God

Swami Bhoomananda Tirtha

Your God is all; and so is equally nothing, as He is everything; the space is nothing in particular, but is everything general and absolute. Earth is space, air also is; but space is not just all these, together or separately. God is likewise all, each; He is all existence, all conditions, objective and subjective. Should He not be your fleeting joys and hence necessarily the fleeting alternates, namely sorrows? Study and observe more, and then say He is consequentially between both and beyond. You are partial in defining Him, in locating Him, in giving Him the dimensions that is His. Do not define Him in your way. Describe Him in His manner, which should be to your purpose as well.

Like space, nothing is besides God. Everything is within Him. You are concerned more with your personal experiences, fates, vicissitudes and the like. I say He is everyone and all these. Do not look to Him separately or distinctly, in joy to lose Him in sorrow. Do not trace Him only in gentleness, to miss Him in cruelty, the inevitable contrast! You need not be cruel, but provide in your mind a place for it. Do not disallow cruelty and its associates but perceive alongside their divinity. Thus negatives and seeming contrasts, which have overtaken your mind and perception now, will lose their potential, vitality, and the mind will overtake them gradually, as does the sea the so many rivers; the space the so many spatial objects!

Mind you, the entire objectude subsists not on anything aside or besides (an object entity); it is on, in, of, by and through the subjectude alone. Your mind, equally a subjectude in your being, can similarly host all kinds of impressions of objects; be they of persons, their behaviour; of places, their effects; of events, their characters.

[This is an extract from the correspondence section that appeared in the August 1986 issue of the monthly journal ‘Vicharasetu – The Path of Introspection’]

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Societal Welfare

Any society’s prosperity is built on the joint efforts and contributions of its members. Its mental and moral welfare rests always on the austerity and dedication of those few, whose thoughts and inspiration permeates the rest. When the austere and the dedicated decline in number or quality, the society’s welfare resources  will become deplete, a fate too drastic to be ignored!

 - Swamiji