Seeing God

There is the God that can't be seen. And there is the God that can. Hindus visit their temples to see God. And be seen by him. Whether it's a statue of the warrior goddess Durga, the ever popular goddess of prosperity, Lakshmi, with her handsome husband, Vishnu, or the powerful South Indian deity Vel, Hindu families come bearing their gifts of coconuts, flowers, rupees, bananas, or whatever is on hand to offer God or Goddess that day.

The priest draws aside the gate that separates the worshipper from the image, and the family members gaze into the eyes of their beloved deity. This is the process of darshan, which means "sight". You see your beloved deity. He or she sees you. A connection is made. A blessing is rendered.

Yet, in spite of what my Sunday school teacher taught me, in all my travels through India from one end of the subcontinent to the other, I have never met a image in the temple is God. In fact, if the "idol" dump it in the river! That's a petty unceremonious way to treat God, don't you think?

If you look through a telescope, you can clearly see the planets. Yet no one thinks the telescope is actually Mars. The "idols" in the temples, called murtis in India, are telescopes to help us see God and goddess closer, comes so near we can reach out and touch the divine feet.

Seeing the Unseen

The seers of the Upanishad wrestled with words, trying to show us that which cannot be seen. The Katha Upanishad endeavors to explain :

Beyond the senses is the mind. Beyond the mind is the higher intellect. Beyond the intellect is the Inner Self. Beyond the Inner Self is the vast unmanifest reality, the primal energy from which all things emerge. Beyond the unmanifest is the Supreme Being, who exists everywhere yet cannot be seen. One who realizes the Supreme is liberated. Yes, that one becomes immortal.

No one can see the Supreme with  the eye. The only way to know Him is through deep meditation, after the intellect has been completely purified. Those great souls who know the Supreme One, they are liberated from suffering and delusion. Yes, they become immortal.

Remember that in Hinduism immortality does not mean immortal life in a physical body. It means the Inner Self becomes free from the process of death and rebirth, relaxing into undying divine consciousness.

The somber Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman liked to compare God to a spider. It was meant to be creepy image, suggesting a malevolent being who captures us in an inescapable web and eats us alive. The Upanishads use the image of a spider repeatedly but in a different sense.

To the seers, the Supreme spins the entire universe out of its innate being, just as a spider generates a web from its own mouth. At the end of a world cycle, the Supreme One dissolves the universe back into itself. The nature of that awesome eternal being is far beyond the ability of our intellects to understand. Yet the unseeable one is the very one pervading awareness in which our awareness abides, our own innermost truth.

We cannot see Nirguna Brahman, yet we are Nirguna Brahman!

Unthinkable Truth

Nirguna Brahman is " the Godhead behind God" that the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart experienced in deep meditation. It is absolute Reality itself, pure self-existent being. Any attempt to describe it falls flat. Even the words I just used are a dim reflection of its glory. The supreme One is totally beyond our imagination. The human mind can't begin to grasp it.

What we can do is transcend our own minds, shift back into the pure awareness within ourselves, and simply experience the reality. It can be known but it can't be communicated in words- though mystics never tire of trying!

In Hinduism, this transcendent being is symbolized by the sound " Om". Om is produced by running the Sanskrit letters a, u, and m together. The Mandukya Upanishad says that "A" stands for the waking state. " U" signifies the dream state. "M" stands for deep sleep. And the slight pause, the little piece of silence that follows your speaking the sound Om and the precedes your repeating it again- that pregnant silence is Nirguna Brahman. It's the " nothing" that contains everything.

Embracing Transcendence

This experience transported Ramakrishna into one of the highest meditative states a human being can achieve. He experienced the living reality of Brahman, the all-pervading essence of awareness that exists beyond thought. Ramakrishna became so firmly grounded in this transcendent state when Naren challenged him to show him God, the master was able to transmit the actual experience of divine being to the unsuspecting young man.

Let me hasten to make a point here, so you don't get the wrong impression. Unlike Naren, precious few of us go to meet a guru and find ourselves thrown into the highest mystical states. Most of us spend quite a few years performing spiritual practices before we get to a point where we can receive the guru's transmission.

Ramakrishna later explained that Naren was in fact a very highly evolved soul who had selflessly entered the physical plane to serve humanity. His European training temporarily led him away from his innate spirituality. All Ramakrishna had to do to put him back on track was "reawaken" a cosmic state of awareness Naren had already achieved in previous existences!

