THE GLORY OF GOD
The glory and majesty of God start with a mental concept. Because not having known God, you idealize Him to be something super, beyond man. You are then worshipping an ideal. This is good. At least you have something onto which to clutch. You are climbing the stairs, and you have the rail to hold onto lest you slip. Having the various ideas of God, that He is being all-powerful, all-merciful, all compassionate, all the greatest virtues and the greatest things man could ever think about.
Is He all that merciful? Is He all that powerful or all that compassionate? It remains a question because you have not yet known the glory of God. But it helps you by turning your thoughts to what is compassion, to what is mercy, to what is love. In reality, you are not praying to the “Thou,” the separation, you are praying to That which is within you, and awakening That which is within you. These are the mechanics, and you become loving. When you think of Divinity as all compassion, and having your thoughts tuned to that, you automatically become compassionate.
Sunday mornings, we are at home, and we hear the church bells ringing. What strikes me immediately is of the glory of God, and I hear Him speaking in the sound of those bells. When you go to a Hindu temple, you have these bells outside, and you ring the bell before you enter the temple. This is one of the basis of our gong meditation, although it is of Tibetan origin. Then that sound flows in your mind. It becomes a kind of mantra. That sound flows in the mind, and by allowing it with total innocence, without fighting against it, by allowing it to flow in the mind, your mind becomes quieter and quieter, and you get into the mood for that devotion and that worship to the “Thou” concept.
GOING BEYOND MOODS
Concepts are also very, very important to the one on the path. But one mistake that most people make is that they find that the mood is the sum total. It is not. It is nice to get into that mood, into that frame of mind, but that remains only in the mind and only in the concept. It is a help.
What has to be done, and here is where one loses the “I” and “Thou” sense and finds the sense of oneness, is when you go beyond the mood when you transcend the mood. You start with the mood, and slowly the mood would fade away. The “Thou” is not there. The “I” is not there. Only Divinity is there.
Do you see how our teachings are so similar? For Christ said, “I and my father are one.” It does not only mean that little body of Jesus. It means all of us that are within this consciousness, for to me, Christ means pure consciousness.
KNOW GOD/EXPERIENCE GOD
Our teachings are no different at all. From duality, we proceed to non-duality. For to know God and to know the glory of God is to become one with Him, because God, or Divinity, can never be known. Because in the very process of knowing, the mind is involved. The mind is involved in the very process of knowing. You can only experience Divinity. You can only experience God, and that area of experience is beyond the mind. So, you see, no difference in our teachings. It can only be experienced.
Therefore, people that have experienced God, to use that word for lack of a better word, they could never describe the glory and the majesty to you. For example, in communion. When I go into that samadhi, I could never explain it to you. I could tell you a little about it. But I could never explain to you what it really is. It is like trying to explain colours to a person that is born blind. You cannot. These eyes of blind people have to be opened, awakened, for them to experience and see the colours themselves, to experience the glory of Divinity, and to experience the glory of Divinity is to be one with the Divine. Therefore, you are Divine.
You can never become one with the Divine if Divinity is not there in you. The entire tree is in the seed. If the tree was not in the seed, there would be no tree. In all of nature in the entire universe Divinity exists in an involved form and in an evolved form. The tree exists in the seed in an involved form, and when it grows, it is in an evolved form. Yet the same energy is existent in the seed as in the full-grown tree.
THE CONCEPTUAL GOD
Even in the conceptual God, even thinking that God is all-powerful and all-majestic and glorious is also true, for whatever your mind thinks, happens. For that very glory and energy is there even in the thought. What is needed is the materialization of the concept.
Hindus believe that their God has four arms. When they reach that stage of actually being in the presence, they will see God with four arms. The Moslems believe that if you live a good life here, abstaining from drink and women and all kinds of things, then when you pass over, having lived a good life, you will go to a heaven where there will be rivers of wine and houris looking after you, tending you. Houris: pretty damsels, fairies, angelic, they will be looking after you. Deny yourself here to get that up there, and believe you me, when that Moslem dies that is exactly what he is going to find.
Some Christian people believe that there is an old man, a kindly old man, sitting up there in Heaven, with a whole lot of bookkeepers writing up everyone’s debits and credits. They believe that St. Peter standing at the gate chucking you out or letting you in, and if he firmly believes that that is exactly what he is going to find.
WHAT YOU BELIEVE, WILL BE
The glory, the majesty is in your mind, and you can bring that concept to its actualization. That is how it works. Whatever you believe, that shall be so, and so be it!
This applies in daily life too. You get up in the morning, and you say, “Oh, I feel so rotten today. I feel so sick.” Believe you me, you are going to feel sick. But get up in the morning and say, “I am fine today. I am feeling well.” Then you will be well. That is the glory of God. Not apart from you, but within you and within your concept.
THE PERSONALIZED GOD
But then the question would arise, “What is the real God behind the glorified God?” Because if you have a concept of something higher than you, it must be glorious. Why must it be glorious? Why must it be all-compassionate? Because you feel within yourself that you are un-glorious, that you are uncompassionate; therefore, as your ideal, you got to have something that you are not. That is good because that will make you aspire to reach that. All these concepts become symbols in man’s mind which can be actualized and brought to reality. That is the personalized God that I always speak about. That is the Buddha. That is the Krishna. That is the Christ.
THE IMPERSONAL GOD
But there is a step beyond, and that step is the impersonal God without quality or quantity. Impersonal energy that motivates activates and energizes the glory of the personalized God. And that is the area man has to reach. In other words, “I and my Father are one” means that this energy that makes up my little individual self has now merged away into the energy of the universal self. Energy is not the right word, because to talk of these things, the dictionary would never have the proper vocabulary. That is the true mergence.
You merge first into the personal God, and step further you merge into the impersonal God where you become universal. The little I is then totally lost. Merging into the personal God, the God of our concept, the “I” and “Thou” will always remain. There is a togetherness and yet a separation, because being a concept, the mind is still involved. As long as the mind remains, you can only reach the personal God as any bhakta would reach, any devoted person would reach.
But there you are still bound by the laws of opposites. For whenever any quality is applied, it will always have its opposite. Compassion, yes. There will always be non-compassion. Kindness, yes. But there will always be cruelty. So that personal God has all the attributes. And when one speaks of a positive attribute, it also has the opposite attribute. That does not mean it is wrong, because this universe can never function without the laws of opposites.
The personal, glorious God is one with attributes. He represents the totality of that energy which emanates from this universe. Everything is vibrant. Every individual here is vibrating according to his evolutionary standard.
As every town has a collective consciousness, collective vibration so has this world. It so has this solar system, this galaxy and millions of galaxies that form this universe, and all have these vibrations. The sum totality of the vibrations of this universe is the glory of the creation of the personalized God. For the personal is not the end. From there just a step more, you reach the impersonal, which is attributeless.
… Gururaj Ananda Yogi: Satsang US 1981 – 05