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Begin low, at the level of the ground itself. Lower your gaze past the jeweled anklets, past the reddened soles soft as the inner petal of a lotus, down to the very earth of Vraja where She has just stepped. There, in the warm dust of the grove, a few grains still hold the print of Her heel. Here the tradition tells us to begin our remembrance, not with the splendor of thrones, not with the thunder of cosmic forms, but here, at the foot-dust of a cowherd girl who has no idea She is the source of all worlds. And it is this humble powder, this caraṇa-reṇu, that holds a power before which even the Lord of all power surrenders. Understand at once that here Śrīpāda speaks in his sādhakāveśa, his outer consciousness as a male devotee of Śrīman Mahāprabhu, and from that lowly place he lifts up the glory of Her dust.

Consider who cannot reach the place where we are standing. Brahmā, born of the lotus, speaker of the four Vedas, architect of universes beyond counting. Śiva, the five-faced one, master of the occult Tantras, the great yogī whose meditation outlasts the ages. Śukadeva, who spoke the Bhāgavata itself, the parrot-sage drunk on the nectar of Hari's glories. Nārada, who wanders the three worlds with his vīṇā, ever singing the Name. Bhīṣma, the grandsire whose every breath was fixed on Madhusūdana even as the arrows held up his dying body. These are not small souls. They are the very chiefs of the spiritual worlds, and they reach, and reach, and the sweetest face of God slips past them. His childhood pranks they may catch a little, a glimpse of the butter-thief, a flicker of the boy among the calves. But the romantic sweetness of His adolescence, the mādhurya He pours out in the bowers, this they cannot see. Why? Because they come as men. They identify with a male body, with the posture of awe, of reverence, of the worshipper who folds his hands before majesty. And the love of Vraja does not open to majesty.

You may ask, O seeker, whether this puruṣa who is subdued is not rather Mahā-Viṣṇu, Kṛṣṇa's vast puruṣa-avatāra reclining on the causal ocean. But no. It is Kṛṣṇa Himself, for pure love of Govinda in the mood of Vraja is won on one strength alone, the strength of Rādhā's foot-dust, and it is just that Govinda whom the dust controls. Even the Brahma-Saṁhitā, when it names Him ādi-puruṣa, the parama-puruṣa, breathes that name in the very context of His love-alliances with the gopīs: śriyaḥ kāntāḥ kāntaḥ parama-puruṣaḥ. The Person here is the Person who loves, and the dust that conquers Him is the dust of the one He loves above all.

Hear, then, the secret the tradition guards. There is a worship that wins Vaikuṇṭha, the realm of splendor, where God is served as the infinite Lord and the soul becomes His honored associate in a body of majesty. That worship follows the rule, the regulation, the careful step of vidhi, and it is true and it is holy and it carries the soul home to a glory beyond the stars. But there is another country still, the country of Vraja, where the splendor is folded away inside sweetness, where the Supreme is simply Nanda's boy with cowdust on His ankles and a flute at His lip, and that country opens by a different key. Not by knowing He is God, but by forgetting it for love. Caitanya-caritāmṛta says it plainly: the one who worships spontaneously, in rāga-bhakti, attains svayaṁ-bhagavān in Vraja; the one who worships by rule attains an associate's body in majestic Vaikuṇṭha. And Brahmā, Śiva, Śuka, Nārada, Bhīṣma are devotees of that latter kind, so the sweetness of Govinda is barely perceived by them. The friends of the heart enter the bowers instead, the sakhīs, those whose love is so spontaneous that reverence has melted clean away. The tradition seals it: only Kṛṣṇa's girlfriends may enter this play, sabe ek sakhīgaṇera iha adhikāra, sakhī vinā ei līlāra anyera nāhi gati; without them no one finds the path inside.

And so the question rises like incense: if the highest sages cannot subdue this God of sweetness, what can? Not penance. Not the mastery of universes. Not the recitation of every scripture ever breathed. Only one thing in all of creation binds Him, and that is love, prema, grown to its uttermost height. The Upaniṣad whispers it, bhakti-vaśaḥ puruṣaḥ, the Supreme Person is conquered by devotion alone. The tradition names the stages like rungs of a golden ladder: prema deepening into sneha, sneha into māna, into praṇaya, into rāga, into anurāga, into bhāva, and at the very crown, mahābhāva. The highest essence of all prema is mahābhāva, and here the heart goes silent in wonder: Śrī Rādhā is not merely one who possesses mahābhāva, She is the very form of mahābhāva, sei mahābhāva-rūpā rādhā ṭhākurāṇī. The whole limitless height of love that could ever subdue God has taken the shape of a girl in Vraja, and from Her lotus-feet that nectar pours out in endless streams, innumerable rivers of the honey of mahābhāva, as this very book sings again at its ninety-fourth verse. No wonder, then, that Kṛṣṇa is wholly controlled by the dust of those feet.

