Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Delusion … how we cheat ourselves

Just had a talk with a Sri Lankan friend of mine: he mentioned his uncle, a Theosophist and one whom he considered to be delusional. My reply was that each one of us, in some manner or other, is delusional.

It brought to the forefront the idea that we all really are delusional, each living in his or hers own made-up world of reality, each probing the world with a set of standards that give rise to judgements like “he is delusional”. The delusion of the person judged is as real to him as our ‘reality’ is to us.

My delusion is that there is a God. That a power greater than our mind or abilities is guiding the universe through its pace. For want of a better word, God is what all of us call him/her, it. and then we choose to put onto this great power a tag of our own making based on what we know of him/her/it. It could Allah, Jesus, Yahweh, Krishna, Buddha…the list is endless.

My Lord and Lady, Sai Baba says there is only one God and the wise know Him by many names. To add to that I would like to say the foolish know Him by just the one name and believe it is the only right one.

Now the various religions give their own ‘delusional’ interpretation of what God is.

What is God?
My take on this delusion

I settle for the “Omniscient, Omnipresent and Omnipotent” with the additional rider “The Great Director of Life”.

Just being omniscient (all knowing) means God knows all
Just being Omnipresent mean God is everywhere
Just being Omnipotent means God is all powerful

This would make God the basis of everything. The operating system of the universe if you will have it.

Yet there is definite design to what is happening around us. It was Albert Einstein who said that God does not play dice with the universe, and He doesn’t (pardon me for using the He epithet – it is easier than typing out all of them). He lovingly decides the path for each of us, and for all of us. For clans, for tribes, for nations, for civilisations. Not a leaf moves in the wind without His knowledge or permission.

When we take the sometimes conflicting and contradictory aspects of God in the various religions and try to make sense of them all, it is little wonder that a large chuck of humanity would prefer not to know Him.

God is the function inside of us that determines our actions through the conscience. He is the doer. We believe it to be ourselves doing the action but that is not so. Think of three separate entities: the body, the mind and soul.

The body is the equipment, the mind the information gathering/analytical function and the soul (that untarnished pervading thing that makes up the stuff of the universe) the actual thing that decides what we do, say, think, etc.

Thus He is Omnipresent, in all living beings and even in the inanimate, expressing Himself at different levels of consciousness. Each form that we see is impelled by the will of God, to the extent whatever we have compiled as our experiences is just a diary of events of God’s action.

At the lowest understanding we are drones that God uses to enjoy His own creation. By giving leeway to the mind, we develop a personality and an ego. That is our collective delusion.

Now we can group ourselves in what I would call delusional cluster or belief/creed factions. Then we decide our factional delusions is the right one and the rest of them are wrong. This is called religion but are nothing more than sects ort cults.

There is only one true religion, the religion of the heart. When one sees another, and all others, as an aspect of himself, and as an aspect of God, he can’t help being good to all. For being anything else would mean you are treating yourself as you have treated the ‘other’. There is no other.

God is the Primal Cause and the Primal Substance of the Universe. The cause we can understand but it is a little harder to understand the substance.

When God created, what did he create the universe out of. Himself/herself/itself. All of the Universe is but God. Than everything we see, hear, touch, etc is but God. How can it be otherwise?

At a higher understanding, we are God impersonating as humans. My Lord and Lady Sai Baba says he is God and so is every one else. The only difference is that He knows he is God and we don’t.

That’s it. We don’t know we are God. All we have to do is to know we are God.

To know is to accept as the truth, the reality. Once we ‘know’ in it fullest sense, we will be God.

More later

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