There is one God. Each Deity is the personification of a different aspect of God, as if God puts on a different attire to present another quality of His/Her divine nature. The Gods are the laws of nature, the mechanisms of existence. You are one with all that is, with the source of all existence, with God. Each aspect, each personification, of God is within you.
Generally, your relationship with the Gods starts with viewing God as if outside of yourself. You revere God as distant… as something beyond you. However, your relationship with God culminates in becoming one with God… in finding the Gods within you. This, of course, is not done through the superficial personality level, but instead within the depth of your being. The different Gods then are different aspects of your psyche and of your physiology. Cultivate your relationship with God with the intent of moving in that direction instead of holding God at a distance.
There will be a time when you actually have a choice of taking that final step of mergence with God, or keeping the very slightest separation so that you can revere God as other. However, that is another subject entirely and one that is not possible to really understand until that time comes.
For now, lean in the direction of finding God within you. But know it is a process. It evolves and grows over time, just as it takes time for the seed to become the tree. Patiently sit before each aspect of divinity and explore your relationship with that God or Goddess. In time you will merge. You will find that divinity in you as you… as some aspect of your being, your psyche, your physiology.
This is indeed a subtle process. For example, finding Karthikeya within you will not mean your personality transforms into what you may think a Commander and Chief of the Army of the Gods would be like. How He emerges through you will be unique to you. For example, some will remain soft-spoken and appear meek. Others may be commanding in their demeanor. To find Karthikeya within you will transform you in profound yet subtle ways.
Such discovery is attained primarily through meditation, yet proper reflection and discernment will facilitate the process… very much so.
This interests me immensely and I ponder this often. Raised a westerner and Catholic, with no education or culturing in the Veda or familiarity of the names of the Gods, it was always a challenge to “go with” a feeling. I wondered if it was a positive or negative thing that I had no basis who Parvati or Shiva or Ganesh were. I had no pre-conceievd notion of what to access or emote. Reading about the Gods and Goddesses of India helped culture me; I loved the stories, but remained in my head. What began to really touch me was to close my eyes during the pujas and feel the words/sounds. I have no idea intellectually what is being said. It justs seems immense, powerful, all encompassing…there is no choice other than surrender. There really is no choice. If I plugged my ears like the shipmates of Ulysses and tied myself to a mast the sheer power of the vibration surrounds me. God finds me and cuts my ropes. Thank you Brahmarshi. Jai Guru Dev.
Excuse my ignorance and limited understanding, but that sounds pretty darn cool!
Your words bring a level of understanding as I explore my own divinity. I felt a tear roll down my cheek and knew in my heart that your message reached the depths of my heart. Thank you. Sue O.
Brahmarshi, thank you for presenting us with such exquisite wisdom. My relationship with the different aspects of divinity in the forms of the Devas and Deities of the Hindu tradition has grown tremendously over the last couple years in part because of my exposure through your teachings and in part because of a deep curiosity. This is an area seldom ventured upon by a person of strong Christian background, while in actuality such exploration has deepened my relationship with Christ. I almost feel as if Christ has been leading me through such an exploration showing me the universal nature of Divinity which isn’t separate from Christ but a part of his, our, unified consciousness. I think your ability to express these Divine attributes or Laws of Nature and how they relate to our own soul, psyche, and physiology is so powerful because of the potential in these teachings to bring together deferent religious or spiritual beliefs. To take what some may perceive as a Hindu, poly-theistic philosophy, religion, or spirituality and teach the unification of that with one God within us, as us, is extremely beautiful and powerful. And you make it sound so simple, haha. Thank you so much,
Erik
I am sorry, back again… but I just reread this and I am certain I will be rereading it again and again.
Do we _really_ have a choice?
If there is surrender, there is total surrender. Can we surrender 10 percent…50 percent….99 percent? When we take the leap we have to totally take the leap, 100 percent. Once our foot is off the edge of the cliff we can’t dangle there too long.
Is there a moment when it is all before you, you look and say…’nahhh, no thank you”? We don’t surrender free will, but …we can say “no”?
