Krishna! the very word has a magical spell about it that sends you in ecstasy, Krishna,krishna! millions have found their salvations in this simple but soulful utterance.Krishna, divine lover of Radha, yet beloved of all gopis,Krishna,stealer of butter cookies, yet also Universal giver, Krishna,simple cowherd, yet great king,covetedly youthful, yet agelessly wise, Krishna,endearingly human,yet divinity in its fullness. In the pantheon of gods, Krishna , "the dark one" , is , perhaps the most well loved embodiment of light. And this paradox is the best hint to decode the many anecdotes he is associated with. Unlike Sri Ram,who immediately preceded him in the divine saga of Avataran, and conformed strictly to maryada, or righteousness as his path,Krishna sported his way through all of life,making it all a play,a leela. Ramji the seventh Avatar of God Vishnu, allowed himself to be confronted by hopeless situations,like any of us,he was subject to the law of maya,and he overcame by exemplary courage and fortitude ,equipoise and calm, and even by gratitude and allying withthose who themselves stood for righteousness. And characteristically,therefore ,he was simple to decipher ,but very difficult to emulate into one's own life and practice, as even the contemporary characters in the Ramayana proved,only Ram was Marayada purshottama.Sri Krishna decided to take the divine show literally a step forward ,and remaining intensely human on the one hand, he freely used his divinity to display a complete control over, rather than being subject to maya, Ramji demonstrated with his own life, that one must endure what he cannot cure, this is a great discipline,but then ,it must lead to the state,avastha, where one can cure what he no longer can endure,And this is important to note,this is to be able to play with shakti, knowing it to be one's own emanation,and Krishna's step forward was indeed,a giant leap for mankind, more than landing on the moon! He was actually handing out the technology of knowing that even the moon is just a small step for those on the pathof unleashing their divine potentials...Avataran means the reaching down to help ,and Avatars are the fullness of divinity, who descend down to earth,to help others to reach divinity for themselves, and when the Eighth Avatar, Who was magically, the Eighth child of Devaki, born on the eighth night of the waning moon,chose an open display of both human nature, the wordly way, on the one hand,and divine deeds on the other,it was a great lesson in confluencing the transcendent with the immanent,a great tribute to both,in a lighter vein, it was Krishna's way of showing how to actually have the cake and eat it too!And it is in this light of confluence that one should view Krishna's various episodes, to grasp their full meanings.In the Shiva sutras, it is exhorted that there comes a stage ,where, anything that the yogi does, becomes a divine deed, and Krishna,the yogi of yogis, was actually living out a life from such a high state.The milkmaids, for example, were always at a loss to understand his stealing methods,when they would readily give away pots of butter painstakingly gathered by them.But Krishna relished the stolen butter because even in this act ,he was immaculate and intense, and, in a paradoxical way, he was gathering his own reward, with great skill, and importantly,with his own painstaking ! Till today,in Maharashtra, teams are made at various levels to reach mountain high dahi handis and gather cash rewards, amidst the rended chants of "govinda a la re, a la!" if, for a moment we shift our focus from the act of stealing,to the fact of intensity, concentration, teamwork, and skill, that the event requires,we would understand that these are the very pre requisites of yoga itself.Take another highlighted incident from Krishna's life,it is said that he once sat on a tree, watching the gopis take a bath,and when they pleaded with him to be covered ,he actually did away with their robes !this is so difficult to understand, till we remember that ego is the greatest hurdle in the way of merging with Godhood,Any Yogi would tell us, the symbolism of the creator watching his creation,is that the gopis are just like thought constructs,all of which stand bare in front of supreme consciousness,flitting clouds ,like merry butterflies,are always bare,under the gaze of the sky!Seen like this,Krishna's sitting ascended and watching is exactly the methodology of remaining the eternal witness of a countless thoughts in front of a concentrated, yogic consciousness.In the same, enigmatic,mystical way, when implored by arjun, the battlefields of Kurukshetra were always of secondary in import in the teachings of Krishna, he preferred to address the war within arjun ! Leading him from ego tainted action, to the subtle release of knowing the actionless act,from the transient to the permanent, from conscience to consciousness..Hare Krishna! Happy Janamashtami! (Article by Shail gulhati, painting by artist
Kishore Roy)
Happy Janamashtami.
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