A Message for the
New Year on ‘The Concept of God’
Wherever and whenever I had an opportunity to talk on
spiritual matters, in India or outside, I have met with several questions,
forcefully articulated by active younger minds, on the ‘exact’ concept of the
so-called ‘God’ we all talk about almost as a habit. And more experienced
questioners who have been exposed, either by choice or by accident, to Hindu
philosophy, ask deeper questions like ‘Should we believe in Advaita
(Non-duality) or Dvaita (Duality,
Multiplicity)’. And in fact they
elaborate their question in the form: ‘If the great teachers like Shankara,
Ramanuja and others differ in their interpretations of the scriptures, which of
them do we follow? Is there a possibility of integration of all these
interpretations?’.
This Message attempts to answer these doubts with the little knowledge that I
am supposed to have acquired from those who know. It is a little long, but you
have a whole year (2016 !) to chew on it.
Frankly
speaking it is very difficult to ‘prove’ the existence of God. All the proofs
that scholars may be offering have some flaw or other or they seem to beg the
question. God must be the name we have given to what we are not able to
understand even collectively. Such a God has to be the creative force, the
overall intelligence that governs the universe, the all-pervading essence which
binds together everything in the universe and gives life to all living
beings. But this does not say that such
a thing exists.
If
you are looking for it intellectually, it should be the creative force,
the sustaining power, the motivation towards change, the overall intelligence,
the truth.
If
you are looking for it emotionally, it should be love, goodness,
kindness and beauty. The Gita (10 -34) says: ‘I am glory, beauty, speech,
memory, intelligence, steadfastness and forgiveness’.
If
you are looking at it spiritually, it should be the ever-present
all-pervading essence or spirit that gives life to everything and binds them all.
But
the ordinary believer in God only looks at it as He who gives rewards
when good is done and punishes defaulters in ethics or morals.
There
are different levels of the conception of God. An answer given to a questioner
at one level, will not suit, or be satisfactory to, the questioner at a different level. The
super-designer argument may be acceptable to a teen-ager beginning to take the
first steps in life but it may not
satisfy a grown-up adult who has gone
through several turn-arounds in life.
The
beauty of Hindu philosophy and religion lies in the fact that instead of
starting from the reality of a Universal Mind, they start from what is
experienced at the human level. So the innermost recesses of the human mind are
first explored. This investigation leads to what constitutes the innermost
essence of man. One finds this essence is the seeker himself, rid of
all his tools of search. In fact, the mind itself is part of the luggage
that is to be shed off. But this exploration of the innermost core is
inextricably interlinked with the preconditioning of the mind. This
preconditioning itself is nothing but the cumulative effect of all the traces
of sensory experiences left in the memory bank and in the type of intellect.
This pre-conditioning differs from individual to individual and so the
understanding of the innermost core also varies from person to person.
The technical jargon
that corresponds to this preconditioning is ‘VAsanA’. The innermost core is
what the Vedantins call ‘Atman’. But the question is ‘What is this Atman?’. They
say it is the innermost reality within us. It is the real subject of all our
experiences. It is the eternal witness
to everything that I do or think.
But then, where is
‘God’ in all this? The advaitin would
say: ‘There is no God other than yourself’! But if this is referring to the
Atman within oneself, then there should be several Gods – one for each Atman in
each person. But the advaitin would reply: the Atman within yourself and the Atman
within myself is the same. But still this does not answer the question about
God who is the Master of the Universe
and who is the Creator of the Universe.
This is where Hindu
Philosophy has scored, particularly the advaita school. They assert that the
Atman which is the innermost core of Man is also the transcendent Eternal
Reality which is omnipresent. The name given to that supreme Reality is
Brahman. The declaration of the Upanishads is, according to Advaita, Atman is
the same as Brahman, period! This statement is not amenable to any proof. Yogis however say that it will be seen as
true in meditative samadhi.
However, the matter
whether God exists or not is not relevant from the absolute point of view. The
advaita school is very clear on this point. The existence or otherwise of a God
with superlative attributes or the necessity for such a God arises only in the mundane world which is after all
only relatively real. As far as absolute
truth is concerned only non-duality is true; namely Truth is one and only
one. You may call it God. But that God is not your God with superlative
attributes. It is Brahman, the unqualified Brahman, to whom there can be no
attributes.
But then, all the
scriptures cry hoarse that everything in the universe owe their existence to
God. They say it in the sense that all
the movie pictures you see on the screen owe their existence to the screen. If
the screen were not there, there would be no pictures. The screen alone is
always there, before the projection of pictures on it, during the projection
and after the projection. So the screen is relatively more real than the
pictures on it. This is the famous ‘anvaya’
logic. It is in this sense that scriptures including the Brahma Sutras say that
Brahman is the source of everything.
Let us look at it in
another way. Man is conscious of his own limitations. In other words he is
capable of imagining or conceiving the infinite and in comparison he knows he
has limitations that make him lack that infiniteness. It is that infiniteness
which he renames as God. The advaita teaching says he has to rise from his limitations which are
collectively termed as his avidya (Ignorance).
