The love of the gopis exalts the charm of Krishna. This charm in turn intensifies their love, for they find great satisfaction in it. The happiness experienced by the focus of love comes from the happiness experienced by the object of that love. This is not a relationship based on the desire for personal satisfaction. This is the intrinsic nature of selfless love.

It is in the satisfaction of the beloved that the lover finds his or her pleasure, his or her joy. When the pleasure of love hinders the service offered to Lord Krishna, the devotee becomes irritated with such ecstasy.

In reality, the gopis feeling of happiness was indirect, because it depends entirely on the satisfaction of Krishna. This is always the case with motivated love for God. This pure love is possible only when the servant or the maid derives his or her happiness from that of his or her master, in this case Krishna, God, the Supreme Person. They know the desires of God, and how to serve Him with perfect love for His pleasure. They perform their service expertly for the satisfaction of their beloved.

Take for example the exchange of love between Goddess Radharani and Krishna, and between the gopis and Krishna.

These exchanges of feelings between Krishna and Radharani are very difficult to understand for anyone who is not already established at the level of pure virtue. Even material virtue does not allow one to grasp this transcendental reciprocity. Therefore, one has to go beyond it to reach it, because the exchange of feelings between Radharani and Krishna is not a matter of the material universe.

Even the most skillful reasoner cannot understand this, either directly or indirectly. The material activities relate to the material body or the more subtle mind. But the exchange of feelings between Radharani and Krishna transcends all intellectual speculation. Only the purified senses, free from all the designations of the material world, can enable one to know this spiritual knowledge.

The purified senses can indeed appreciate these spiritual romps, whereas impersonalists (those who believe that God is a formless Spiritual Being), deprived of the very notion of spiritual senses, can only perceive what is within the reach of their material senses, so that they cannot understand the exchanges or romps based on the spiritual senses. Those who possess purely empirical knowledge, however developed, can only satisfy their dull material senses by indulging in crude physical activities or intellectual speculation. Whatever proceeds from the material body or mind is as imperfect as it is perishable, whereas the spiritual and absolute activities are as luminous as they are sublime.