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God, in His
Highest feature
From Endless Love by Ravindra Svarupa Das.
Submitted by Manoj
I never heard anything as welcome as the lecture after the chanting. The devotee spoke very strongly about the need to become free from material desires. He laid down four regulative principles, the pillars of spiritual life: no meat-eating, no intoxication, no illicit sex, no gambling. I know that many people who hear this in a Krsna temple are put off. I was attracted at once. At last, I thought, someone is willing to tell the truth.
Then the devotee began to explain how control of the senses was practically possible. Mere negation or suppression of material desire, he said, will not work. The senses require engagement: if you try to stop the material activities of your senses without replacing those activities with something superior, you will quickly fall down. But if you give your senses superior spiritual engagement, your material activities will naturally cease, and you will remain fixed in consciousness. Spiritual life, he said, begins with control of the tongue: eating for sense gratification and talking of material things bind us firmly to material existence. Of course, it is virtually impossible to stop eating or talking. But if we eat only the spiritual food offered to Krsna and chant and talk only about Krsna, then our senses have spiritual engagement and automatically cease their material activities. Similarly, the devotee explained, all the other senses can be engaged in the spiritual activity of devotional service.
For the first time I had heard a reasonable account of how to become free from material desires. The devotee had, as if talking directly to me, explained my own failure and told me how to succeed. The lecture was so sensible, and the devotees and their temple were so attractive, that I began that week to chant Hare Krsna, and I returned to the temple next Sunday with enthusiasm.
If I had realized how coherent the philosophy of Krsna consciousness was, I might have been able to deduce from the lecture on sense control that it was integral with an extremely personal conception of God. Without such a conception, the idea of "spiritual activity" or "transcendental engagement of the senses" becomes meaningless. If God has no name, form, or qualities, how can we talk about Him? If He is not an individual person, how can we serve Him? If the impersonalists are right, then chanting and hearing about Krsna or serving Krsna are material activities, and they would not purify our senses and gradually uproot our material desires.
I naturally assumed, however, that the devotees were impersonalists, like me. They were speaking strongly to the contrary, but it took some exposure for their words to penetrate the barrier of my own impersonalism. Their conception of God, or Krsna, was so concrete, so specific in its detail, that I assumed it had to be taken as a symbol or qualified in some other way. Krsna's luminous blue complexion, the peacock feather on His fine black hair, the silver flute raised to the smiling lips-surely these were material images, at best a manifestation in the world of time and space of something originally unmanifest, before which all words and images must fail. If we brought such words and images to the Supreme, then wouldn't we be limiting it by our mundane conceptions?
All my preconceptions were destroyed, however, when at the love feast I overheard a devotee say to someone: "Oh, no, you don't understand. Krsna is beyond that light! The clear light is emanating from the transcendental body of Krsna!" Instantly, all the different pieces of the Krsna conscious philosophy I had heard came together coherently. And in my mind the conceptual edifice of impersonal philosophy came crashing down as though someone had put a bomb under it.
The devotees presented a powerful case. I had thought that a personal conception would have limited the Supreme, but I found their arguments that the impersonal conception was the most limiting of all to be completely persuasive. For what is the difference between God defined completely by negations and no God at all? I recalled the ease with which I had passed from nihilism to impersonalism.) What is great about a big zero? It is the impersonalists, the devotees argued, who impose their material conceptions on the Supreme, not the personalists. The impersonalists assume that if God has form, it must be a material form like ours; if He has activities and qualities, they must be material activities and qualities. Upon hearing about God's name' form, qualities, and activities, the impersonalists immediately limit Him by thinking of them as material. Therefore, they deny all these attributes and reduce God down to a nullity. Because they are enmeshed in the material conception of life, they cannot comprehend that there can be spiritual name, spiritual form, spiritual qualities, and spiritual activities. The devotees of God accept such transcendental variegatedness. They admit that God has an impersonal feature, but they affirm that He also possesses, beyond that, an eternal personal feature of transcendental name, form, qualities, and activities full of bliss and knowledge. In this way, there are no limits placed upon the Supreme. Specific form does not limit God, for He has unlimited transcendental forms (but of all such forms, that of Krsna is the highest).
I found these arguments unassailable. True, it was still amazing to think that God was, in His highest feature, a bluish youth, tending cows in His spiritual abode-but then, on the other hand, shouldn't God be amazing, the most amazing of all?
The detailed artistic depictions of Krsna I saw in the temple were, more than just accurate representations of Him; they were nondifferent from Him. This was a feature of His absolute or spiritual nature. Krsna, the devotees explained, is absolute, or nondual. The variety of the spiritual world is not affected by the duality that characterizes material variety. When, for example, I say the word water, it doesn't quench my thirst, because in the world of duality the object and its name are different. But in the spiritual world there is no such duality. I say Krsna and Krsna is fully present. As He is fully present in His name, Krsna is also fully present in His picture or statue. Because of such nonduality, we can associate with Krsna directly through His name, or through the deity, and we become purified by that association (I knew this to be factually true: after a few weeks of chanting, I was beginning to give up my bad habits; the clamor of material desire was subsiding.)
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