Personality of Godhead - Part Two
by Śrīla Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī Ṭhākura Prabhupāda
There is an old quarrel between those who assert that God has a material form and those who assert that God is the void – both of which are quite off the mark. It is unnecessary to pick a side in this futile and foolish debate. If humankind cannot rise above such palpably wrong ideas, we are sure to breed narrowness and sectarianism and to quarrel with one another.
We human-beings possess an intellect that is subject to error, oversight and self-deception, and that is liable to be led astray by the false testimony of our defective sense organs. And if we permit our judgement to be biased by anthropomorphic, zoomorphic and phytomorphic ideas that constitute the stock-in-trade of all human thought, we will surely become entangled in some form of idolatry.*
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* Anthropomorphism, zoomorphism and phytomorphism refer respectively to the attribution of human, animal or plant characteristics and behaviour to God.
It will serve no good purpose if we seek to drag down into the jurisdiction of blundering, unspiritual thought the Entity who transcends such thought. Is the range of human thought really so unlimited that it can legitimately aspire to accommodate God? It is surely foolish to suppose that the apparent aspect is necessarily more important than the real entity.
The mischief that is likely to result from any attempt to evaluate the facts of spiritual experience when they are presented to the faculty of human judgement in an apparently tangible form by the inconclusive logic of mundane experience, may be illustrated by the following amusing story:
A poor widow put her boy through school and, by dint of begging from door to door, managed to find the wherewithal for his maintenance. The child of course began his studies with the alphabet, “A, B, C...”. After he had completed half a dozen years of schooling, the boy was promoted to study Euclid’s geometry. One day his mother overheard him as he recited a sentence from that mathematical treatise: “Let A, B, C be a triangle.”
Hearing this, the widow assumed that the boy had been unable to go beyond the alphabet even after so many years of school. She had been at her wits’ end to find the means of his subsistence during this long period, and fell into despair.
The poor widow made a great error of judgement. What she failed to understand was that the alphabet in the two cases were not the same, although they seemed identical to her.
We must not assume that the entity of the Absolute is a finite, fragmented object. Nor is He an unintelligible section of the Whole, although by the constitution of our present equipment for the acquisition of knowledge, we do not have access to the whole truth of anything.
There is both similarity and dissimilarity between the language and experience of self-realized souls and the language and experience of ignorant, worldly people. That dissimilarity is of a nature that cannot be understood by our present, defective judgement. If our existence was completely self-sufficient, there would be no God and no necessity of worship. We can be relieved of our native ineligibility for worship only by the causeless mercy of the Transcendental Object of worship.
Adapted from The Gaudiya, Volume 45, Number 10
by the Rays of The Harmonist team
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SB 1.5.14
tato ’nyathā kiñcana yad vivakṣataḥ
pṛthag dṛśas tat-kṛta-rūpa-nāmabhiḥ
na karhicit kvāpi ca duḥsthitā matir
labheta vātāhata-naur ivāspadam
Word for word:
tataḥ — from that; anyathā — apart; kiñcana — something; yat — whatsoever; vivakṣataḥ — desiring to describe; pṛthak — separately; dṛśaḥ — vision; tat-kṛta — reactionary to that; rūpa — form; nāmabhiḥ — by names; na karhicit — never; kvāpi — any; ca — and; duḥsthitā matiḥ — oscillating mind; labheta — gains; vāta-āhata — troubled by the wind; nauḥ — boat; iva — like; āspadam — place.
Translation:
Whatever you desire to describe that is separate in vision from the Lord simply reacts, with different forms, names and results, to agitate the mind, as the wind agitates a boat which has no resting place.
Purport:
Śrī Vyāsadeva is the editor of all descriptions of the Vedic literatures, and thus he has described transcendental realization in different ways, namely by fruitive activities, speculative knowledge, mystic power and devotional service. Besides that, in his various Purāṇas he has recommended the worship of so many demigods in different forms and names. The result is that people in general are puzzled how to fix their minds in the service of the Lord; they are always disturbed about finding the real path of self-realization. Śrīla Nāradadeva is stressing this particular defect in the Vedic literatures compiled by Vyāsadeva, and thus he is trying to emphasize describing everything in relation with the Supreme Lord, and no one else. In fact, there is nothing existent except the Lord. The Lord is manifested in different expansions. He is the root of the complete tree. He is the stomach of the complete body. Pouring water on the root is the right process to water the tree, as much as feeding the stomach supplies energy to all parts of the body. Therefore, Śrīla Vyāsadeva should not have compiled any Purāṇas other than the Bhāgavata Purāṇa because a slight deviation from that may create havoc for self-realization. If a slight deviation can create such havoc, then what to speak of deliberate expansion of the ideas separate from the Absolute Truth Personality of Godhead. The most defective part of worshiping demigods is that it creates a definite conception of pantheism, ending disastrously in many religious sects detrimental to the progress of the principles of the Bhāgavatam, which alone can give the accurate direction for self-realization in eternal relation with the Personality of Godhead by devotional service in transcendental love. The example of the boat disturbed by whirling wind is suitable in this respect. The diverted mind of the pantheist can never reach the perfection of self-realization, due to the disturbed condition of the selection of object.