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 and part 2

The heart of Religion is therefore concerned with transforming our mortal awareness of a space-time world into the immortal super­consciousness of eternal existence. At its heart, then, Religion stands altogether distinct from science and philosophy. For whilst science and philosophy are bounded within the mortal sphere of sense observation and discursive thought, Religion enables a man to transcend that sphere and experience immortality super-consciously.

Now whereas science and philosophy and the lesser aspects of Religion, such as theology and ritual worship, deal with numbers of people or have a message for multitudes at a time, the heart of Religion directly affects each single person alone by himself. God and the individual meet in the music of Silence, in the glory of Nakedness, in the majesty of Aloneness, in the all-Light of the hidden Dark, and there is Communion. Thereupon this Lonely One, who treads the unattractive, un-glorious way of service of the Nameless Supreme, becomes the Transfigured One, the One whose state of sorrow has been changed into the state of Nirvana, in which the mortal awareness of the space-time world has been transformed into the immortal super-consciousness of eternal existence. If now we remember that the reality of the inner consciousness is the final factor determining the external shape of things, we shall see why the world-changes, clumsily brought about by ordinary mortals, however good and capable they may be, cannot stand comparison with the excellence that has shone forth because there lived an Enoch and Elijah, a Vāmadeva and Parameṣṭhin and Āruṇi and Yājñavalkya, a Christ and a Buddha, a Zarathushtra and a Kṛṣṇa. And again, of those world-changes brought about by ordinary mortals, those which have brought healing and peace are the ones whose ultimate inspiration came from the God-united.

The highest practicality consists therefore in the realization of God. The perfection of the outward shape of manifested reality is the complement of the inward realization of the Transcendent.

I said earlier that, as I purify myself, I awaken to the Transcendent. Purification, which is a perpetual process, means the poverty which is an utter self-stripping, a complete detachment from all finite things, a freedom from the burden of useless possessions, both material and immaterial. It means the chastity which is utter freedom from all desire, a virginity of soul. It means the obedience born of that casting away of all selfhood and self-will which makes a man the happy servant of God, uninfluenced by the accidents, pleasant or unpleasant, of everyday life. We all know the eloquent passion with which Christian mystics like Jacopone da Todi, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Teresa, the Blessed Angela of Foligno, Rolle, Suso, Eckhart, Ruysbroeck, Dante, Boehme and many others have expounded this. A thousand years, two thousand years before them, India’s mystic seers declared in the Upaniṣads:

When are liberated all the desires that lodge in one’s heart, Therein a mortal becomes immortal.

The Buddha taught that, since the origin of sorrow, of the ill-state of consciousness, was craving, which is the lust for sensation, possession, power and exalted selfhood, the end of the ill-state was brought about by:

The utter cessation of craving, by putting away material things, the objects of sense, and (where necessary) even the use of the senses, and also by putting away thoughts, stimuli, feelings, perceptions, intentions, memories, preoccupation and deliberation arising out of the senses and the objects of sense.

Five and a half centuries after the Buddha, Jesus gave the same teaching in a dramatic form:

If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it away from thee; for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish than that thy whole body should be cast into hell.

If we turn to the discipline of Yoga, we find that two of its parts are called Yama and Niyama, which mean the practice of all virtues like harmlessness, truthfulness, kindliness, charity, faith, contentment, and so on. Another part of Yoga is called Prātyāhara, which means the turning away from the worldly life of the senses and the discursive mind. This is the counterpart of the Christian repentance, and of the Buddhist nibbindati, a turning away from the sinful state, which fundamentally means the sorry state of worldly consciousness forgetful of God. Prātyāhara produces the right condition for Dhāraṇā, which is the concentration of one’s whole consciousness upon Brahman, or God, which corresponds to the Christian Recollection, and in which the self is released, or at least beginning to be released from succession, that is, from the cycle of births and deaths in one’s own consciousness. With the practice of Dhāranā, there is established the continuous consciousness of God. One experiences the abiding Presence of God, however busy one may be.

Now we can clearly see why India laid, and lays to this day, such stress upon complete desirelessness. Every desire, good or bad, springs from and is circumscribed by the limited self. In some degree or other it blots out our awareness of God, for every desire means self-interest and self-centredness. But he who is utterly desireless is the one who enjoys freedom, the one in whom “Thy will, not mine, O Lord” is manifest. This freedom extends wider and deeper than the realm of desire, embracing all thought too. And this is the point where the mystic, having already parted company with the philosopher a little earlier, leaves him altogether. In that remarkable English mystical work called The Cloud of Unknowing, there is a passage by its anonymous author which owes much to the teaching of Dionysius the Areopagite:

“When thou comest by thyself,” says the Master to the disciple, “Think not beforehand what thou shalt do after; but forsake both good thoughts and evil thoughts … And look that nothing live in thy working mind but a naked intent stretching unto God, not clothed in any special thought of God in thyself, how He is in Himself or in any of His works, but only that He is as He is. Let Him be so I pray thee…”

This emptying of the mind, this stripping of the self of all desire and thought and its wayward will, in Christian terms the “sinking into one’s nothingness”, is a sine qua non for the realization of God. The Buddha gave perhaps the clearest detail of the stages of conscious realization in what he called the Eight Deliverances. In the Sixth Deliverance which one reaches after realizing Infinity, both material and immaterial, one enters into and abides in no-thing-ness. Whilst realizing the profound states of consciousness, the negative and positive aspects of the experience are simultaneously present. In his Dialogues of the Supersensual Life (p. 66), Boehme said:

Behold, if thou desirest to see God’s Light in the soul, and be divinely illuminated and conducted, this is the short way that thou are to take (namely) not to let the Eye of thy Spirit enter into Matter, or fill itself with any Thing whatsoever, either in Heaven or Earth, but to let it enter by a naked faith into the Light of the Majesty.

