About God (I)
By yoga teacher Gregorian Bivolaru
If there was a topic that attracted a lot of questions to any normal person in a day or in a stage of his or her existence, and this since the dawn of time, then this must be the topic that relates to God – a concept that has evolved considerably and involved a lot of aspects and shades since the early days of humanity.
If we look closely around us we see that this concept stirs intense reactions from both believers and nonbelievers. Rare are the topics that mobilize so heavily those who fiercely asserts that they are not interested or they consider it absurd or as a factor of intolerance towards those who do not admit to believe in God, to pray to Him or to adopt religious practices. There are also those who do not admit to believe in God, pray to Him or to have certain religious practices, if these are different from those they know and apply. It is easy to see that this topic it was and it still remains always current.
In eternity One without a second
According to statistics, it seems that from the planet’s population of about seven billion people, there are between 900,000 and 1,100,000,000 of agnostics, atheists and nonbelievers. Therefore, it could be said that today the concept of God interests in various ways and in varying degrees of depth almost six billion human beings.
To embrace a particular religion is not necessarily the sign of an inner approach and a genuine query about the existence or non-existence of God. Often it is limited to a simple family or cultural heritage. However, for many, to be a believer is quite difficult to separate from belonging to a certain religion. When viewed overall, these issues are often an essential vector for transformation and evolution of consciousness. When associated with the existence of great civilizations, these aspects are the witnesses of a progress that led the human being from a sui generis amalgam of divine and mysterious elements of nature, to the notion becoming more ethereal, more complex, from polytheism to reveal one unique God, of which Akhenaton spoken long ago and then came to speak about almost in unison all current major religions. Together with them evolved the sense of values and relationships between people, but with them all in some cases increased the dogmatism and settled, here and there, the provisional end of the right to know and understand in depth, which is associated to these values.
We must emphasize, however, that in view of the great sages, the word God can be understood only in His indivisible unity because He exists beyond the different ways that may serve to represent Him in connection with the temporal needs of the manifestation.
When we talk about God, speaking in the plural, about some gods, is nonsense, even if we approach the concept from the Hindu perspective. The same view is unique for Judaism and Christianity, as well as for Islam.
In His profound essence and in substantial terms, God is in eternity One, the One without a second. Even if He often manifests Himself in one of the hypostasis of one of His three main aspects, BRAHMA, VISHNU and SHIVA, who according to Vedic tradition are the TRIMURTI or the triple manifestation, God still retains His primordial, indivisible nature, the unchanging, ever the same as that nature is forever immutable, is eternal.
When God is known by the great yogis in the hypostasis of ISHVARA, in connection with its distinct qualifications, this apparent individuation or rather the apparent formalization does not affect its absolute principle, which remains outside any measurement. The so-called divine personality is effectively a determination entirely relative, but which also characterizes the absolute principle, manifested in some form. This form should never be identified with the authentic and indivisible supreme essence of God.
In His hypostasis as a source and absolute principle of universal manifestation, it is revealed to us in a sensible way the so-called person of God, ISHVARA. However, if we aspire to mirror, to understand and to get closer to His true nature, He must imperatively be thought of and intuited only in an analogical and apophatic manner.
Self-knowledge leads to knowing Him
The absolute primordial principle (God) is the universal informal comprising in Himself, both the unmanifested and the manifested. He exists beyond any concept and any image, without any duality. He is the first, the only, ultimate PARABRAHMAN, without the second, whose other manner which is not supreme (APARABRAHMAN, as it is called) is not distinguished other than in an entirely illusory way, because the effect is not something that could be true and in its essence, different to the cause.
In His infinity, God is absolutely inaccessible, unaffected and always unknown and mysterious because He can’t be entirely an object of knowledge for other than Himself. This is explained by the fact that apart from Him, no one is able to fully know Him and embrace Him. When viewed from this perspective, all knowledge, even relative, is nothing more than participation to the secret knowledge that is comprehensive and absolute, as well as supreme. Some traditional Indian writings, call God – the One who is beyond all that is known.
However, above all, we must not lose sight for a moment that every human being is in fact a sui generis microcosm, originally molded in the image of God the Father. Therefore it is possible for each of us to discover in our inner universe the focal points of correspondence with Him.
Once awakened and dynamised, these makes possible not only a great and very deep self knowledge, but also the direct and immediate knowledge of all these aspects, the hypostasis that have existed, exists or will exist in the entire macrocosm and in the infinite being, full of mysteries of God the Father.
