THE GLORY OF GOD
The glory and majesty of God start with a mental concept. Because you do not have 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 to clutch. You are climbing the stairs and have the rail to hold onto lest you slip. Having the various ideas of God, He is all-powerful, all-merciful, all-compassionate, and has all the greatest virtues and the most significant things a 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.
On Sunday mornings, we are at home and hear the church bells ringing. What strikes me immediately is the glory of God, and I listen to 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 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. However, one mistake most people make is that they find that the mood is the total. It is not. It is nice to get into that mood and that frame of mind, but that remains only in the mind and 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 feeling of oneness, is when you go beyond the mood when you transcend the mood. You start with the mood, and slowly, the mood will 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.” This does not only mean the little body of Jesus. It means all of us 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. 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 engaged 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 who have experienced God, to use that word for lack of a better word, 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 is. It is like trying to explain colours to a person who is born blind. You cannot. These eyes of blind people have to be opened and 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. There would be no tree if the tree were not in the seed. In all of nature and the universe, divinity exists in an involved and evolved form. The tree exists in the seed in an involved form; when it grows, it is in an evolved form. Yet the same energy exists in the seed as in the full-grown tree.
THE CONCEPTUAL GOD
Even in the conceptual God, even thinking that God is all-powerful, all-majestic, and glorious is also true, for whatever your mind thinks happens. For that, very glory and energy are present, even in thought. What is needed is the materialization of the concept.
Hindus believe that their God has four arms. When they reach that stage of being present, 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 look after you. Deny yourself here to get that up there, and believe me, when that Moslem dies, that is precisely what he will find.
Some Christian people believe that there is an old man, a kindly old man, sitting up there in Heaven, with many bookkeepers writing up everyone’s debits and credits. They believe that St. Peter is standing at the gate chucking you out or letting you in, and if he firmly believes that, that is precisely what he will 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 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? You feel within yourself that you are un-glorious and uncompassionate; therefore, as your ideal, you have to have something you are not. That is good because it will make you aspire to reach that goal. 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 the dictionary never has the proper vocabulary when discussing these things. That is the true mergence.
You merge into the personal God and step further 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 separation because, as a concept, the mind is still involved. As long as the mind remains, you can only reach the personal God as any bhakta and 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 the energy emanating from this universe. Everything is vibrant. Every individual here vibrates according to his evolutionary standard.
As every town has a collective consciousness and vibration, so has this world. It so has this solar system, this galaxy, and millions of galaxies that form this universe, all of which 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
