WHAT IS GOD LIKE?

 

 

 

 

 

In the previous writings, we have been going through how the views of different religions differ from one another, concerning issues like will we be born back to this world again and again and what happens after we die. We have seen that the teachings of the New Testament and the Bible are noticeably different from the views of the Oriental religions, but also from the ones of the New Age movement.

   But what a believer of New Age and Hinduism in particular thinks about God?  Does their view differ very much from the view that has prevailed in the Western countries for centuries? We will try to study this issue below.

 

THE Divinity of all

 

If the Hindu definition of God is briefly described, we can compress it into the following form: God (or in Hinduism Brahman) is the same as the world. Hindus really believe in the divinity of everything (pantheism) and that everything – plants, animals, nature, and mankind – are parts of one and the same divine essence.

   This means that people are gods or parts of a god, but the same applies also to cows, apes, snakes, and elephants, which are also worshipped as such. So to Hindus, God is everything that exists, and there is nothing that is not considered to be divine. The only thing that can prevent us from seeing our divine nature, is maya, a delusion, under which most of us live.

   The same issue becomes very clear to us in the next quote. Rabi Maharaj, a former Hindu guru and well-known yogi who started to meditate already at the age of five, describes this view and how he thought that "God was everything and everything was God". He compresses in it the ordinary belief, in which millions of Hindus still believe today:

 

Snakes are gods to Hindus. I myself held a living, excellent macajuel snake in my room and worshipped it. In the same way, I also worshipped the ape god, the elephant god, and above all the cow god. To me God was everything and everything was God – except miserable non-caste people. My world was full of spirits, gods, and occult powers. Since my childhood, my goal was to give them everything that belonged to them. (1)

 

Rabi goes on about how he also regarded himself as God – which, of course, is a logical conclusion from the view described above, according to which everything is divine. He worshipped himself and took as his goal also to teach the same view to other Hindus. He did it so that people, after having realised this, could be freed from the never-ending circle of reincarnation:

 

I really sat before the mirror and worshipped myself. And why not? I was God. In the lovely and beautiful Bhagavad-Gita, Krishna had promised this divine information to everyone who practised yoga. This was nectar which the thinkers drank. It was not a question of becoming God; it was simply noticing who I really was and who I had always been. When I walked on the streets, I felt that I was the master of the universe and that all my creatures bowed before me. (…)

   My goal was to teach gifted Hindus the truth about their divinity and release them from their chains of ignorance. I would become a guru, because a guru is a teacher, and without his assistance Hindus will not have any hope to be freed from the wheel of reincarnation. (2)

 

 

Chapter 1 - Problems with panteism
Chapter 2 - The Bible's descripton of God