Posted on: 27 Aug 2019
Note: This article is meant for intellectuals only
O Learned and Devoted Servants of God,
[Shri Anil Antony asked: Padanamaskaram Swami! Please give Your answer to the following questions: At Your Lotus Feet, anil
Swami, You mentioned that God pervades the relative awareness of human incarnation. In special cases like in Krishna He pervaded the whole body also. God is unimaginable and awareness and body are imaginable. How then it is said that God pervade only awareness part, not body, in general and in special cases entire body also? If God were a limited item then such superimposition can have a meaning, since one limited item superimposed on another limited item. When God is present in the human incarnation, why to say that He is only in awareness not pervading in body or fully pervading the whole body in addition to awareness also? Kindly clarify.]
Swami replied:- The pervading God is unimaginable and hence, even the mechanism of pervasion is unimaginable. We are only assuming the mechanism of pervasion as if God is a finite imaginable item. Such assumptions are made to explain to the human beings for the sake of easy understanding. We are not actually sure about the pervasion of God in the awareness (energy) or in the body (matter) based on perception anywhere. Based on the details of inference, we are assuming this pervasion as the perceivable mechanism. When Krishna lifted huge hill by His tender finger, we assume that the unimaginable God pervaded all over His body including the finger. This means that the body and the finger have become unimaginable. Otherwise, the imaginable body and finger can’t lift the huge hill and withstand its enormous weight. In order to avoid confusion as far as possible, we are introducing a concept that God pervaded all over the body also. Even without the pervasion of unimaginable God in the soul, by the will of unimaginable God, the huge hill can be lifted up by the finger and body due to the unimaginable power of the same unimaginable God existing in the awareness. We are taking the statements of scripture and we are adding some more assumed mechanisms also if necessary to make the subject more clearly understood by the brains of ordinary human beings accustomed to understand the phenomena of imaginable items. When we say that a crane lifted a heavy load, we can say that crane is made of strong material to withstand the weight of the load. Similarly, when we say that Krishna lifted the hill, we can say that body of Krishna attained unimaginable power due to pervasion of unimaginable God in it.
The scriptural support is that God pervades the medium internally as well as externally (Antarbahishcha... Veda). At the same time, if we stick to this concept, the finger of Krishna was wounded by the blade of a sugar cane while eating it. This means that the finger is not pervaded by the unimaginable God. To correlate both these statements, we assume that God pervades the soul and body or one only as per the requirement of the context. Krishna used to eat food and drink milk due to hunger and thirst. This means that God is not pervading the body always except in the required contexts and such concept is our assumption only, which can’t be having perceivable proof at any stage. Since Krishna can say excellent spiritual knowledge at any time, we assume that God is pervading the soul always. All this assumption is based on inference only without perception at any step. The pervading item as well as the mechanisms of pervasion are unimaginable and these assumptions are introduced even by the scripture based on the inference drawn from events. The aim of the scripture is to bring the spiritual knowledge about God to the common understanding level of the human beings. If you remove all these assumptions based on the basic unimaginable nature of the God, you have to simply keep silent and express God and His actions through silence only and not by even any word.
God can’t be represented by any word as name because every word indicates only an imaginable item and hence, God can’t have any word as His name. Scripture says that God is not seen by eyes (na tatra chakshuh...) and only one blessed devotee can see God by eyes (Kashchit... aikshat). This is again interpreted that God is not seen by eyes because unimaginable God is obviously invisible. But, when the unimaginable God merges with imaginable-visible human devotee to become human incarnation, God is seen (realized) by a blessed devotee only and not by all devotees, who have seen Him but not realized Him due to ego and jealousy towards co-human forms. We are only interpreting the scripture and even the scripture is interpreted based on the events taking the help of inference, which is not based on perception at any stage. Actually, the inference applied to imaginable items is based on perception in some step of its procedure. When you infer invisible fire hidden on the mountain from the visible smoke, your inference is based on the generalization (Vyaapti) of the link between visible fire and visible smoke that you have seen in the kitchen already. Such step of perception is absent everywhere in the inference applied to explain unimaginable God and His unimaginable actions.