Radha the Intriguing Mystery : 5. Swami Krishnananda

06/11/2018
(Spoken on Radha Ashtami on September 14, 1983)
5.

Thus, the holy observance of Sri Radha Ashtami is a reminder to the spirit of man—not even to his psyche—that there is something in him which is not male or female, and not human. For all practical purposes, we cannot think except as human beings. No man can think that he is a woman, and no woman can believe that she is a man. We can imagine how limited our thoughts are. Whatever be their acuteness and genius of penetrative thinking, men can never believe that they are women; similar is the case with women. There is this terrible limitation set upon our thinking itself and, much worse, is that which compels us to feel that we are human beings. But Sri Krishna did not behave like a man or a woman, nor did he behave like a human being. These elements of a non-human or ultra-human behaviour are described in certain sections of the Srimad Bhagavata Mahapurana, and we are always intrigued when we hear or read about these mysteries.

God is an intriguing something, and He shall ever remain an intriguing something. We can never calculate the length and breadth of God's existence by arithmetic or algebra and, similarly, we cannot measure the rightness and the wrongness of God's actions by our ethical standards because human ethics is also mathematics; it is also a measuring rod, as arithmetic is. This cannot apply to the manifestation of a limitless being in limited form, which we call the Avatara or the Incarnation. In these realms, the entry of man's thought is forbidden. As the Bible tells us, man is forbidden entry into the Kingdom of God, and God has placed an angel wielding a flaming sword at the gate of the Kingdom, the Garden of Eden, so that no man may enter. No mortal can enter the Garden of Eden because the flaming sword is whirling at the gate. This is only to say that man should not and cannot understand God and, therefore, the laws of God also cannot be comprehended by human behaviour and human norms.

The complacency of man's immersion in this vainglorious feeling that his understanding is complete has to be shattered one day or the other by the invasion of God's infinity, and that was done by the advent of Bhagavan Sri Krishna with all that he demonstrated in these lilas and stories that we hear of as described in the Puranas and the epics. They say God entering man is like a mad elephant entering a thatched hut. The hut will not remain once the elephant enters it.

All these remain only as examples for us because with man's hardboiled ego, with this flint-like feeling that man's possession seems to be, he will cling forever to his own stereotyped fashions of thought; and he would like to extend the domain of his measuring rod of understanding to the Kingdom of Heaven—which would not be permitted because the flaming sword is there; thus, man's entry is debarred. This is why the Upanishad says that speech, together with the mind and the understanding, turn back baffled when they try to enter, when they even behold the gateway to the Kingdom of God. Therefore, it is a matter for us to admire from a distance and be thrilled at the very thought if it. Such is the glory which, in mysterious and indescribable ways, we seem to reveal in our own lives by religious and spiritual observances of this kind.

THE END