In Quest of GOD

Early doubts and Search.

From early on I was curious and wanted to know what people meant by God. In South India we have many temples and in each the Idol is known by different name. The question in my mind was "Are there so many Gods? If so how can they all be one, because it is said God is One". The qualities attributed to God viz: omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscience, Infinite without beginning or end. God is Love and God is Mercy. How could then men of religion fight with and kill one another? Such doubts haunted me and to find an answer I used to attend religious discourses. The greatness of God, the qualities of god and stories about gods were narrated at these discourses but none touched on the point worrying me 'why so many gods and why the killings.'

At the end of one discourse by Swami. Paramanada of Swami Vivekananda Society, I approached the Swamiji and asked what God really is. He answered the average man cannot understand the abstract nature of God and it is for those temples are built, festivities designed and discourses held. God reveals his real nature to those who pine to know him. He evaded my question why there are so many religions and why the quarrels and killings. I began reading the epics Ramayana, and Mahabharata. I read the Upanishads. I read the unabridged Holy Bible. I read extracts from the Holy Koran. All related to great men and women of the past and their lives. In all these, on close observation, you see an invisible force at work. I wondered if this was God.

Once when we were travelling by train in North India, and were talking about God and the role of a Guru in realising God, the elderly gentle man sitting opposite said "the Guru can teach and preach and take you to the brink of knowing God, but it is for you to take the ultimate head-long plunj to know God". What he meant was not clear to me. I pondered and pondered. What he meant was that God is not reachable nor knowable. One can only know him by meditating on that entity with the qualities attributed to God. This means there is God but not reachable nor knowable.

I started meditating to know what, if any, has all the qualities attributed to God. After quite some time it came to my mind that the primordial energy that pervaded the universe should be the one that our seers referred to as God.

I now realised who Bahama, Vishnu and Maheswara refer to. The creative life force is referred to as Brahma, life sustaining forces as Vishnu and the destructive forces as Maheswara. These three major forms of Energy are sustained by minor forms viz, Heat, Light, Electricity, Magnetism, Gravity, Chemical etc. As any school boy knows, all these are interchangeable. Nothing lost nothing gained.

Concentration on this leads to the realisation that all we see, men, women, beasts, plants, insects, reptiles, rivers, mountains, storms, cyclones, earth quakes etc are the outcome of the change of forms of this Energy which results from the interplay of different forces.
Birth(start of life) and death(end of life) are the beginning and end of a process of change which is inevitable in the cosmic order of things.

Meditating further one realises primordial energy, personified, is God. Energy has all qualities attributed to God in all religions. Thus everything is God, and God is in everything as revealed by statements 'Sivoham' - I am Siva - and 'Tat Twam Asi'- that you are - in our scriptures.

Why are we afraid of death? Ignorance of this basic reality and attachment to worldly things. Death is nothing to be feared at but for the bodily suffering from the gradual decay of the organism - the result of aging. It is only the end of the process. One should bear suffering - it is possible by ignoring it and concentrating on GOD. Sovoham