The Sixth Deliverance of the Buddha is the state where I, Me and Mine are completely stilled, pacified, made harmless. Thus reduced to one’s own nothingness, one is enabled through Love and Peace to “meet God without intermediary.” Over and over again, the Gītā, the Buddha and the Upaniṣads clearly taught that I, Me and Mine were the cruel misconceptions which lay at the source of sin and sorrow. This Sixth Deliverance is that state of alert Quiet whence one proceeds to deep contemplation, called Dhyāna in India. Eckhart quite rightly states that in the Quiet man begins to be united with his final ground, pure Being, devoid of symbols or attributes. This austere mystic, so much in tune not only with Plotinus and Dionysius the Areopagite but also with those supreme mystic­seers, the great Ṛṣis and Munis of the Vedas and Upaniṣads, discarded even the supreme symbols of Reality. This Quiet, however, must not be confused with Quietism, which Ruysbroeck criticized so rightly and severely.

Pure Contemplation is beyond the span of thought and emotion. But in talking about it we are necessarily confined to words which cannot escape or transcend the mortal boundaries of thought and emotion. Bearing this in mind, let us say that pure Contemplation is the concentrated urge of one’s essential being for loving union with the Divine. The finite person opens himself out to the Absolute Infinite, to the eternal that-which-is, the Godhead or Brahman or Ātman, to the indefinable Nirvana. In Dhyāna the distinctive awareness of Thou, God, and I, man, gradually disappears. When the final stage, samādhi, is fully attained, there is only the Absolute, and, at the moment, immaculately conceived God incarnates, and the Son of God is virginly born. This virgin birth of the Brahmaputras, the Sons of God, is a tradition in India which was already centuries old when Jesus was born.

It is easy to say that these are mere words. Not so. There is a Real Experience which these words express so poorly. And yet it is possible today, using words, to reach at least one step closer to an understanding of the realization of God. As the profounder states of consciousness are reached, the turmoil of thoughts, feelings, impressions, words, gradually calms down. From Quiet onwards there is deep peace. The uprising, proceeding and dying of perceptions, which is the cycle of births and deaths, the realm of mortality, begins to cease. In pure Contemplation there is only a gentle oscillation between God and oneself. But even in this stage a slight disturbance of discursive thought, words, manifests itself. In the ultimate stage all discursive thought is completely stopped, oneself being in full self-possession, which is identical with complete self-surrender to God. This is the attainment of the Absolute Silence, wherein our ordinary consciousness has flowered out into super-consciousness. This is the state of the Anointed One, and the meaning of “I and my Father in heaven are one” or, in terms of the age-old Hindu teaching, Pratyagātman and Paramātman are in eternal union. This samādhi is the full experience and true meaning of Im­mortality here and now. It is the transcending of time by the God-united.

And so we see that, unlike the philosophical thought of immortality as continuous existence in endless time, the mystical experience of immortality is a mode of awareness by the transformed consciousness of him who has realized God. As I said earlier, the mortal awareness of a space-time world is transformed into the immortal super-consciousness of eternal existence. Please forbear with me for using words. It is the best I can do. But I hope that this verbal expression, “the complete stopping of the flow of discursive thought, at will, and in full self-possession, which is identical with complete surrender at this stage” — I hope that that statement will prove stimulating and helpful.

In this Absolute Silence one has fully awakened at last. In the process of this Awakening, the devil-self in one has been utterly transformed and made one with the fully matured God-being. The Silence is the heart of the Enlightenment of the Buddha. This is the Kingdom of Heaven of Jesus, the Brahman realization of the Upaniṣadic Muni. This is the Peace of God which passeth all understanding, the supreme Nirvana of the Buddha.

This realization of God is that third occasion to which I referred earlier, when the humanly misconceived I-hood, the shadow of the eternal divine I AM, is finally cast out, and the true being of the purified individual shines in self-lessness. Never again will the Brahman-realized, the God-united, come under the dark spell of the illusory ego. The very root of all evil, as the Buddha taught, has now been cut away, and the ultimate ignorance rooted out. No evil state of consciousness can afflict him now, and therefore there are no complexes, no fantasies and dreams, no cravings and fears, no frustrations, no anxieties. But instead, illuminated by the transcendent Light of Nirvana, there is a complete loving acceptance of everything and of everyone, for all enemies, exactly as much as all friends, are fellow human beings. This loving, whole acceptance is the source of the power which can transmute all the world’s evil into good. This loving, whole acceptance is the pure basis of perfect personal relations, of concord between man and fellow man. If I have indeed realized God who is my innermost true Self, who is the Self of all, I can do no harm whatsoever to my neighbour. Indeed, since God within me is realized through Love’s omnipotent moving, I cannot help loving my neighbour. Only where there is perfect Love, there alone can power be used rightly and irresistibly.

Only if I realize God, and realize the Love of God, then truly do I discover that Eternal God, Founder of the world, is invincible, for God is Love and Wisdom, God is Beauty and Truth, God is Action and Power. Here-now in eternal existence, and not merely in the temporal transience of sense-mind perception, here-now in the very midst of the Omnipresence, guided by the Omniscience, energized by the Omnipotence, do you and I live. Let us answer the call of the Infinite, and awaken to the Eternal Life here now, which is our spiritual birthright, and join hands in the work of Peace. Let us never forget at any moment that the fundamental Peace we have to make is the Peace between body and spirit in our own selves. Without this Peace, no external Peace can be sustained. But, when we have made this Peace, then we shall know the truth of that Beatitude: “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God.”

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