The creation they say is the desire of God. Whatever happens in the Creation is God's desire. Naturally people would want to know why is that the God desires in the way He does? Why does he desire Sun to burn, Moon to reflect light, Universe to expand, have a Big Bang, one to become a murderer and another saint, Sunami and earth quakes to occur, Indian to remain poor and large in numbers, Americans to remain too rich for long, Chinese to be sghort, and so on and so forth. Why did he not desire differently?
These questions are valid. By pursuing them, Man realizes that the questions are irrelevant.
Desire is observed to be a characteristic/ property of beings. Suna and moon and stars do not have desires. Languages do not have desires. Probably trees do not have desires. Desires are actually seen to be arising with the existence of ego, intellect, mind and senses.
But Gita's God by definition, though all pervasive and contains everything in the Creation, itself has no ego, no mind, no intellect, no emotion, no senses. God is not like another human being of super capabilty. God is the source and container of everything but has no desire. Desire affects those which are afflicted by desire. God is not afflicted or affected or impacted by anything. Thus there is no way that God can have desire.
God by definition is the Supreme who is complete by definition: there is no scope for Him to desire or wish. Desire or
wish arises from incomopleteness. If there is completeness, there is no scope for a wish or desire to arise for seeking completeness. The Supreme has every thing in Him and never feels inadequate. Without any inadequacy, the Supreme has
no need to wish or desire. The Supreme who is complete has everything: He
contains everything in the Creation and is in existence in each and everything
in the Creation. All wishes and desires of everything/ everyone are contained in
Him and He exists in all wishes and desires possible in all creatures. So the
Supreme does not need any desire or wish of His own. That His Creation functions
the way it has been doing and will continue, fully satisfies Him. With nothing
remaining to be satisfied, the Supreme has no scope for any wish or desire of
His own. Any thing / any one even a little less than Supreme and less than Complete can only have a wish or desire.
To put it differently, all that happens in this creation is nothing but His wish and desire getting fulfilled! That is how people see God's desire in everything that happens. It is just like saying that the Sun desires to light the Earth.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Soul Searching: Gita & God 28
Soul (often referred to as Atman) is a term in Upanishads and Gita that helps generate confusion. The greater the confusion the better - no one knows. Everyone has the right to discover the meaning of soul. Some in search of the nature of soul ask questions and seek answers to them. That is the scientific way. For example:
What happens to a soul when one commits suicide ?
Soul is immortal. Soul does not die. Death is meant for the body and its organs. Death can come due to age, disease, accident, murder, legal punishment, or suicide. Irrespective of how death occurs, soul is unaffected. Suicide is the result of a disease or accident resulting from the interaction of properties/ gunas of objects and forces in the creation. Soul is not concerned with such things.
Attempt to suicide need not always result in death. Even if it does, the soul is not involved. It is only an illusion to think of soul suferring: suffering is possible for those things that have appropriate gunas to experience suffering. Soul does not have such property or guna and hence cannot experience sufferring. Sufferring is experiened by one or more of this: body, mind, intellect and ego.
Then who gets rebirth? Body or mind or intellect or ego? That question has no meaning and irrelevant. Every thing transforms over time. Nothing remains the same. There is nothing that needs to take birth or rebirth. Day and night takes rebirth roughly every 12 hours? That is silly, we know. These are phenomena resulting from interaction of certain forces in the creation. So is life and any particular life form. Just as 25th March night does not get reborn after 365 or 366 orbits of the Earth around the Sun, nothing gets reborn. Soul does not.
But any life that is born have soul/ atman. The soul being indestructible, infinite and indivisible, it is inconsistent with the defnition of soul to identify as soul of this person or that person.
Gita's soul is Atman or paramatman or God. It is not the term that is used to praise John because he is/ was a great soul. It has nothing to do with the term soulmate.
Terms like Soul, Atman, Pramatman, Self and God may have different connotations and meaning depending on usage. But for Gita all these are one and the same. It is waste of time to differentiate them for any analytical or spiritual purposes.
Gita's theory of God is consistent if one accepts these terms as Synonyms or exact equivalents.
What happens to a soul when one commits suicide ?
Soul is immortal. Soul does not die. Death is meant for the body and its organs. Death can come due to age, disease, accident, murder, legal punishment, or suicide. Irrespective of how death occurs, soul is unaffected. Suicide is the result of a disease or accident resulting from the interaction of properties/ gunas of objects and forces in the creation. Soul is not concerned with such things.
Attempt to suicide need not always result in death. Even if it does, the soul is not involved. It is only an illusion to think of soul suferring: suffering is possible for those things that have appropriate gunas to experience suffering. Soul does not have such property or guna and hence cannot experience sufferring. Sufferring is experiened by one or more of this: body, mind, intellect and ego.
Then who gets rebirth? Body or mind or intellect or ego? That question has no meaning and irrelevant. Every thing transforms over time. Nothing remains the same. There is nothing that needs to take birth or rebirth. Day and night takes rebirth roughly every 12 hours? That is silly, we know. These are phenomena resulting from interaction of certain forces in the creation. So is life and any particular life form. Just as 25th March night does not get reborn after 365 or 366 orbits of the Earth around the Sun, nothing gets reborn. Soul does not.
