The Realization of God

A lecture given by Phiroz Mehta before H. M. Queen Juliana of the Netherlands at Appeldoorn on 29^th January 1954

Continued from part 1

There is something which keeps God and the devil together in me, mixed up with each other in a fluctuating relationship. This something is the I-hood, the misconceived selfhood in me. This I-hood is the shadow of the eternal, divine I AM. It is real, as long as I struggle to perpetuate its reality. At death, the I AM sheds this shadow altogether. So too in profound slumber, or dreamless sleep. There is a third occasion which this shadow is cast out — but we shall come to this a little further on.

What do I do with myself? The devil I can transform; God in me I can bring up to full stature. So I assert. But can I do it? Yes, provided that where myself is concerned I will awaken and become Enlightened.

Now the devil, God and myself are not three sharply defined entities to be dealt with in three specific, separate ways. In the moment of obscurity, I myself am the devil, and in the state of enlightenment, I myself am the pure vessel of God. As I purify myself, I awaken. As I awaken, I transform the devil and make God in me grow. The process is a whole. It happens simultaneously.

At the beginning of this talk we touched upon the disharmony in the world situation, and the tribulations in our personal lives, so obvious to everyone. But we must look more deeply and see that even the joy of friends in converse, the ecstasy of lovers’ kisses, the delight of children at play, the pleasure of the senses and the elation of the mind, the satisfaction of achievement and success, are all clouded with the sorrow of their transience. They all pass away. All things arise and move and pass away. Death seems Lord of all. And we are aware of each and every event and experience, feeling and thought, as something which begins and proceeds and dies. Our very consciousness is subject to the Lord of Death. But the heart of man cries out for the joy that will never end, for the life that will never die. And until man can win this joy or ānanda, this deathlessness or amṛita, he is in anguish, and his whole world, both painful and pleasant, is only a vale of tears, a valley of the shadow of death. This blissful Peace, this living Im-mortality is the fulfilment of man here-now. This Eternal Life, man ascribes to God, to Brahman, to Ātman, whereas he himself, as he is, suffers the sorrow of his distance from God.

Let us hear what the sage Nārada said to his great master Sanatkumāra:

Sir, I know the Ṛg-veda, the Yajur-veda, the Sāma-veda, the Atharva-veda, Grammar, Propitiation of the Shades of the Departed, Mathematics, Augury, Chronology, Logic, Polity, the Science of the Gods, the Science of Sacred Knowledge, Demonology, the Science of Rulership, Astrology, the Science of Snake Charming and the Fine Arts. This, Sir, I know.

Such a one am I, knowing the sacred sayings, but not knowing the Ātman, the Spirit. It has been heard by me from those who are like you, Sir, that he who knows the Ātman knows the Spirit, crosses over sorrow. Such a sorrowing one am I, Sir. Do you, Sir, cause me, who am such a one, to cross over to the other side of sorrow.

Chāndogya Upaniṣad, VII.2. 2 & 3

The Buddha, with his sure touch with reality, declared the First Great Truth of Sorrow in these words:

O Bhikkhus! This is the Noble Truth as to the source of sorrow: worldly existence is sorrowful: old age… disease… death… union with the unpleasing… separation from the pleasing… the unfulfilled wish… each one of these is sorrowful. In brief, desirous transient individuality is sorrowful.

The Buddha refrained from calling the goal by the name of God. He called it Nirvana. But he unequivocally affirmed the Transcendent. Let us hear his assurance:

O Bhikkhus! There are those things, profound, difficult to realize, hard to understand, tranquillizing, sweet, not to be grasped by mere logic, subtle, comprehensible by the wise. These things the Tathāgata hath set forth, having himself realized them by his own super-knowing.

And a little later he adds:

When a Bhikkhu understands as they really are, the origin and end, the attraction, the danger, and the escape from the six realms of contact (viz. the five senses and the discursively thinking mind), then only he comes to know what is above and beyond them all.

Brahmajāla Sutta

At this stage we must try to understand clearly that the Great Teachers have always referred, fundamentally, to a state of consciousness rather than to an emotion or a thought, when they declared that worldly existence, both painful and pleasant, was sorrowful. The longing for God is an emotional stress and an intellectual outreaching in its early stages. But back of it there lies a deep-seated quiet urge in our inner consciousness itself. This urge becomes an irresistible dynamic power, in course of time sweeping our whole being to its ultimate destiny of God-realization. As long as our inner consciousness is not God-centred, then any and every experience is prevented from wholly being God in expression. Therefore, whether the experience be pleasant or painful from the standpoint of sensation or of any worldly, mortal values whatsoever, our inner consciousness, divorced from God, can only be characterized as sorrowful. Slowly, painfully, we mortals awaken to the awareness of our state of divorce from God. We have pious feelings about God; we raise up philosophies about God: we spin out theological systems. But we are not at home in God. Ours is a mortal awareness of a space-time world. And this is a sorrowful state.

Continued in part 3

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