When we love God, we will love God in one of these five ways. These are the five major categories of how you would feel related to anyone, be it a person in the world or God. So we say,
“Oh yes, I want to love God!”
But how do you love? You have to love Him in one of these five ways. This is why Shree Krishna says,
“However you surrender to Me, whether you surrender to Me with shant bhav (where God is the king and the soul is the subject), feeling yourself to be a subject in My kingdom, or dasya bhav (where the devotee gets opportunity to perform personal seva), or sakhya bhav (where the devotee and Krishna are equals and formality becomes negligible.), or vatsalya bhav (where the devotee experiences ever-increasing parental love), or madhurya bhav (where the devotee loves Shree Krishna as their beloved), however you surrender to Me; In other words, however you love Me I will love you the same way in return.”
That’s His law. He says this in the Gita.
So Mother Yashoda is a Saint, a soul who surrendered to God with vatsalya bhav, who completely purified her heart. God came to her, Shree Krishna came to her, and said,
“Now you are My mother. You’ve surrendered to Me with vatsalya bhav.”
So when He came as Shree Krishna, Mother Yashoda came as His mother. Then what happens is…there’s a special power. You know, when you love someone in this world, the love is merely a thought in your mind. It’s a feeling in your mind. It doesn’t exist as any kind of external power, but in the Divine world, prem shakti (the Divine power of love), prem (Divine love), is an actual power of God. So you can have dasya prem (the experience of the feeling of Divine love in servitude), sakhya prema (Divine love in the mood of friendship), vatsalya prem (Divine love in the mood of parental affection), madhurya prem (Divine love in the mood of conjugal love), all these different styles or tastes of this Divine bliss.
And God also enjoys all those different styles of Divine bliss. When He interacts with His God-realized Saints, His parikar (Divine associates), in His Divine abode, they enjoy. Let’s say there’s a sakhya bhav Saint in Golok Dham (the highest Divine abode of Radha-Krishna) with Shree Krishna. That Saint enjoys sakhya ras (the Divine bliss of friendship) from Shree Krishna. When he interacts with Him, as he gets to all day, every day in the Divine world, he’s enjoying sakhya ras. It’s a particular type of Divine bliss.
Beyond that is vatsalya ras (the Divine bliss of parental affection). Beyond that is madhurya ras (the Divine bliss of intimate love). But as he’s enjoying it, so is Shree Krishna. Shree Krishna is enjoying His own ras (Divine bliss) through the interaction with that Saint.
And what happens to both of them under the effect of this ras? They both forget their place. The place being, in reality, Krishna is the King and we are His subjects. That’s the reality. We are not His friend. We are not His mother. We are not His beloved. No, no. The reality is He’s God. We’re insignificant souls, but that reality has no ras. There’s no ras in that. There’s no ras in reality. The ras is there when Shree Krishna forgets His position as God and we forget our position as souls. And this happens through His power. His prem shakti (the Divine power of love) makes Him forget, and the souls who love Him in that way also forget.
