Reviews
"Always, this gentle tale leaves intact the mystery of the path to the Beloved. But the glimpses we get suffice to lure us deeper into the mystery and into reunion with our most treasured intimations of the sacred."
- Jean Houston Ph.D., author of The Search for the Beloved: Journeys in Mythology and Sacred Psychology
"Glorious!...a beautiful play of fantasy and reality, of past and present, of two Radhas dancing out of eternity into our hearts. The mysteries of the two worlds intertwine, giving us glimpses of the perennial love of the soul with the Beloved."
- Theresa King, editor of The Spiritual Path
"This is a charming, stirring, and elevating love song within a love song... a modern Gita Govinda. So much of Swami Sivananda Radha's energy is in these image-laden words and precious vignettes-the magnificent magic of the awakened heart."
- Georg Feuerstein, Ph.D., author of Structures of Consciousness
"... a joyful, bliss-giving view, and also-in an amazing way - a dance with Krishna. This book made me laugh and weep, and filled me with a renewed appreciation of Swami Radha's gift to us all."
- James Fadiman, Ph.D., author of Unlimit Your Life
"There is a profound simplicity to Swami Radha's journey that invites us to ponder our own journey to the Divine, knowing that such a relationship is possible."
- Sister Frances Briseño, OSB-Benedictine Sisters, St. Scholastica Monastery
"This book is so beautiful. Through it you can hear Swami Radha singing."
- Herbert V. Guenther, Ph.D., D.Litt., author of Kindly Bent to Ease Us
Excerpt
From Chapter: "Who Is Radha?"
THE STORY IS ALIVE NOW as it was then. This story is always alive - a love story, a story of an illicit affair. The women - normally faithful, hardworking career women, wives and mothers - suddenly hear an enchanting call and abandon the everyday world to search for the source of the sound, for that Other who has stolen their hearts.
IT IS IN THE FOREST in India. The forest is warm even at night, and the forest is alive with whispering night creatures and trembling leaves, with the sighs of the river exhaling its ripples onto the shore. Full moon shimmers on water. Flowers open in the moonlight, glowing iridescent, ethereal, transparent. A sweet fragrance wafts through the village into the cottages where the women, old and young, sleep surrounded by families and all that is familiar.
A stirring. A restlessness. Something is waking them. Something is calling them. A flute. A magical sound penetrates the darkness, and they rise, lured from their beds. Running lightly into the night, they follow the waves of melody. Laughing, no ties holding them back, they meet with others, saris flying, black hair streaming, bangles ringing.
Radha is leading the way
following the flutesong
running to the Blue One.
The Player is back.
He is here.
This is the scene. This is the play. It is India, long ago, in the paradise of Brindaban where Radha and Krishna unite at the center, and Krishna multiplies himself and becomes the exclusive dance partner of each of the gopis, the cowherd girls, in the Rasa Lila, the circle dance, the taste of play.
I sit here at the foot of her bed, writing, thinking about her. Our Radha is old now in human years. How old is she in the other time - or is there time there? Or is that the world of the unborn and undying where knowledge, like Krishna, is evergreen? In her vision, or "dream experience" as she modestly calls it, when she reunites with him, she is startled to find that he is young and that she, too, is young - ever young, ever new, ever fresh.
Is that why the Affair has to be illicit, outside the regular laws and moral customs, outside the humdrum "I-see-you-every-day-my-dear" order of marriage? Running into the darkness of the unknown, the mysterious, to find him there, not in the bright sunshine but in the ambiguous light of the moon. Spirit escaping body, Radha running to Krishna.
She talks quietly and rarely about those times of going out from her body. Usually it is not to meet him but to do work for him. She finds the ones calling out in pain and comforts them, or gives them the Light to find their way or to find perspective on the pain.
Why does she not talk about these mysteries and announce them to our world? Here in this time and place, North America approaching the new millennium, when many proclaim spiritual enlightenment, touting their powers, and calling the undiscriminating to follow them, why does she, who is involved in the truly miraculous, not at least point it out? Maybe she is like the original Radha - modest yet intense, shy, eyes cast down, eyes for him only, silently approaching.
She is not here for herself but for Krishna. Why would selfless service need publicity? She gives what is needed to help, and is alert to the slightest tinge of ego - even a tinge, she says, is enough to color the Light. She is a true sanyasin you see. She does not even like to use the "I" word; it makes her nervous somehow. She wants only to start us spinning in an upward spiral, to get us back on the road to him.
This world is a Stone Age to her. A far cry from Brindaban. A spiritual Stone Age, where football stars are worshipped like gods, where money, sex and success are the false idols. Many now are stone deaf to the flute. It calls as it always has, but there is so much noise these days, so much static, so many other channels (500 isn't it?), so many possibilities and nuances for illusions, it makes her job hard.
The sound of his flute pierces the heart. How can they not hear it? No heart? No time? No resonance? Hard for her to imagine.
How did she hear its sound? Her old world was burned away - dissolved, exploded. The war did a good job of that. For this child of the wealthy importer of Buddhas and Oriental antiques, the modern interpretative dancer, the baroness - the sight of cows' bloated bodies in fields, the images of mothers clinging to dead babies, the experience of a hell of merciless destruction and unspeakable cruelty did a thorough job of burning illusions. The pain of loss - the husbands who had loved her, the babies who could not be born - all intensified the quest for meaning and purpose that had been with her since childhood. As she made her way west to the new world, fleeing the prospect of life under communist oppression, she had nothing to hold onto anymore.
And the flute sounded, sweet and clear.
© 1996 timeless
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