But any life that is born have soul/ atman. The soul being indestructible, infinite and indivisible, it is inconsistent with the defnition of soul to identify as soul of this person or that person.
Gita's soul is Atman or paramatman or God. It is not the term that is used to praise John because he is/ was a great soul. It has nothing to do with the term soulmate.
Terms like Soul, Atman, Pramatman, Self and God may have different connotations and meaning depending on usage. But for Gita all these are one and the same. It is waste of time to differentiate them for any analytical or spiritual purposes.
Gita's theory of God is consistent if one accepts these terms as Synonyms or exact equivalents.
Prove God: Gita and God 27
Man asks questions and seeks answers to them. They discover and gather useful knowledge only through this process. They discover Truth in this way and later on discover that the Truth they discovered was either not the Truth or not the whole Truth. They are in continuous pusuit of getting to the Ultimate whole Truth. They discover and find proof of the existence of Gita's God in the same way.
The following is one possible way how Gita's God was discovered by Man:
1. Where can God be seen?
You cannot see God with your eyes. God being infinite, you cannot photograph him within the frame of any camera either. You could get sense of some picture of the God when you can take a picture of the entire Universe: however you would still not get the full picture of God as there exists things like knowledge, feelings, concepts that have no images to be captured in a film..
2. Who has seen Him?
No one has seen HIM. He is not an object to see.
3. How is He? Can we describe Him?
He is incomprehensible, unknowable, infinite, ceaseless, unperturbed, always working, desire-less, ego-free, anger-free, unattached, not limited by physical dimensions and beyond gender classification (use of He is equally good as use of She or It when referring to God)
4. If I don't know how eaxctly God is, how do I accept HIM?
I accepted my Mother even before I knew that she was my Mother and what exactly was she. I do this. So, what is the problem with accepting God.
I accept the impact of recession on me but I have neither seen nor known recession clearly.As a human being, I do not see many things and concepts, I do not comprehend them. But still I accept them if I find that useful to my life. If concept of God is useful to me, I can accept it if so choose. If not I need not accept. It does not matter to the existence of God.
5. Has the term / concept of God been coined by to put moral chains to so
that people practice goodness?
The concept of God arose much before the concept of morality evolved. Therefore, God is unperturbed by goodness or evil. Rather, He is the creator/ source of all good and evil. By definition therefore God has caused man to coin the term/ concept of God. It was no man's independent decision to coin the term.
6. What is the basis to presume that God exists?
The basis of presuming God's existence is the assumption that anything that exists must have a source. Tracing back chronologically in time, one tries to reach the ultimate source of anything and all things in the Creation. But the efforts to go back is an infinite and end-less process. If one assumes that one has reached the end of the process, one has still to seek the source of that end-point. So, one assumes the existence of the Ultimate source even if that remains unidentified. It follows that this ultimate source has always been there. This may be named God. God therefore is in existence since Man assumes that there exists an Ultimate source / cause of the entire Creation. Big Bang is not the source as there must have been a source of the Big Bang.
7. Why then it is said that God exists everywhere and in every thing? Then God must be seen every where and in every thing.
The following is one possible way how Gita's God was discovered by Man:
1. Where can God be seen?
You cannot see God with your eyes. God being infinite, you cannot photograph him within the frame of any camera either. You could get sense of some picture of the God when you can take a picture of the entire Universe: however you would still not get the full picture of God as there exists things like knowledge, feelings, concepts that have no images to be captured in a film..
2. Who has seen Him?
No one has seen HIM. He is not an object to see.
3. How is He? Can we describe Him?
He is incomprehensible, unknowable, infinite, ceaseless, unperturbed, always working, desire-less, ego-free, anger-free, unattached, not limited by physical dimensions and beyond gender classification (use of He is equally good as use of She or It when referring to God)
4. If I don't know how eaxctly God is, how do I accept HIM?
I accepted my Mother even before I knew that she was my Mother and what exactly was she. I do this. So, what is the problem with accepting God.
I accept the impact of recession on me but I have neither seen nor known recession clearly.As a human being, I do not see many things and concepts, I do not comprehend them. But still I accept them if I find that useful to my life. If concept of God is useful to me, I can accept it if so choose. If not I need not accept. It does not matter to the existence of God.
5. Has the term / concept of God been coined by to put moral chains to so
that people practice goodness?
The concept of God arose much before the concept of morality evolved. Therefore, God is unperturbed by goodness or evil. Rather, He is the creator/ source of all good and evil. By definition therefore God has caused man to coin the term/ concept of God. It was no man's independent decision to coin the term.
6. What is the basis to presume that God exists?
The basis of presuming God's existence is the assumption that anything that exists must have a source. Tracing back chronologically in time, one tries to reach the ultimate source of anything and all things in the Creation. But the efforts to go back is an infinite and end-less process. If one assumes that one has reached the end of the process, one has still to seek the source of that end-point. So, one assumes the existence of the Ultimate source even if that remains unidentified. It follows that this ultimate source has always been there. This may be named God. God therefore is in existence since Man assumes that there exists an Ultimate source / cause of the entire Creation. Big Bang is not the source as there must have been a source of the Big Bang.
7. Why then it is said that God exists everywhere and in every thing? Then God must be seen every where and in every thing.
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