Of Gods and Humans

By: Victoria Smith

 

One could say that the goal of religion is to find, and be united with God. In this connection, some of the holiest days of humankind have recently been celebrated—Easter for Christians, the Passover for Jews. (If I’ve missed mentioning other religious celebrations, apologies, for this was not meant as a comprehensive list.) The Christian Easter message particularly preaches the hope that human beings could achieve resurrection, like Christ did, by believing in Jesus Christ as one’s Lord and Savior, and thereby be united with God in the afterlife. In my personal spiritual faith journey, however, I’ve evolved into the belief of the yogi that God is already inside each of us, and that any belief of separation between God and his creation, especially sentient beings like humans, is a false belief; thus, the path to salvation could be found in spiritual practices (like yoga and concentration through meditation) that help clear our minds and souls of this false belief, thereby learning the truth that God is truly in us, indeed, is none other than we—the Atman, also known as the underlying Reality or the Real Self. It is in experiencing this Reality, our Real Self, that we thereby experience union with God.

April being National Poetry Month, it is fitting to cite the following relevant poem of the great Hindu saint, Kabir:

I laugh when I hear the fish

in the water is thirsty.

You wander restlessly from forest

to forest while the Reality

is within your own dwelling.

The truth is here! Go where you will— to Benares or Mathura; until you have found God in your own soul, the whole world will seem meaningless to you.

To me, the message of above poem is no different from that of Christ in the following Biblical passage: “And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, ‘The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.’” (Luke 17: 20-21).

But what causes our false belief in our separation from God? The yogi believes that this is caused by our false identification with our ego-sense (our mind and senses). And that it is this false identification with our minds and senses that creates the “I” who is separate from God, which is the cause of all humankind’s misery. Therefore, the yogi’s goal is to unlearn this false identification of the ego-sense by mastering his or her mind and senses— to calm the mind by controlling one’s thought waves, and to free the senses by freeing one’s self of desire through the practice of detachment and non-attachment. It is in the state of perfect yoga—when we’ve stilled our thought waves and our minds are completely clear, that we come to know we are none other than the Atman, and it is in liberating ourselves completely of desire that we free ourselves of pain and of the compulsion of the senses to be driven toward the painful cycle of birth, death, and rebirth—the desire to return and plunge once more into the sense-experience. When we’ve achieved this complete liberation of the mind and senses, we thus enter into the eternal, unchanging peace and happiness of the Atman.

That all sounds very good, doesn’t it? Yes. But as humans— guess what? We have the freedom to choose to achieve or not achieve the state of perfect yoga. At this stage of my mortal life, I acknowledge I am not yet ready to completely liberate myself of all desire and passion. Why? Because I believe that my desires and passions, or more accurately, my compassion, are what motivate and energize me to continue fighting against the injustices of this world—to help make a better world for my fellow human beings through my power of creativity, so that they may be positioned, if they wished, to achieve their own perfect state of yoga and thus be freed from pain and suffering. While I know this kind of concentration without non-attachment on my part will fail to completely liberate me, thus retaining me in partial ignorance that will continue to bring me pain and suffering, I am consoled that such pain and suffering will also necessarily come with intervals of their opposing forces of ecstasy and joy— in other words, keep me completely human! And I confess I am intrigued and fascinated by the possibility that such a condition of intense concentration without detachment, as the Hindus believe, could bring one into the state of a “disincarnate god” and/ or become merged with the forces of Nature, thereby making one a “ruler” of parts of the universe (page 47, “How to Know God: The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali” by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood, Vedanta Press, 1981).

I think I could be content to live in such a state for a while. After all, I’ve already been called a “force of nature” a few times, and they certainly don’t call me “the Queen V” for nothing. (Hashtag “tongue-in-cheek” grin emoji.) Nirvana can wait.

(All rights reserved. Copyright ©2018 by Victoria G. Smith. For updates on her author events & publications, go to VictoriaGSmith. com. “Like” her on Facebook at Author Victoria G. Smith. “Follow” her on Twitter @AuthorVGSmith)