Category:God's Rasa-lila
Theme Analysis
Śrīla Prabhupāda clarifies the most elevated, confidential, and frequently misunderstood pastime of the Supreme Personality of Godhead. This transcendental dance is not a display of mundane lust, but the highest expression of spiritual bliss (sac-cid-ananda), where the Lord expands His pleasure potency to exchange loving mellows with His pure devotees. The rasa-lila is so potent that its true purpose is to attract conditioned souls away from degraded material sex life and toward the reality of the spiritual kingdom. However, Śrīla Prabhupāda strictly warns against the professional reciters and foolish people who jump directly to the rasa-lila chapters without first understanding the Lord's supreme position, as this leads to fatal misunderstandings and imitation.
- The Highest Spiritual Bliss: The Lord's rasa-lila is not a mundane activity, but the ultimate expression of spiritual exchange where the Supreme Lord eternally enjoys with His own internal potencies.
- The Danger of Imitation: Foolish persons and professional reciters who jump to the rasa dance without proper qualification commit great blunders, often leading to degraded imitation.
- Attracting the Conditioned Souls: The essential purpose of displaying the rasa-lila in the material world is to cure the conditioned souls of their diseased morality and attract them to the eternal reality of the spiritual kingdom.
- For the Liberated Souls: Only those who are completely liberated from the material modes of nature, like Śukadeva Gosvāmī, can properly relish and understand the profound depth of the Lord's intimate pastimes.
- Explore the synthesized essence of this category in this Vanipedia article: The Transcendental Reality of God's Rasa-līlā.
Pages in category "God's Rasa-lila"
The following 19 pages are in this category, out of 19 total.
A
- According to the Bhagavata school, the Lord's rasa dancing is the smiling face of the Lord
- As mentined above, it appears that Krsna enjoyed the rasa dance with the gopis when He was eight years old. At that time, many of the gopis were married, because in India, especially in those days, girls were married at a very early age
S
- Since God is sac-cid-ananda-vigraha He likes every part & parcel of His different potencies to take part in the blissful rasa: participation with God in His eternal rasa-lila is the highest living condition perfect in spiritual bliss & eternal knowledge
- Since it is recommended in this verse (2.2.13) that one should gradually progress from the lotus feet up to the smiling face, we shall not jump at once to understand the Lord's pastimes in the rasa dance
- Srila Visvanatha Cakravarti offers his good counsel to the interested Vaisnavas when he says that they should not be interested in hearing only about the Lord's activities - like rasa-lila
T
- The gopis are predominated expansions of the internal potency, and therefore the Lord's participation in the rasa-lila dance is never to be considered like the mundane relationship of man and woman
- The Personality of Godhead Garbhodakasayi Visnu is also engaged in rasa enjoyment with His external potency, by which He creates, maintains and dissolves the entire material manifestation
- The pure devotees of the Lord, however, can equally relish the nectar in the form of the profound philosophical discourses and in the form of kissing by the Lord in the rasa dance, as there is no mundane distinction between the two
- The reason the Lord displays the rasa-lila is essentially to induce all the fallen souls to give up their diseased morality and religiosity, and to attract them to the kingdom of God to enjoy the reality
- The Supreme Lord's pastimes are more attractive to liberated souls than to mundane people. He is of necessity not impersonal because it is only possible to carry on transcendental rasa with a person
- The Supreme Personality of Godhead is therefore described in the sruti-mantras, Vedic hymns, as "the fountainhead of all rasas." When one associates with the SL & exchanges one's constitutional rasa with the Lord, then the living being is actually happy
- There are professional Bhagavata reciters who abruptly go to the rasa-lila chapters of SB, as if other portions of SB were useless. This kind of discrimination & abrupt adoption of the rasa-lila pastimes of the Lord is not approved by the acaryas
W
- When the Lord manifested Himself on this earth He partially displayed the activities of His pleasure potency in His rasa-lila just to attract the conditioned souls, who are all after the phantasmagoria pleasure potency in degraded sex enjoyment
- Without having the Vedic knowledge one can hardly understand the transcendental nature of the Lord's rasa dance and music