vaiku??hasya bhagavato jyotir-a?sa-bhuta vaiku??ha-loka-sobha-rupa ya ananta murtayas tatra vartante tasam ekaya saha muktasyaikasya murtir bhagavata kriyata iti vaiku??asya murtir iva murtir ye?am ity uktam
- (Priti Sandarbha (10)
“In the spiritual world, the Supreme Lord has unlimited spiritual forms, all are expansions of himself illuminating that world. With each one of those forms, the Lord enjoys pastimes with a single individual liberated soul.”
These liberated souls therefore have spiritual bodies like that of the Lord.
In the Lord’s abode, there are an unlimited number of forms, all suitable for rendering service to him. Every one of those forms is non-different from him, being expanded from his effulgence; each one is eternal, full of consciousness and bliss. They are the crowning, central jewels of the spiritual world—its very life. These unlimited spiritual bodies are the perfected forms of the liberated souls which are awarded to an individual, according to his taste, when he reaches the state of absolute liberation. This state is called attainment of the spiritual body. All these spiritual bodies are eternal for they exist even before the liberated souls enter them and will continue to exist ever afterward. However, prior to the entry of the liberated soul they are in an from OUR PERSPECTIVE – inactive state.
As all of the unlimited souls are servants of the Lord, each one of them has a spiritual body in the Lord’s abode just suitable for rendering service to the Lord. When an individual becomes qualified for direct service to the Lord by the grace of the Goddess of Devotion, then the Supreme Lord awards him that spiritual body.
( from Manjari Svarupa Nirupana, Sri Srimat Kunja Bihari das)
In another place Srila Ananta Das Babaji Maharaj says to a devotee:-
He told me that the form is already there. The guru(besthi guru) contacts in deep meditation Krishna´s form as the all-knowing Samasthi Guru and the Lord tells Sri Guru what form would be compatible with the feelings of the sadhaka. Then Sri Gurudeva reveals that form to the sadhaka and instructs him in bhajana. It is actually our seva-consciousness that “activates” that form.
The form is like a nice cloth which Krishna is giving to the liberated soul. A cloth “made of topmost spiritual bhava”…
But By practicing raganuga-bhakti in manjari-bhava-sadhana, the form which the sadhaka will be assigned actually comes from Srimati Radhika.
Now We are FORCED to ask:
1) How can there be spiritual bodies for us BEFORE we enter?
2) How can they be there AND be INACTIVE?
3) Now we are here, they are there…what are they doing in the meantime?
BUT we have to understand ONE THING: These questions originate in a material conditioned mind. We are forced to THINK and FEEL and EXPERIENCE in a time-space-continuum. BUT we are talking here about the SPIRITUAL WORLD…the innermost portion of Sri Krishna´s “creation”…the topmost realm of Divine Love…Goloka Vrindavana… Our questions are BOUND to fail.
We can ONLY UNDERSTAND these “matters” when our consciousness is fully purified (suddha-sattva).
When our hearts are filled with the Lord´s inner potency (svarupa-sakti ), we can comprehend and realize these things.
How can we even try to understand the siddha-deha? It is a body made of “BHAVA” (spiritual emotions). Even the clothes we wear are symptoms of our bhava… Right now, we cannot even imagine a body made of fire…what to speak of Lord Brahma´s body which is made of intelligence…
But this does not mean that we can forget it all…we can anyway never understand it. The meditation on the siddha-deha is useless…it is only my head-cinema producing a movie with me in a manjari-form.
No. This is not what the mahajanas teach us. All depends on our practice, on our consciousness and on our stage in bhakti.
Srila Narottam das Thakur sings:
sadhane ye dhana cai, siddha dehe taha pai,
pakkapakka matra se vicara
apakke sadhana riti, pakile se prema-bhakti,
bhakati lakshana tattva sara (56)
“The treasure I desire as a practitioner I will get when I attain my spiritual body; it’s just a question of being ripe or unripe. The ripe stage is the stage of pure loving devotion and the unripe stage is the stage of practice. That is the essential truth about devotional principles.”
So, we keep on practicing.
To think that “we as perfected jiva-souls” ENTER the spiritual world is also not a correct thinking pattern. It is not like we leave here and go there…and suddenly we appear in Goloka Vrindavana… The spiritual world is eternal. There exists only ETERNAL PRESENCE. It is not that 10 minutes ago, this liberated jiva was here in this world and then it entered the spiritual world.This is a seperate topic altogether. The spiritual world is not a “geographical place” (neither is our tatastha-sakti by the way). It is not bound on time and space. It is a world of pure spiritual consciousness of existence.
Many people look up or wave to the sky when they talk about the spiritual world. But actually, it is RIGHT here…we are just not aware of it. Already here our mind is defeated…
And to think that these spiritual forms are already there and man, what are they doing in the “meantime”…the mind bites its own tail… THERE IS NO MEANTIME. There, in Goloka Vrindavana, is only NOW.
Right now we need metaphors like the forms “being inactive”. We “activate” them by our spiritual bhava. The true alchemy takes place when we fully identify with our Krishna-given form and when we do our seva to the Divine Couple in our siddha-deha. Glimpses of our siddha-deha can be experienced at the stage of asakti.