Is that what You mean by taking a choice? I am also thinking in terms of karma and dharma and how that plays into it. I am also thinking of the group consciousness on Mt. Soma and how that effects an outcome. What of the role of fear?
I know I can think this to death. The discernment for me, the thought arises that the choice comes down to surrender. Do you trust the process, the people, the place, the “time”, the Priest, your Guru, God? Once you do, there is no other choice. Karma, dharma, the Guru, group consciousness, the stars/planets, the Rishis of the ages, the Knowledge, the Gods, “the Force”, whatever, all of it supports whatever is held. Beauty is held there. Purity. Love. Structure. Expansiveness.
There should be no fear. Only beauty can ensue… still… I am afraid sitting here, but vastly less so.
Jai Guru Dev.
Everything can be understood on different levels. Surrender can be a mood, emotion, philosophy, attitude, or something much deeper. Ultimately true surrender is an attribute of a state of physiology… a level of consciousness. The words used to describe it may be the same on all levels, but the meaning of those words will be very very different. Truth lies in the gap between …
Christ of course knew all this. What people did with Christ’s teachings is another matter. It is like the game telephone, but the words of Christ were repeated and written down after hundreds of years of being passed from one person to the next and translated from one language to the next. Even when people repeat what I said, when it gets back to me it is often, in my mind, not at all what I said. Both great humility and dedication are required in the pursuit of what Christ really said and meant.
Beautiful and exciting to see how it all turns out.
Today for me has been a day of great contemplation. These blogs mean a lot to me, and it has come alive recently because of the expression of thought it has afforded me. I truly do not want to waste anyone’s time, particularly your time Brahmarshi, with the comments I post. In fact I have deleted the first lines of this comment many times and rewritten in attempts to be efficient with my words. Your words of humility have reverberated with me all day. So many thoughts back and forth in my head all day, I could just cry! I want so very much to deeply understand relationship with the Divine. The fact is I do not know, and if I’m being honest, I cling to a personified relationship with Christ, and I find myself doing the same thing with the expressions of Deities and Devas of the Hindu tradition. Is this ok for now? Doesn’t their personified values make them more accessible to us, more understandable, and relatable? Will growth within our own consciousness take care of the relationship itself? I feel as though I am losing something to view the divine on a quantum mechanical level rather than a person level. Is this karma I must work through? I hope what I write is relevant. I had yet another realization today of how much I need you Brahmarshi. I had this feeling all day of your comments making me step back and really take a look at what I have to say and my notions about things. You guidance is such a blessing, particularly when you challenge my current thoughts or bring awareness to that mistakes which I may not even realize I am making. I would like to say again, that this blog is allowing me to work things out so to speak and I deeply appreciate being able to do so. Thanks, Erik
It is so interesting to me how I feel myself learning and growing, from your words, of course, Brahamarshi. Also from the comments made by others. It is as you described in the Golden Frog, and how I began to discover in class. I find myself moved by Erik’s recent posts, much in the same way I was by Orin’s first post some time ago. It is beautiful to see and feel people awakening to the knowledge you present.
Still, I find the right choices hard to make each day – to find the time to meditate, to extract myself from the mundane reality of daily life, to live as you so eloquently direct, to know God. I know what to do. I believe. I intellectually understand. But still I struggle. Some days I see the beauty of it, the promise. Other days it is just so hard.
This comment delivered the idea of God and the Deities to me on a whole new level, which I will need to sit with and contemplate. It is interesting how certain comments are nice and feel good, and others seem to hit a chime in my physiology, and make me stop in my tracks and think about things.
The personified God versus the quantum mechanical… The persona versus the physiology. The soul verus the body. The kite versus the tail. The sail versus the boat. Science and psychology… the king and the queen of the universe. The flat absolute is the carrier wave for the song of the soul. The mind and the heart.
The spiritual path is the path of integration. A rational and scientific understanding of life and existence is a lamp that shows the way lest superstition and false understandings creep in. When, through the ages, scientific discoveries seemed to refute God, those discoveries, related to better, assisted us in understanding God.
Through discernment we cast aside false dogmas just as a child washes away the mud from a beautiful rock he discovered in his very own back yard.