Brahm (the Absolute), who is ras (Divine sweetness and bliss), when all of His qualities and powers are active and manifested outwardly, He is Sakar Brahm (the personal form of God), He is Shri Krishna. Then He enjoys His own blissfulness, and He gives that bliss to the souls.
Think of it this way: I gave the example of a mango. So if someone were to say to you, “Oh, here’s a branch from a mango tree, just the wood part, no fruit,” and they said to you,
“Do you know that the DNA, the structure, is exactly the same as the fruit? No difference. This is the same as a mango fruit. Here, chew on this.”
You’ll say it may be chemically the same, but experientially it’s not the same.
Similarly, you can say Brahm, Nirakar Brahm (formless God) and Sakar Brahm (God with form) - so formless God and Shri Krishna, the personal form of God - they’re one and the same,
ब्रह्मणो हि प्रतिष्ठाहम…
Brahmaṇo hi pratiṣṭhāham…- Gita 14.27
Shri Krishna says, “Formless God is from Me and established in Me; it’s not some other God.”
Yet, it’s like the difference between chewing on the twig of a mango and actually getting the ras of that mango. The ras is there in the twig too, but it’s unmanifest.
Now, take sugarcane. Sugarcane is also very sweet. Sugarcane has no flower and no fruit. Imagine if sugarcane had a fruit. Could you imagine what would be the sweetness of that?
So you could say Brahm is sweet, like the sugarcane - Brahm is ras - but that experience of the personal form of God is unimaginable to someone who hasn’t, like you could say a gyani (knower of the Absolute), who hasn’t experienced the personal form of God. It would be like us trying to imagine what would be the taste of the fruit of a sugarcane plant. All we could imagine is that it would be something very great.
So this is the real ras.