So long as he is subject to these limitations he cannot dispense with
religion or his belief in God. Only
through the Grace of God does the saving knowledge of non-duality come to us. We need prayer and meditation to
make ourselves worthy of God’s Grace.
And that God to whom
you direct your prayers may be called your ishhTadevatA (Favourite
God). There is nothing wrong in this so
long as it does not carry with it hatred of any other God, either of Hinduism
or of any other religion. One can have
preferences, without exclusions. Reason is strongest, when it accepts divine
guidance. This divine guidance does not necessarily have to come from a
personality called God. Whenever we say
‘personality’ we think of it only in human form. We are not able to think of it
as something which makes us think. This something is the consciousness within
us. This is actually what guides us. That is divine guidance.
God, the Reality Absolute, is not only
transcendent – in the sense that He (or It) is beyond all finite conceptions – but
He is also immanent in everything, animate and inanimate. This immanence aspect
is a speciality of Hindu Vedanta.
Whatever we see, hear, smell, taste or touch – everything is the Almighty.
The taste of water, the light of the Sun,
the sound in space, the smell of the Earth, the glow of Fire, the lives of
living beings – all these are nothing but that Absolute Itself. I am only quoting the Gita (VII- 8, 9) here.
It all looks like poetry, music. Yes, the music of the moving, the melody of
poetry, the delicacy of dance -- all
this is the song of the Absolute! We are told by great saints that one obtains
this kind of Realisation in the samAdhi
state. Listen to one such description
from Kripananda Variyar:
The sages of antiquity who have been in that state revel in their
equanimous vision and their Bliss of
Equanimity and Compassion; they are conscious of nothing else but the fullness
of that Consciousness. The vision knows
no ‘I’ or ‘Mine’. The little self is merged in the Supreme Self. Knowledge and Ignorance both get consumed in
that oneness of the knower, the known and knowledge. There is no seer, no vision, nothing to be
seen. For such a brahma-jnAni,
neither time, nor action, neither merit nor demerit, neither pleasure nor pain,
matters the least. In that state of Enlightenment, there is no distinction
between one self and the other self. It
is full of Grace and Light – no darkness, no confusion. It is the massive Light
of Consciousness. No up, no down, no peak, no valley. It is a state that
transcends speech and mind, a state that has no goings-on, no action, no
reaction.
Hinduism
is a graded religious discipline. It takes man step by step from the worship of
the popular gods for gaining material ends all the way up to the prayer of the
JIva (Soul) which is keen on being led ‘from Unreality to Reality’. There is
only one Reality from the transcendental point of view. For the purposes of
worship various names and forms are ‘superimposed’ on it. Once this process of
giving a name and a form to what is ‘nameless’ and ‘formless’ starts, there is no end
to it. One observes all forms of worship and goes all the way with religion in
order to arrive at a point beyond religion. All this is quite necessary in the
case of the majority of ordinary men who choose to live in a world which takes
multiplicity as real and as The Truth.
But
the true Advaitin takes all this as an unavoidable come down. He knows all this is mAyA but he cannot but do
it. He knows he is sinning against his own enlightened state in doing all this. Appayya Dikshidar, the
famous advaitin of the 16th century, expresses this feeling in his
characteristic forthright language: “Oh Lord, I have in my weakness committed
three sins and I beg forgiveness from You. To serve as a support for meditation
I have given a form to the Highest who
is really formless; I have tried to define the undefinable by composing stotras
and litanies and lastly I have confined the omnipresent Lord to particular
places of worship and have journeyed to those places”. This is the attitude of
a true advaitin towards all forms of worship.
Whether each form or for that matter the formless Ultimate was the first
cause or not does not make any difference to that attitude.
Now
let us come to the question about Multiplicity versus Non-duality. Shankara and
Ramanuja the two great protagonists of the two major schools of philosophy of
Hindu India differ only in one point. In
interpreting the Upanishads, to which of the statements shall we give importance
or dominance? To the statements that are obviously absolutist? Or to those that
are obviously non-absolutist? Shankara supports the former viewpoint and
Ramanuja leans towards the latter. This difference in interpretation by these
two great teachers has generated a succession of philosophical literature by
later thinkers and writers and the body of literature on both sides is
voluminous. For most of us ordinary spiritual seekers, this difference between
Shankara and Ramanuja should not matter. For, said in technical terms, Shankara
says there is ultimately no distinction between, God, souls and matter because
souls and matter are nothing but divine though in the phenomenal world they
appear to be different. Ramanuja says that the phenomenal difference persists
in the ultimate although in a subtle way. Now for us in the phenomenal world,
what does it matter whether this phenomenal difference persists in the ultimate
or not? Let us cross the bridge when it comes! As far as the phenomenal world
is concerned both Shankara and Ramanuja and in fact all the other Masters of
Philosophy agree that we have to purify our minds through Bhakti, we have to
eradicate all our undesirable vAsanAs in the first instance, we have to
surrender even our will to God and work in the world in a totally unselfish
manner. Thus the teaching of the Great Masters coincide in terms of what we
have to do in the real world. In fact
this is why Hindu religion is one in spite of all the differences in the interpretations of the scriptures.
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