Now see precisely how the measure of love is the measure of His surrender. The tradition fixes it: the greatness of a devotee rises strictly with the greatness of his prema, prema-tāratamyenaiva bhakta-mahattāratamyaṁ mukhyam. And the rasikas, parsing love into four amounts, show how His submission tracks it grain for grain. In ordinary practitioners it is a single atom, faint, almost invisible, so faint that even God's submission to it can hardly be traced. In Nārada and such great souls it is more here and less there, and to just that degree He yields to them. In the people of Vraja it is vast, and His surrender to them is full, saṁpūrṇa. But in Vṛndāvana's queen, in Rādhā alone, love reaches its absolute fullness, saṁpūrṇatama, the most complete completeness, and so She controls Him to the most complete extent of all. There is no fraction left over, no corner of the Beloved that is not given to Her, and that supreme devotion has settled even into the dust beneath Her wandering steps.

So picture again that fragrant powder. It is vaśīkaraṇa-cūrṇa, the enchanting dust that subdues in an instant. Sadyaḥ, suddenly, at once, not after the slow alchemy of years. The moment that dust touches Him, Kṛṣṇa is already won. The saints sing that Hari sells Himself into Her love, āpana vikroy kori, hands over the deed to His own being and, without a moment's deliberation, avicāre, stands a willing captive before Her, unable and unwilling to weigh or argue or resist. The God whom Brahmā cannot find in meditation is led about by the dust of a girl's feet. Power without end, ananta-śakti: the dust of Rādhā's lotus-feet is full of unlimited power, the highest nectar and the highest jewel, parama-ratana, and there is no other power in all the manifold worlds that can do this thing.

And the saints of our line show us how to wear it. Narottama Dāsa Ṭhākura sings of decorating the very body with Rādhikā's foot-dust as one would put on jewels, and finding that Giridhārī, the Lifter of the Hill, comes effortlessly, anāyāse, with no straining at all, to the one so adorned. I cry bolihāri, he says, I praise that great soul who takes shelter of Rādhikā's lotus-feet. And in the old song the wonder is told whole: neither Brahmā the lotus-seated speaker of the Vedas, nor the five-faced Śiva who speaks the occult Tantras, nor Śukadeva who speaks the Bhāgavata, nor Nārada, nor Bhīṣma, nor the demigods or humans or the wise men, can easily attain Lord Hari within their meditations. But listen, how amazing, on the head of that son of Nanda who shines like a fresh raincloud rests the foot-dust of Rādhikā, which is like a magic herb, a siddhauṣadhi. And Prabodhānanda himself, whose heart beats inside these very verses, cries out from the place of longing: I am unfortunate, I cannot see, I cannot touch the honey-sweet feet of Rādhā. O Queen of the bowers, kuñjeśvarī, be merciful, and let me only remember the dust of Your feet, day after day after day, anudina, without end.

This, the tradition tells us, is what anusmarāmi means. Not a passing thought, not a duty discharged and set aside, but constant remembrance, the aṣṭa-kālīya-līlā-smaraṇa, the eight-fold round of the day's pastimes held unbroken in the heart, the main item of rāgānugā-bhakti. For when the mind forgets, it is a lifeless thing, and the dogs and jackals of lust and anger romp freely through its empty courtyards. But when the mind is full of Her, full of the sweetness of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa's play, there is no room left for the prowling beasts. And the tradition is tender about how this remembrance comes. It must not be a stiff schedule, a dead and stale clock-bound exercise; it must be spontaneous, alive, overflowing. They tell of Śrī Kṛṣṇa Dāsa Bābājī, the siddha-bābā of Govardhana in the last century, to whom a devotee came weeping that he had done no bhajana all day: he had only, in his morning meditation, slipped a ring onto Śrī Rādhā's right hand, and then become so lost in the sweetness of that hand that he could not move his mind from it for all the hours that followed. And the old saint was delighted. Today, he said, you have truly done bhajana. So the Gauḍīyas worship within by remembering the pastimes of Rādhā-Kṛṣṇa and of Caitanya Mahāprabhu, and without by hearing and chanting of them, that at the hour of death they may enter the Lord's eternal play, the highest perfection of life. That is the constant remembrance Prabodhānanda is praying for here, the mind drowned and happy in a single grain of Her dust.