1768: From Beauty to Absolute Beauty | Plato, Krishna and the Rāsa Dance
Wisdom of the Sages
David Ramella
4.9 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 12 May 2026
⏱️ 57 minutes
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Summary
Most people think of God simply as a witness or facilitator of their own romantic affairs. The Bhaktivedanta tradition reveals that the conjugal love experienced by human beings is a mere reflection of a spiritual reality in which the same love exists in an absolute, pristine state. So we don't need to turn away from beauty and love in this world. We just need to see the source and origin behind it. Raghunath and Kaustubha explore Plato's ladder of beauty alongside the bhakti path — and find they are pointing in the same direction. Every spark of beauty in this world springs from the same source. Use it as a stepping stone, not a dead end. And at the top of that ladder, the Srimad Bhagavatam opens the most sacred passage in all of Vedic literature — the Rāsa Līlā. Krishna, lacking nothing, takes shelter of his own internal potency and enters the most intimate of all loving affairs. The unconquerable is conquered by love.
Srimad Bhagavatam 10.29.1
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | When you fall in love, you think it's about one person. |
| 0:03.5 | Your attention gets focused on the beauty you see in that form. |
| 0:08.4 | That's all I can think about her. |
| 0:10.2 | Her shapely shape. |
| 0:12.9 | Her shapely shape, the shapely shape of her shape. |
| 0:17.2 | And a lot of spiritual teachings, especially the impersonal ones, they say, turn away from that form, right? |
| 0:25.2 | Because we get that. |
| 0:26.6 | The form is illusion. |
| 0:27.8 | Here we go again. |
| 0:29.1 | I'm getting attracted to a form. |
| 0:30.6 | So a lot of the mystical teachings in Christianity, in Islam, they're all impersonal. |
| 0:36.5 | Because they say that form you're looking for, that's an illusion. |
| 0:41.8 | It comes, it goes, and then you suffer. |
| 0:43.3 | Whether it's Shakespeare or these Sufis, it's the same idea. |
| 0:47.8 | The form is not the thing. |
| 0:50.1 | But Plato is saying, you know, start right here. |
| 0:53.6 | Start with just appreciating the beauty you see in one person. |
| 0:58.7 | Right. |
| 0:59.5 | And use it as the first step in understanding beauty in a deeper level. |
| 1:05.0 | Because the beauty you see in the person you love, |
| 1:08.5 | it's coming from a same source |
| 1:11.5 | as the beauty in nature. |
... |
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