God is totally a product of man’s imagination. This idea exists outside man but most of the men are endowed with a faculty to imagine him. By inspiration and hard work some people are able to experience him much more than others.
Man has been made in God’s image; that is, a lot of attributes of God exist in man. Man can elevate his being much higher than a common man’s level. Specially gifted and hard-working men lift themselves further.
Pain in human life, generally, comes from the world. The tragedy of man is that he has to live in a world which has been created by his predecessor fellow human beings, while he bears the many attributes of God when he is born. Man is not a God, but God-like. If there were no world, man could reach a much higher level of spirituality than he generally does. It is the world that instills greed, unfairness, unnecessary painful competition, hatred of other human beings, lust for material things, wars, etc. Without the world man would be in a near-divine position. Without the world man’s concentration on God would be great. As the English poet Blake said, “If the doors of perception were cleared, one would see things as they are, infinite.” So, pain is an unavoidable part of human life. But truly gifted people see the beauty of the universe hidden behind this pain.
I look at human life in a non-dualistic way. Everything is one-piece. That is, man’s and universe’s physical infrastructure is based on the same elementary-particle physics. The so-called mind is a human quality, but there may be other phenomena in physical universe that may have similar attributes. Human mind is based on ideas and experiences. It is the faculty of creating ideas that distinguishes humans from animal kind and botanical world, two other “living” entities on earth. The facility to create ideas in human consciousness reportedly underwent a big boost in the expansion of cognition some 70,000 years ago. The history of modern man, Homo Sapiens, is the history of the interactions of their ideas about themselves and their physical surroundings and their experiences. We have different ideas now than we had thousands of years ago. God is an idea that transcends all other ideas.
The tragic irony of human life is that it is on one hand endowed with God-like attributes but on the other hand it has to live through the worldly pain. Obviously, gifted people enhance spirituality over pain through religion, science, and art.
Suffern, New York, July 29, 2017, Rev. 5.20.18
maharaj.kaul@yahoo.com
