It is the desire of every human being to become a perfect Lover of God sooner or later. God can be formless or with form. God can be conceived in whatever name and form we choose. He/She takes the form of Love so that devotees or gopis can simply love that form. Only Love can understand Love; nothing less than Love can approach that Supreme Love.

 

Man cannot and has not found eternal peace or joy with all his knowledge, wealth, technology, science, art and all that is worldly. We always aspire for eternal peace, joy or love even though we may look for it in wrong things, places or people. It is true that Eternal Love is all pervading and no one can live or survive without such love. Ignorance of our own greatness has caused us to wander around like a child lost in a wonderland without its mother.

 

It is my intention to show that it is possible for every creature to experience that Love in this very life, however short it may be. For this, we need some good examples of our own breed and frailty who have achieved the ultimate Love in their human life. Besides great incarnations, we have excellent examples of gopis -- the shepherd-girls of Vrindavan. They were by no means literate in our ordinary sense of education. They were naive in many respects according to our arbitrary standards and yet with certain discipline, renunciation of the perishables and full faith in themselves, they approached the Lord for everlasting Love. They were not pure in the beginning and had even bodily desires they hoped to fulfill, but when they approached the purest of the pure, these gopis became pure by mere association of Krishna and humility. They surrendered to the Lord and allowed Him to play with them in any way He desired. It is of course a Mother's play with her baby -- pure and simple.

 

True saints, female or male, have usually felt this Love in their heart for their beloved Lord. Without this experience of Love, we remain like a fruit tree without fruits, a river without water and a mother without a child. A barren life is no joy, nor can toys nurture us too long. We all sooner or later begin to aspire for that true Love which cannot be described but can be experienced without a doubt. For most worldly people, it is difficult to follow the steep path of saints or Incarnates but we can certainly follow the path of these shepherd girls, or gopis, who were a common lot and yet achieved the highest. One such perfect gopi was Radha who was reborn as Mirabai. So these two names are interchangeable and represent to us a perfect example to follow. Mirabai is a living example for us of how to love God Almighty as our very own whether as  a husband,  a wife, a friend, a father, a mother or a child.

 

We must however be very faithful to this Love and there are certain signs on the road of faithfulness along which we shall travel. Mirabai was a Perfect Incarnation of Love. We will learn through her life and her songs how to become like her in this life itself, if we choose to turn from the painful worldly existence. There is no need for us to suffer when Joy and Bliss are at hand.

 

In our presentation of Mirabai's Love, we will refer to saintly comments by other Swamis, Saints or Incarnates -- all are interchangeable words. We will also refer to holy scriptures such as Shreemad Bhagavad Gita, Bhagavatam and other holy writings of saints, eastern and western alike.

 

May She bless us with wisdom, humility and self surrender, so that we can paint a perfect picture of Her, a true gopi, as idealized by Shree Krishna himself. She indeed was a true Gopi. Jai Mirabai, Jai Shree Krishna and Jai to all Incarnations -- small and large.