The worship with awe and reverence performed by neophyte devotees who follow the regulative principles and aspire for mundane fame cannot be accepted as transcendental. The execution of regulative devotional service with a desire for mundane fame is only an indirect worship of the personal Godhead. Even though the objective of worship with awe and reverence is Krishna, it is not the same as worship in the mood of sweetness mixed with faith and pure love. There are differences in worship in terms of the understanding of the goal of life, the realization of the goal, and the nature of the goal. One cannot ignore these different grades and considerations. Although the Supreme Personality of Godhead is the Absolute Truth, the truth of his existence is initially incomprehensible for a neophyte devotee. Since a neophyte devotee maintains a connection with the three material modes of nature, his conception of the Absolute Truth is incomplete. But a devotee who follows the path of pure devotional service establishes an eternal relationship with the Supreme Personality of Godhead and Absolute Truth. Neophyte devotees who follow the regulative principles and worship the Lord with awe and reverence cannot understand that the opulence of the Absolute Truth is a manifestation of the Supreme Personality of Godhead’s energy, and thus they are unable to enter into the path of attachment and sweetness. Because of this defect, some of them fail to accept the Supreme Personality of Godhead, Lord Krishna, the son of King of Vraja, the cause of all causes, and the original Personality of Godhead, as the only source of all forms of Godhead. Because neophyte devotees have not properly heard from a bona fide spiritual master, they base their conception of Godhead on his vaibhāva-prakāśa, his opulent and allpowerful feature as the Absolute Truth. No one has the right to drink even a drop of nectar from the ocean of the transcendental mellows of Lord Krishna’s pastimes without the mercy of the daughter of King Vrishabhanu. That is why, due to lack of subordination to the gopīs, Lakshmi and her descendants, the followers of the Śrī Sampradāya, have no right to see the beauty of the service of Sri RadhaGovinda. Due to a lack of this understanding, the unauthorized sampradāya Nadīyā-nāgarī is bereft of the service of Sri Gaurasundara, whom they accept as an incarnation of Krishna’s vaibhāva-prakāśa, and they try to establish themselves in the imaginary position of Gaura-nāgarī. This group of gaura-nāgarīs, who are situated in mundane rasa, think of themselves as beyond the concocted mundane rasa by establishing Gaurasundara as separate from Lord Krishna, who is the shelter of mādhurya-rasa. On the pretext of serving Krishna, they become busy in the service of Gaurahari’s vaibhāva-prakāśa, Lord Narayan. The dim reflection of mādhurya-rasa is svakīyarasa, and so it is simply another form of dāsya-rasa. Many people make a mistake by accepting Lord Narayan’s pastimes with his legitimate wife as mādhurya-rasa. Those who have actually followed Śrī Caitanya-caritāmṛta are situated in ujjvala-rasa, which is hundreds of thousands of miles away from such illusion. They know that the reflected mādhurya-like svakīya-rasa is pure dāsya-rasa. In dāsya-rasa, a mood of awe and reverence, respect, following of rules and regulations, and a lack of pure love and devotion are prominent in the heart of the servant. In ujjvalarasa, instead of these above-mentioned moods being prominent, the devotees who are fully inclined to Sri Gaurasundara, who is eternal and full of knowledge and bliss, who is the embodiment of sweetness, and who is the personification of magnanimous pastimes, display an intense attachment that is imbued with faith and love. The concept of a mādhurya-like svakīya-rasa conceived by the so-called vaiṣṇavas whose hearts are filled with regulative principles derived from [mechanically] studying literature like Bhaktirasāmṛta-sindhu and Ujjvala-nīlamaṇi is nothing but a lack of submission to Sri Rupa. They say that since Lakshmipriya’s and Vishnupriya’s attachment for Sri Gaura is similar to the attachment of Satyabhama for the Lord of Dwarka and to Laksmi’s attachment for the Lord of Vaikuntha, therefore the concept of svakīya is identical with mādhurya-rasa, both for the object of worship and the worshiper. Therefore they conclude that the svakīya mood of Sri Gaura and Vishnupriya is certainly ujjvala-rasa. But mistaking the inferior dāsya-rasa to be mādhuryarasa is simply not acceptable. By taking shelter of Sri Sanatana Goswami’s Bṛhat-bhāgavatāmṛta and Sri Rupa Goswami’s Bhakti-rasāmṛta-sindhu and Ujjvala-nīlamaṇi, the intelligence of an ordinary mundane rhetorician can be refined and the conception of the Gaura-nāgarī philosophy can be exposed as unauthorized. — Patrāmṛta, Nectar from the Letters, translated by Bhumipati Dasa, published by Isvara Dasa, Touchstone Media, Kolkata, 2012.
