expectations you could still love him. It was easy to be constant in your love mood because you enjoyed loving him so. But, now after a long time, your joy has worn thin so you stop loving the Lord.

“What was I loving him for anyway?” you wonder. “If he really loved me, he’d be here. What’s the point in loving a Lord who’s never around? Why should I love him when I don’t enjoy it?”

As your joy flies away, a sense of profoundest desolation occurs. “It’s no fun loving a Lord who’s far away from me. What kind of a Lord would treat me this way?” you wonder. “Certainly he is, after all, an unworthy lover.”

It’s common that human relationships are dissolved when one party in the relationship goes away, stays away and doesn’t even communicate. However, it can be observed that in some cases there are people who continue to love the absent one even when he (or she) is far away, or uncommunicative, or even has done some evil to him or her. The love usually continues in the heart of the lover in these instances because he or she enjoys that love so much. The enjoyment of that love is extremely precious to the true lover.

Deep Questions

So, too, at an extremely high and almost incomprehensible level does this occur in the breakdown of Prema Radha, when the enjoyment of loving wears thin due to the apparent distance of the Lord. When the joy goes, when the enjoyment of the love goes, then the love itself is gradually weakened and diminished. Now this great soul in Prema Radha finds himself or herself again, once again, but more painfully than ever before, alone. No words can describe the extent of this forlorn state nor the emotion of personal futility.

“What is the sense of a universe which has such an absurd reciprocator of human love?” you cry. “Is the universe, and all that has unfolded in it, a preposterous joke? How can anything in this universe have meaning if loving the Lord has no constancy or validity? Certainly all human beings should band together and parade the world with picket signs protesting their absurd treatment and refuse to go on! — unless better living conditions are extended from The Management.

“And, surely,” you complain, “there is no greater fool than the one who aspired to and experienced Prema Radha. Perhaps reality itself is unreal! Surely it must be unreal because of these capricious actions of the Lord toward one who loves him and lives for him only! And then what of these mood experiences — all of them? Are they unreal too? Is everything nothing? Is all nothingness? Ohhhh.”

They Look Within Themselves

In this dejection a great pivot point has been reached. What happens next? The weak seekers fuss and fume. But in due course the Lord returns to their awareness and their joy ultimately is built back up again. They resume life at the ferocious level of Prema Radha once more. Of course, if in the future their joy falls away at times, so does their love.

But the strong ones, throughout history, continue to accept transformation — and “love” their way beyond Prema Radha. The dynamics of love do not quit at Prema Radha mood. These few lovers look within themselves when Prema Radha love breaks apart. They look at the frailty of their love rather than judge or condemn their Beloved. They suffer, yearn, and ache but they endeavor to love anyway, despite the diminishing of their joy, despite the concomitant lessening of their love. These rare lovers desperately investigate their love and determine what is really the problem. They hurriedly search their attitudes and behavior to find what is really wrong. While feeling so alone and so distant from their Beloved, they minutely examine their all-precious love, searching for its fatal flaw.

Pure Love Radiates

In time the transcenders of the Prema Radha mood discover they are passing through yet another initiation, and are moving forward into even greater love. They discover the painful but obvious truth that even the great love of Prema Radha had a quality of selfishness. They can see their enjoyment — their personal, however magnificent, enjoyment — of their love relationship was a major part of their motive to love the Lord.

“Ah-ha! There is the flaw. My love is not even yet free of my selfishness nor my desire to dominate subtly,” you realize. “I still have an expectation of joy. When my expectation is not fulfilled, then, sad to say, I love with less intensity and ultimately give up. Oh, what sorrow to know that my love is not a full giving, to know my love still has a hook in it. I am, even now, making a demand on my Beloved and loving him with an ulterior motive.”

Gradually there awakens in this extremely painful self-revelation a new love ever so sweet and free, a love like a melody streaming through the space in your mind, filling your chest cavity. Your sense of existence is filled like the songs of a huge choir saturate a vast cathedral. Pure love moves forward. Pure love radiates forth.

Eternal Love

“Now, my Lord, I love you whether you choose to stay here or leave me.
Lord, I love you whether I enjoy loving you or not. I love you totally. If I enjoy loving you, fine. If I don’t enjoy loving you, that is also fine. But I love you. I live in love. I love you and I can’t help it. Whether I ever see you again, whether you ever respond again, whether my personal inadequacies make me feel sad or in agony, I don’t care. I love you. I love you now. I live for you and your sweet will. I love you always — by your grace — no matter what!”

This perfected love is called Nitya Radha, the eternal love between beloved devotee and beloved Lord. You realize the seeming withdrawal of the Lord and his seeming lack of care was an act of love. The two of you brought it about to facilitate the necessary growth within you.

You needed to grow into being a person who can love so profoundly that your mood of love becomes eternal — beyond time, beyond space — incapable of destruction or impediment.

Nitya Lila — The Eternal Dance of Love

Your love relationship, now perfected through Nitya Radha, establishes a new way of life daily — an eternal dance of love between Lord and devotee: Nitya Lila. (Nitya means eternal, the Absolute; Lila means a play or dance. Lila also means the relative universe as manifest in time and space.) Sri Ramakrishna said at this level the devotee and Lord share together in the work of creation.

In Nitya Lila, the mood of love between the devotee and the Lord is so perfect that the concerns of one become the concerns of the other. The Lord and his eternally loving devotee become, in a sense, co-workers. This is not to imply that the spiritualized devotee is the Lord.2 However, sharing through love such deep, universal concerns, the devotee becomes ever so deeply compassionate about the welfare of humanity, for example — the development of values, the upliftment of the suffering, the comfort of the sick. Primarily the devotee serves at the level of raising human consciousness, recognizing most of humanity’s wars and woes come from a beclouded awareness.

You Share in the Emanation

Now the devotee is at the height of his or her soul’s expression and can be most instrumental in changing life’s situations constructively. Will, love, intelligence, and power unite. Consider that all the advancements in civilization and the quality of life have occurred when people became more conscious. As people raise their consciousness they are not only able to solve many of their own problems, but they are also able to offer viable solutions for the world’s problems.

The transformed lover in Nitya Lila sees the world situation clearly and, while acutely concerned, he constantly sees new hopes and possibilities for humanity. Even wars and bloodshed can be ameliorated. Some songs written by those who have experienced Nitya Lila say the “divine player” can suggest the creation of galaxies or universes and the Lord will fulfill his request.

The Ever-New Dance

As a devotee in Nitya Lila, you live in eternal delight, constantly thrilling to the ever-new dance with your Beloved. You share in the life and emanation of the Lord, while at the same time retaining your distinct spiritual individuality.

The Lord continually shows his love and appreciation for you. While you delight in serving your Beloved, He delights too in serving you, his very dear lover. In Nitya Lila your love is fulfilled. In Nitya Lila finite and infinite fuse.
In Nitya Lila you have finally, after who knows how long, come home.