Question: Swamiji, is there really a God?

Swamiji: Those denying God are only denying their own misconceptions of what God is. Some investigation into that which you are denying is necessary, or the denial is useless. This is a scientific age—on what evidence do you base your denial?

It’s easy to say you don’t believe a “rakatah” exists. I ask you what is a “rakatah.” And you tell me you don’t even know. It is just some sound.

The word God is only a sound. What does this sound symbolize? That is what each one must investigate for oneself.

Q: What would you say the nature of God is?

S: God is Truth. God is that which remains constant in past, present and future; all else is false.

Q: But is God really running the show?

S: If God is sitting and writing our individual histories—all these sorrows and tragedies—he must be a mental pervert. Right?

This idea of God is a poetic point of view; it has no philosophical support. The creator endows the mental and physical equipment and situations in the creation according to your own instructions, so that you can expend your own desires.

The three great Hindu acharyas [teachers] accept the Upanishads as authority. They agree that the goal of life is God-realization, not experience in this finite world. All agree on the path and the goal; they only differ in the relationship between the individual and the Divine. Sri Madhva, the dualist, says that you are eternally separate from the Divine. He is correct: When you are identified with the body, you are eternally separate from God. Sri Ramanuja, the propounder of qualified dualism, claims that you are an aspect of God. You are a drop of the ocean, but the drop can never know the ocean. He too is accurate: when you are identified with your mental self, you are a part of the Whole. Adi Shankaracharya, the preceptor of Advaita Vedanta, declares that you are identical with the one. According to him, you are the eternal, essential Divinity transcending both the physical and mental instruments.

Your relationship with God depends on your point of view. When you are standing on a mountain peak looking down at the temple in the valley, you are separate from the temple. When you go down from that mountain and enter into the temple gates, you become a part of the temple complex. However, when you enter the sanctum sanctorum, you and the Lord of the temple are one.

All three standpoints define your relationship to God. The relationship may change, but God remains the same. We cannot say that only Shankara’s Non-Dualism is valid. Remember that Ramanuja and Madhva also based their philosophy from the same fount of Hindu scriptures. Their interpretations seem contradictory because their philosophies were addressed to a certain society in a particular era.

This elasticity is the strength of a perpetual, healthy culture. A culture cannot be ironbound; it must have the freedom to express itself according to the environment and circumstances in that culture at that historical time. The community must be able to look to the cultural values for solutions to its problems. Those problems will change because the world continues changing.

Each one of us is composed of a physical, mental and intellectual personality, yet our physical demands can be totally different from the needs of our forefathers. Our emotional concerns may be different from those of our fathers; our intellectual aspirations can change completely in each generation. When these internal requirements shift, a condition is created in which the old modes of living in society are no longer useful. Only an efficient, flexible culture can establish a new means of satisfying the current needs in order to generate contentment in the community.

The ability of our culture to accommodate, contain and provide solutions to new problems is the brilliance of the Hindu culture and the reason for its long, long history. This enduring quality is not because of the masters who have come from time to time, but rather the true vitality of the culture has been its capacity to produce such geniuses. They were the means through which the culture was expressed and interpreted to the society.

We at Chinmaya Mission faithfully follow Adi Shankaracharya’s logic that establishes man’s relationship to the Fundamental Reality, which lies behind the plurality, but we do not ignore the other points of view. Dualism and qualified dualism are necessary because, not only are we to appreciate the intellectual vision of “One without a second one,” we have to reach out and go there. This has to be accomplished in our own bosom and we must slowly plod on from our present level.

On some days you may be in a mood of the dualistic type where you feel that God is something to be worshiped. At other times, you may feel that you are indeed a part of God, like the qualified dualists. The moments that we can soar into the heights of non-dualism to personally apprehend the oneness of God and ourselves are rare indeed.

Q: But duality does exist. Right now I am this and That is That.

S: Of course, duality exists. You are observing it every day. Can you deny the nose on your face? When you are at the level of the body, there definitely is duality. Pleasure and pain are in duality. So are spiritual pursuits. When a Buddhist monk sits under a tree to reach nirvana, then nirvana is something other than himself—that is duality too.

Q: But just what is the relationship of God, mankind and the world?

S: It is very difficult to find words to express the exact relationship. Words are finite, and finite words cannot express fully the Infinite. Therefore we must attempt to convey the truth through an illustration, which can only bring forth the principles. Then we have to mentally chew and digest the imparted ideas, so that the illustration may yield its sacred sweetness to us.

The relationship that exists between the individual, the world and Creator is explained by the example of a piece of cloth in which a decorative pattern is woven, like one of the tapestries we use for wall hangings. Now this piece of cloth is made of threads passing in and through it. The threads make up the patterns in the cloth, for example, a family sitting at tea on a long veranda with trees and sky in the background. Now, for the sake of our model, this scene would be equivalent to our total conception of the world, with its oceans, mountains, continents and individuals. The pattern constitutes our world.

Now the existence of this cloth depends on what? Has it any existence other than the thread? If we were to remove the thread would there be any cloth? No, because the cloth is only the thread. However, since we look only at the patterns of the thread, we only see the portrayal of the family at tea on the cloth. But there can be no pattern without the thread.

The thread here is the symbol for the Creator—without whom there would be no creation of tapestry or its designs. Thus the whole world is established by and patterned in the divine principle. If we take away this divine principle, the entire pattern the world would necessarily melt into nothingness, just as the piece of cloth would end if all the threads were to be removed.

Now let us analyze this principle further. What is the cause of the thread? If it were not for the cotton, the thread would not have existed, nor the cloth, nor the figure woven on it. In cotton, the three—the thread, the cloth and the pattern—exist. Out of cotton all the three appeared, and into cotton they return when they perish. The true essence of this cloth is nothing but cotton. Remove the cotton and try to give me a piece of cloth, please!

The all-pervading Supreme Reality in itself has not undergone any alteration. Just as cotton remains cotton; it only changes its form in the tapestry. According to its stage of modification, we give it the name “thread,” the name “cloth,” then the name “pattern.”

Thus the relationship between the created, the creation and the creator is that there is no relationship possible because relationship connotes that at least two things exist. If we sincerely seek the exact relationship between the Supreme Reality and ourselves, we have to conclude that there is no difference at all. Just as there can be no difference between the cotton and the cloth with its pattern.

Another example used in the scriptures is the spider and its web. The spider creates the web out of itself—material of the web is the very substance of the spider. In short the web is nothing but the modified form of the spider itself. Similarly, the Supreme Reality is the lock, stock and barrel of this atrocious looking mechanism of samsara [the creation].

“There is only Reality. Wake up and discover who’s suffering!”says the dream guru to his dream student. Then the individual, the world and the creator all merge into that One.

The End of Satsang