There is a moment in the Gopi Gita — the grief-song of the searching Gopis — when the narration becomes strange.
The Gopis are enacting Krishna's stories. One of them has bent under the weight of an imaginary mountain. Another walks with his distinctive tilting gait. Another speaks his words to a weeping companion. And the Bhagavata uses a specific grammatical construction that has occupied commentators for centuries: the Gopis do not imitate Krishna. The text says they have become (babhuvuh) — they are now what they were searching for.
This is Tadatmya. Identity with the beloved.
Not the Vedantic dissolution of individuality into undifferentiated Consciousness — that is Samadhi, Nirvana, Fana. Tadatmya is more specific, more relational, more paradoxical. It is the state in which the lover and the beloved are recognised as having been one nature all along — while simultaneously remaining distinct enough for the love between them to continue operating.
The Achintya Bhedabheda philosophy of Chaitanya — inconceivable simultaneous difference and non-difference — is the metaphysics of Tadatmya. Radha and Krishna are not-two: they share the same essential nature, the same Consciousness, the same absolute reality. But they are also genuinely two: Radha is the Hladini Shakti, the love that knows itself as love; Krishna is the Consciousness that contains all Shakti. Neither dissolves into the other. The love between them is possible because they are two. The completeness of the love is possible because they are one.
The Chaitanya Charitamrita describes Tadatmya in the practitioner as the state in which one ceases to experience oneself as the one who is reaching toward the divine and begins to experience oneself as the one in whom the divine is already present and known. Not the achievement of a new state but the recognition of what was always the case — the same Pratyabhijna of Kashmir Shaivism, now enacted through the specific medium of love rather than through philosophical inquiry. Both arrive at the same recognition by different paths: I am not separate from what I love. I was never separate from what I love. The love was the method of discovering what the separation was concealing.
The practical question this raises: what does it mean to love something enough to become it?
Not to imitate. Not to merge. To love with such completeness and sustained orientation that the qualities of what is loved begin to express themselves through the one who loves — because love, at sufficient depth and duration, is the most complete form of attention available, and sustained complete attention is the mechanism by which anything is genuinely understood, genuinely received, genuinely integrated.
The Gopis become Krishna in the forest because they have been completely attentive to him — with the quality of love that withholds nothing — long enough that his qualities have become their qualities, his gestures their gestures, his words their words. This is not mystical. This is what it looks like when love becomes the primary epistemology.
You learn what you love. You become what you truly love. The Bhakti tradition simply takes this recognition to its furthest implication — and then names what is found there. Not the lover. Not the beloved. The love itself, recognising itself, in the form of two who are one.