Is Love really the highest?

 

Maybe I already ranted about this before, but here we go again...

Some religious traditions consider Love to be the highest form of bliss. For instance, in the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition, the highest form of "prema" and "rasa" is the ecstatic love-play between Krishna and Radha. But how do we *know* that this is the highest state? After all, people get very different spiritual experiences all the time, and many find these equally or even more satisfying. 

Even within Vaishnavism there are different kinds of Love towards God. There is the love (!) of a servant towards his master, the love between friends, the love of a mother for her child. There are also those whose only desire is to behold the cosmic form of Vishnu! Who is to say that these forms of love are lower than the desire to see Krishna´s and Radha´s eternal dance? 

And outside the Vaishnava fold there are many other options. What if I don´t want to "love" the divine, perhaps because love is alien to me, or not spiritual enough? Maybe I want to abide in an eternity of silence or darkness, disappear into the cosmic ocean of pure consciousness, or become a fairy in a primordial forest under a blood moon. Or even stay in the world as a reincarnating ego...

How about that?

Perhaps a Gaudiya Vaishnava would answer that you have to taste the honey in order to know the honey. Maybe so, but there are people who "tasted the honey" and came up with highly deviant theologies, such as the sahajiyas. On YouTube, there is a man who was a Hare Krishna, participated in a mass kirtan that lasted for hours, and had a vision of...a manifestation of Shiva. He became a Shaiva and Shakta! And if you answer that your ability to taste the honey is dependent on your karma, well, how do you *know* that it isn´t your karma that´s contaminated instead? 

There are several possibilities here. Maybe the Divine takes countless different forms to lure the fallen (or evolving) monads into its orbit ("upaya" or skilfull means). Or maybe humans actually can chose - to some extent at least - what path we should take from now on. Or maybe we just can´t know which path really is the highest, anymore than a whale can understand philology (despite having a language) or a tern can understand magnetism (despite using it to navigate)...

I somehow suspect that the "true" religion or spirituality is the one that unlocks our deepest potentials as human beings (potentials which may or may not be "supernatural" in some sense), but even here, there seem to be countless of possibilities and variations, since there are different personality types, two genders, several races... 

Why should we believe that one form of spirituality and worship fits everyone? Some form of pluralism or pluriformity is still the bottom line.