Therefore, however mysterious, vast, complex and startling these aspects, hypostasis and energies existing in God the Father may seem, we must be absolutely sure that it is possible to awaken them, discover and experience them with their entire wealth in our own microcosm. We should be absolutely sure that we have access to all these mysteries, eternally present and manifested both in the supreme essence of God the Father, and in all creation, in the entire macrocosm.
The Macrocosm comprises the three worlds, namely: the physical material universe, the astral universe (that is supergiant compared with the physical universe) and the causal universe (amazingly supergiant compared with the astral one). Then, beyond the three worlds that make up what we call the Macrocosm, there is the infinite, mysterious and eternal reality of God the Father that comprises, in its transcendent reality, the entire manifestation.
Therefore, due to the fact that every human being was originally conceived and created in the image of the Heavenly Father, God, it is possible that through the deep and full knowledge of our own microcosm to know and to awaken in us all that is awake and incessantly active in the Macrocosm. Therefore the great sages have often emphasized how important the real self knowledge is. This knowledge not only makes it possible to know the entire Macrocosm and even all the three worlds, but also makes it possible to discover and to know in a direct, profound and ineffable manner God the Father, hidden in the depths of our inner universe, in the form, or rather, as the essential reality of the Immortal Supreme Self, ATMAN.
Creation is the ultimate gift
What is God? Many mystics and philosophers have sought the answer and have formulated different versions. Now here’s a modest and partial attempt to define God in a somewhat schematic approach.
God the Father is simultaneously the eternally supreme, all-encompassing, unique and mysterious consciousness as well as the infinite totality which is embracing and in the same time transcends unceasingly the entire Macrocosm in which are contained the three worlds (physical material, astral and causal).
God is an infinite and enigmatic sphere, whose eternal and mysterious center exists simultaneously everywhere and whose margins can’t be ever reached, because they are nowhere to be found.
This pale attempt to define the infinite and mysterious reality of God the Father does not claim to be exhaustive. It is nothing but a humble attempt, undoubtedly more than nothing, because it aims to suggest somehow the grandeur, complexity and mystery that endlessly exist in the mysterious reality of God the Father.
Many of you rightly ask: why there is the Creation? Why there is this grand Manifestation? Why there are the three universes? Why there are the human beings on this planet? Why God chose, however, that instead there is nothing outside Him to manifest and make appear what we might call Something? Why instead there is never anything but His mysterious, infinite reality, God have chosen and chooses, moment by moment, to exist that Something, in which are contained the three worlds? Why on this planet in this physical material universe (which currently seems gigantic to us) are living creatures that have consciousness?
Here is an answer full of wisdom, real, that it is worth meditated upon from now on: if there was not something instead of the nothing, the absence of the manifestation, thus implicitly God would have been and would have remained absolutely alone forever. Therefore, is worthwhile to ponder on this state of absolute and eternal solitude of God the Father, if He would not have decided to have something instead of the nothing.
Please imagine each one of you, according to the possibilities of your creative imagination what would have meant for God that there would have never been anything outside Him. Try to imagine what it would have meant that in this manifestation, which is the fruit of His intention, His will, there have not been any creature endowed with conscience, to be thus able to discover God, to reflect Him, to marvel that it exists and to be overwhelmed by His mystery. In this way you will be able to predict to some extent why it was, why it is and why the manifestation, the Creation, will always be necessary for God the Father.
Also you will realize why it is necessary and important to God the creature endowed with consciousness – the human being, potentially endowed, structured and prepared since the beginning to know Him, to discover that He really exists, to love Him and also to receive His love, to dialogue with Him, to know His intentions and then to work with Him in a conscious manner.
To act in a divine integrated way in order to make His plans, His intentions become his or her own plans and intentions as the creature, it deifies and awakens in his or her inner universe the divine point of view, identical to reaching the state of practical wisdom, called sophrosyn by the sages.
Of course these deeply unsettling mysteries will reveal themselves as such for you as far as you manage to find Him and feel increasingly more God the Father in your own inner universe. Only when these revelations will gain tremendous value for you and, in sending to you all these valuable information, I can add that what I have shared here comes from a mysterious and indescribable inner experience to which many of you will have access, the ones that already are among those called and you will grow from stage to stage till a moment when some of you will get to be among the few and chosen ones.
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yogaesoteric
January 6, 2014