You will understand Hinduism if you can grasp this concept: There is only Supreme Reality, called Brahman- But Brahman has two modes, nirguna and saguna. Nirguna means without qualities. Saguna means with qualities. Nirguna Brahman is the transcendent Supreme Being contacted only in the highest states of meditation. Saguna Brahman is God or Goddess as we know and love 

Him or Her. This is the deity we can picture in our minds. The one who helps our problems and saves us in emergencies. The one whose loving embrace we feel in prayer.

Try understanding it this way. If  Physicist was called in to describe you, she would list the fields of matter and energy that constitute your body. It would be a very impersonal description . But if a psychologist was given the same job, he would list your many personality characteristics. Some yogis in very deep meditation experience God as an impersonal absolute. Others, whose awareness is focused at another plane, experience God as a loving, caring personality.

It's that elephant again. One blind man has it by the tail. The other is running his fingers over its flapping ear !

A Rock in the Eye

Ramakrishna was a priest of the Hindu goddess Kali. It was his responsibility to care for the statue of the goddess in the Dakshineshvar Temple, to bring offerings to her and chant her mantras.

Ramakrishna took his duties very seriously (his brief forays into other religions, which I mentioned in Chapter 6, " One God with Many Names ", notwithstanding). He hardly had a life apart from the goddess. He would speak about her, sing about her, meditate on her and worship her in virtually every waking moment. He experienced the statute of Kali as actually alive and would see her leap down from the altar to dance around the temple.

A tantric master named Bhairavi Ma noticed Ramakrishna's extraordinary devotion and began calling people's attention to the presence of the great saint among them. As an advanced adept, she could see that his intense devotion was not only giving Ramakrishna divine visions but carrying him into very high meditative states.

Then a master named Tota Puri visited the Kali temple. He was an adept in the Advaita Vedanta tradition. This, to remind you, is the tradition of Adi Shankaracharya which encourages mediators to go beyond every trace of duality (See Chapter 9, " Truth Is a Multi-Layer Cake"). Tota Puri scolded Ramakrishna for his attachment to Kali's form. He explained that if Ramakrishna really wanted to know the goddess's true nature, he must go beyond the image of her he cherished in his mind.

Tota Puri took a sharp rock and pierced Ramakrishna's forehead at the "third eye", the point between his eyebrows. " Next time you go into meditation", the Vedantin instructed ", focus behind this point. If a picture of Kali appears in your mind, take a sword and hack her to pieces".

Ramakrishna was shocked at this advice, but he obeyed. When he next sat for meditation, he brought his full awareness to his ajna chakra, the center behind the eyebrows. When he saw his beloved Kali approach, he destroyed the image, moving through the visual image he held of her in his into the formless reality beyond.

God Is Mind Blowing

I don't think there's any schoolchild in the state of Bengal who doesn't know the rest of the story.

Naren was sitting on the floor when he posed his challenge to the temple priest. Ramakrishna lifted his foot and brushed Naren's forehead with his toe. Remember in Chapter 8, " Turning on Your Inner Light", when I told you about shaktipat, the shot of energy some disciples get from their gurus? Well, Naren got a dose of shaktipat. A massive dose. He was pitched into cosmic consciousness, his awareness merging into the living universe all around him. It was ecstatic!

Then, Naren suddenly remembered his poor widowed mother, who should starve if he wasn't there to support her. In that moment, his consciousness imploded back into his body. He was Naren Datta again. Or rather, he had just become the man history would remember as Swami Vivekananda, the leading disciple of one of the greatest Hindu masters of recent centuries, Ramakrishna Paramahansa.

Naren- called Swami Vivekananda after he took the vows of a Hindu renunciate- would turn the tables on his schoolmasters. He would be the first swami in modern times to visit Europe and America, teaching the Santana Dharma, the eternal religion of Hinduism. He would met with spectacular success abroad, introducing tens of thousands of eager Western students to yoga and meditation.

But for our purpose here we need to understand exactly what happened in that extraordinary moment when the master touched Naren's forehead. And to do that we need to understand Ramakrishna's own spiritual history.

A Divine Challenge

To express his disdain, Naren would go to Hindu pandits-men who spent a great deal of time talking about God-and ask, " Can you show me God?" Inevitably they would regretfully they couldn't.

Then one day a friend took Naren to visit a local priest at the Kali temple in Howrah. " Can you show me God?" Naren haughtily demanded.

" Of course!" Ramakrishna Paramahansa replied.