Manjari-Bhava - The Confidential Moods of Sri Radha's Maidservants

With their songs and their favourite scriptural slokas our raganuga acaryas share their hearts and confidential moods of love with us, and as practitioners we can share these jewels of the heart with each other. We can reawaken our spiritual consciousness, and connect with the spiritual world in Vraja by memo- rizing these slokas and utilising them in our practice of mantra-mayi upasana- chanting slokas and meditating on the particular pastimes they evoke, while taking harinama (japa' practice). Thus we would follow the proper traditional sequence for remembering Sri Radha-Krsna's names, forms, qualities and pastimes, and be able to make progress on the path of pure, spontaneous bhakti.

As beginners we may start with slokas from Sri Upadeṣamṛta, hearing or reading the commentaries, and then taking harinama along with meditating on these slokas. Then our sadhana-bhajana will gradually evolve as our insights deepen and as we add more slokas to our repertoire. This practice will eventually lead us up to rasika scriptures such as Sri Vilapa-Kusumanjali and Sri Radha-Ra- sa-Sudhanidhi. Deeper levels of the meanings and moods of these sacred verses will manifest spontaneously in our hearts when it is done according to the tradi- tional method. Srila Bhaktivedanta Narayana Maharaja describes this as follows:

"When sadhakas study and learn these verses, deeply meditating within them- selves on their meanings while chanting the holy name, they will act as stimuli to fully experience the mood described in these slokas. Then one's mind will not wander here and there. We should not just walk around talking to others while chanting, but taking our chanting beads we should sit in a solitary place and give it our mind and heart. Our previous acaryas chanted all night long, meditating on one verse after another. For half an hour the waves of the bhava of one particular verse would be coming to them: sometimes they would be fully submerged in those waves, sometimes they would rise to the surface and float on those waves, and then they would move on to the next sloka. As they did this more and more, the whole night would pass, and where it went, they wouldn't even know. This is the traditional method of performing bhajana.”

The perfection of our bhajana will be when we are able to see our Svamini Srimati Radhika in every syllable, of every word, of every sloka.

aradhyo bhagavan vrajesa-tanayas tad-dhama vṛndavanam ramya kacid upasana vraja-vadhu-vargena ya kalpita srimad-bhagavatam pramanam amalam prema pum-artho mahan sri-caitanya-mahaprabhor matam idam tatradaro nah parah

"Bhagavan Vrajendra-nandana Sri Krsna is our only worshipful object. In the same way that He is worshipful, so is His transcendental abode, Sri Vṛndavana Dhama. The mood in which the young brides of Vraja (the gopis, headed by Srimati Radhika) worship Him is the highest perfectional form of love of God. Srimad Bhagavatam alone is the immaculate scriptural evidence of this (sabda-pramana) and krsna-prema is the supreme objective of life (the fifth and ultimate goal of human life - beyond mundane religiosity, wealth, sense enjoyment, and impersonal liberation). This is the teaching of Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu (gaura-vani). We hold this conclusion (siddhanta) in supreme regard and have no interest or inclination for any other conclusions or cheating conceptions.

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