Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu, the Golden Avatar, completely reconciles all these apparent conflicts by offering us the aphorism achintya abheda bheda tattva. The nice thing about this is it also parallels the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in physics which explains the nature of the relationship between atomic and subatomic particles. You can know their mass or their velocity but not both at the same time. Similarly one can understand how God and the individual souls are simultaneously one and different. More important than all of this however, is that while progress in brahman and even paramatma realization can bring one bliss, ecstasy and cessation of suffering, without a relationship with bhagavan through bhakti one can never have love.
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