How can those with an impersonal understanding of God be helped to taste bhakti?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

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mind. So when we experience the sweetness of bhakti, we understand that Krishna is a person, but for those who have not yet tasted that sweetness, how can we explain to them that God is a person with whom we can relate? Yes, actually there is, there is, in the relationship with God, there is a cultural level, there is a philosophical level, and there is a spiritual level.
So our cultural conception of God will be shaped by whatever background we are coming from. Some people may come from nihilistic backgrounds, some people may come from monistic backgrounds, some people may come from personal backgrounds. So based on that, we will have a particular conception of God, or we may have no conception of God, whatever it is.
We rise from the cultural to the spiritual through the philosophical. So the philosophy is what takes us, some people may come to a temple also because it feels good, it’s a good thing to do, come to a temple, but then you may not have any understanding of life’s ultimate purpose. So that’s good if somebody is coming to a temple, going to a church, it’s good, but that’s simply cultural.
But when there is philosophical understanding, then actually the cultural rises to the spiritual because we see this as a process of raising our consciousness and then we come to spiritual consciousness. So in general, whatever conception a person may have, the way to rise from the cultural conception to the spiritual realization is first it is philosophically. So Sri Prabhupada in his books gives several simple reasonings.
He says that we all are persons. Personality is a fundamental fact of our existence. So if we understand that God is the source of everything, then in him also personality must be present.
Otherwise how did personality come here? Now the reason why we tend to feel that God cannot be a person is because we find that all persons are limited. You are there, I am here. And when I say God is unlimited, so how can the unlimited be a person? But then here the problem is that we are extrapolating, we are conflating or confusing two things.
That is material and personality. I’ll give example for this. Say now this room is limited.
This room has a form, it has a shape, it is limited. Now if say there is some earthquake or there is a bomb blast, this room is destroyed. Now its form will be destroyed.
The formless heap, the debris that will be there, will that formless heap be limited or unlimited? It will also be limited, isn’t it? So the limitation is not caused by form. The limitation is a feature of matter. Matter, whether it is with form or without form, it is limited.
So some people think that God in order to be unlimited cannot have a form, cannot have a personality because that is limited. But actually what caused this limitation is not form and personality, it is matter. So God is unlimited, God for being unlimited, God is unlimited not because he is formless or personality-less, God is unlimited because he is non-material.
The non-material is different from the material. The non-material can have form and can still be unlimited. The non-material can be personal and still be universal.
In the Bhakti text there are many stories about Krishna which reveal this. Krishna was a small baby on his mother’s lap and people would think, especially when Europeans first came to India and then they came to North India and they saw these pictures of Krishna where sweet boy eating butter and they said, who is this? What is he doing? This is God and he is stealing butter. They just got intellectually short-circuited.
This couldn’t digest, what is this? God is a small boy and God is stealing and he has to steal also why butter of all things? This couldn’t process it. So what happens is that actually Krishna if you look at him in a small picture of beautiful Krishna he doesn’t look like God at all. He doesn’t look like God.
He is attractive but people have this idea of God being very great. Krishna doesn’t look like God but at the same time when he was in mother Yashoda’s lap, mother Yashoda asked him open your mouth and when he opened his mouth he saw the whole universe within him. So Krishna his form looks like that of an ordinary baby but if any mother asks her child to open her mouth she is not going to see the universe there.
So Krishna he is personal and yet he can be universal. So the point is philosophically if you understand that the source of everything must have whatever features are present in the things which have come from it. So personality is present here.
Personality must be present in the source and then the source can be God can be personal and universal or personal and all pervasive because he is non-material. That way we can explain and especially by the process of bhakti even if people don’t understand just come and chant Hare Krishna experience spiritual music they will get a taste. Sometimes basically when we are trying to help people rise to a higher understanding we have to see what works.
Sometimes some people we give some proper philosophical understanding and it clicks for them. Some other people philosophy they just try to come up with some counter arguments in this and that then try to give them an experience or try to just get them to give them some prasad let them chant Hare Krishna let them taste the sweetness of Krishna bhakti and then gradually the understanding will dawn in them. So we do our part but we should know that Krishna is also doing his part from within their hearts and eventually their understanding will dawn.
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