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Picture it: a soul standing at the very threshold of the world, with everything the world counts as precious laid out behind him, and he simply does not turn his head. The people of the world go on with their customs and their counsel, and he does not consult them. The Vedas recite their immense and ancient truths, the whole body of the nigamas, and he does not lean in to hear. His lineage stretches back through generations, fathers and grandfathers calling him to his appointed place in the line, and he does not answer. Even the saints, the venerable ones whose conduct is the very ruler by which good is measured, pass before him, and he does not study their example. He knows none of it. Not because he is dull or ignorant, but because, as Hitdas ji says so tenderly, he does not even wish to know it. Something has taken the whole of him in this hidden, solitary place, this ekānta deśa, and there is no remainder left over to spend on anything else.

What has taken him? The rasa in Rādhā. The bhāva in the Jewel of Vraja. O Rādhe, it is You. It is the taste of You that has emptied him of every other knowing. He has drunk the love of Kṛṣṇa, the dark sweet One whose nearness intoxicates like a fragrance carried on the wind, and now he walks the earth like a man who has forgotten the names of all the streets because he is going to one house only, with firm and unshakable certainty.

Hear how the tradition reads the two great words that this verse turns upon. Rasa is Kṛṣṇa, the ocean of bliss made into a person, the Jewel of Vraja whose every glance is sweetness, full transcendental bliss personified. Bhāva is Rādhā, divine love itself given a body, a fragrance, a braid of hair, a way of walking, full divine love personified. And here is the wonder that keeps deepening: to relish the rasa is to be flooded with bhāva, and to be drowned in bhāva is to relish the rasa all the more. The taste makes the mood; the mood makes the taste. Round and round it turns, and the ecstasy and the wonder always increase, never settling, never reaching a ceiling, never once saying enough. This is why such a soul cannot be called back to the world. He is not standing still. He is being carried in a current that only rises.

And O, consider whose love this even is. This is not the worship that the great ones command. Bhīṣma, faithful unto death, did not know it. Nārada with his vīṇā did not know it. Brahmā on his lotus, the grandsire of the worlds, did not know it. Lakṣmīdevī herself, seated beside her Lord in the splendor of Vaikuṇṭha, did not know it. Even in sweet Vraja, the servants who attend Kṛṣṇa, the cowherd friends who wrestle and laugh with Him, the very mother and father who hold Him as their child, do not know this innermost thing. Even Rādhā's own dear girlfriends, Her sakhīs, cannot pass all the way into the most intimate bower-pastimes the way the mañjarīs can. Only the mañjarīs, the little serving-maids who ask nothing for themselves, slip through into the grove where the Jewel of Vraja and the Love-incarnate Rādhā meet in Their deepest play. This is the secret, the rahasya. This is what is meant by a standing that does not run by the common road.

Rūpa's nephew Śrī Jīva Gosvāmī sets this very joy before us in the Prīti Sandarbha, that we may beg a share in it: "May the wish-yielding tree of Rādhā and Mādhava's joy, which is reared and raised by the gopīs and ecstatically looked upon by them, hoping it will bear the fruits and flowers of the fulfillment of their desires that they may relish in due course of time, and which sweetly manifests itself in Vṛndāvana in a most beautiful way, make me happy." A kalpa-druma of bliss, tended by the gopīs' own hands, blossoming in the bowers of Vṛndāvana: this is the secret garden into which the mañjarīs alone are admitted.

And the tradition tells us that this hidden treasure was the unique gift of Śrī Caitanya Mahāprabhu, poured out of His own boundless mercy upon the fallen souls of this dark age of Kali, a love so high that even the immortals did not hold it, set down into the trembling hands of the lowliest. So when such a devotee forgets the world, do not pity him for what he has lost. Weep instead for what he has been given.

What, then, does his life look like from outside? Like fire, the tradition says. Throw into fire whatever is soiled, whatever is impure, and the fire devours it all and is itself never stained, never made dirty by what it consumes. So the one absorbed in Rādhā's rasa, ever dwelling in his siddha-svarūpa as Her maidservant, burns clean. He may keep none of the proper marks, observe none of the careful customs, fit into none of the categories the world keeps ready, and still he is not contaminated, because the love in him is fire.

There is a second reading the tradition offers as well, and it shines just as brightly. Such devotees simply cannot be noticed among ordinary people. Look for them in the crowd and you will not pick them out. Search the Vedas for a description of their state and it is not written there. Trace the family traditions and they are not listed. And the great saints who worship God in awe and reverence cannot understand their ways at all. For these hidden lovers know a secret the awe-bound can never reach: in Vraja, no one sees Kṛṣṇa as the Supreme Lord to be feared, and no one sees Rādhā as the divine consort of the Almighty. They see Them as just two of their own, two utterly dear and lovable ones, family. To worship in that key, without the distance that awe demands, is the very thing the reverent cannot comprehend.

O wind that moves through Vṛndāvana, you know this fire and do not fear it. O grove that hides the bower, you keep this secret and tell no one. And O heart of mine, do you see what is being shown to you? That the highest thing is also the most hidden, that it wears no badge, that it can stand right beside you in the lane of the world and you would never once guess the kingdom it carries. Hitdas ji bows to such souls as having reached a standing that is not ordinary but wholly extraordinary, asādhāraṇa, all wonder. To such great ones, drunk on the rasa of Rādhā's feet, the heart can only bow.