Sometimes we sing in the kirtan (devotional singing), we try to give some reasoning to Shree Krishna (the Supreme Divine Personality),
“Well, You tell me I have to do sadhana (spiritual practice) to purify my heart and become surrendered to You! You say You can’t grace me until I surrender to You with a pure heart, but there’s one instance of You gracing someone who wasn’t surrendered to You. Putana (the demoness) came with the intention of killing You, and You still graced her and gave her Your Divine abode, so why don’t You do the same to me? Why are You making me do sadhana to purify my antahkaran?”
But the ‘secret behind the secret’ is that Putana was internally surrendered to Shree Krishna. Putana, in her previous life, was the daughter of Raja (king) Bali.
So she was also born in a rakshasa (demon) family in her previous life. Her name was Ratnamala. And when Shree Krishna took avatar (Divine descension) as Vaman (the dwarf brahmin descension of Vishnu), the young brahman (priestly class) boy, and came with the three steps to reclaim all of Bali’s earthly kingdom, as well as his domination of swarg (heavenly realm), and took the third step on Raja Bali’s head, at that time Ratnamala was also present.
And she saw Shree Krishna in the form of this young boy, and she had such motherly feelings of affection for Him. In her heart a desire came,
“Oh, I just want to have a chance to be His mother! I want to have a chance to nurse Him!”
That was her devotional desire.
So Shree Krishna honored that desire - of course, knowing what’s in the heart of all of His devotees - and He graced her to be born as Putana, and He said,
“In this life you will get the chance to do that.”
So although externally it was being shown in this leela (Divine pastime) that Putana came to kill Shree Krishna, actually her most inner intention was just to get the chance to nurse Shree Krishna as her own child.
So although Shree Krishna did relieve her from that body, He did pull her pran (life force) out so that she could be relieved from that body of being born as a demoness, He internally graced her because she was internally surrendered to Him. She was 100% surrendered, and when she received His Divine touch, that was the moment of God-realization. So in fact her body became Divine in that moment. So that’s why when they burned her body, the sweet fragrance of chandan (sandalwood) came.
And despite all of this happening, none of the Brajwasis (residents of Braj) thought of Shree Krishna as being the supreme God.
As we heard during our Janmashtami (celebration of Krishna’s birth) intensive, we heard Shree Maharaj Ji’s explanation of “Maiyari mein nahi maati khayo”.
And Shree Maharaj Ji was explaining that with the effect of that Yogamaya Shakti (Divine internal power of Krishna), Shree Krishna forgets that He’s God, and all of His devotees forget that He’s God, and because of that these sweet leelas take place.
But whenever required, Shree Krishna’s Godly powers of all-mightiness and all-knowingness can come and be used by Him. They’re always at His disposal.
So when needed, He was able to, even as a six-day-old baby, kill this huge powerful demoness, Putana.
But nonetheless, His Divine godly status is not revealed to His devotees because that would spoil the sweetness of the leela.
His devotees of ragatmika bhakti or raganuga bhakti, they do not wish to maintain that awareness of Shree Krishna’s all-mightiness.
They would prefer to have their consciousness drowned in their love for Shree Krishna, which completely drowns out that awareness of Shree Krishna’s all-mightiness.
