TWO

WHAT IS GOD?

Without a spiritual belief in a Divine Being, in the knowledge of whom, and obedience to whom, mortal welfare alone consists, the human race must degenerate.

—Carlyle

THROUGH THE CENTURIES millions of words have been uttered and written on the subject of God. But we do not seem to come any nearer to an understanding of this problem. Almost every people and race have had their own God, which means their own idea of God. These many varieties of deity are so surprising in their differences that a sceptic might well say, “All your gods are hallucinations, figures of your imagination.” In fact, during the nineteenth century, when scientific minds made a study of comparative religions, they discovered hundreds of gods which have been worshipped by both primitive and civilized peoples. Therefore they came to the ironic conclusion that man creates God in his own image.

If you go to a primitive tribe in Central Africa, you will see God carved on a piece of wood, glaring at you with a frightful face from the local temple. The people who live there find in that barbaric countenance their conception of a higher or supernatural power. That is their idea of God.

On the other hand, if you come into a modern city, you will see churches dedicated to the worship of God as Spirit, which means God without form, intangible—a conception far removed from the God of Central Africa. You will also find writers of today like Aldous Huxley, who describes God as “a rich feeling in the pit of the stomach.”

Now it cannot be that each of these gods is the true God. There can only be One, if by God we mean the Supreme Creator, He Who created the universe, though it may be that there are lesser beings which men take to be God by mistake.

If you go to a country like India, you will find again the same differences and the same multiplicity of deities. But the more enlightened, thoughtful Indians have reduced the whole problem to a question of choosing between a personal and an impersonal God.

God means many things even to the same person at different stages of his evolution. To the child, He is almost invariably a personal deity, some individualized Being Who is usually pictured with a human or angelic figure, someone to whom he can pray and of whom he can make requests. But if the child grows up and develops intellectually and spiritually, the old concept fades away, and a new one replaces it. God is then seen as a Power, not as a human image, but rather a Power which permeates the universe.

The picture which the pious worship must be succeeded by the Presence which they feel. God must be discovered within; it is not enough to know Him without. When seeker and the sought blend in eternal unity, then knowledge becomes perfected and aspiration fulfilled. For the doom of spiritual ignorance is not to be written forever on the brow of man.

The most advanced scientists, representing man in his higher development, are beginning to find that life exists everywhere and is present in every atom of matter throughout the universe. They picture God as this infinite power and life current.

If you look at orthodox religion, no matter in what country or what faith, you will find that the God there worshipped is usually pictured as a personal God, an individualized Being Who, they believe, rewards the adherents of that particular faith because they worship Him and praise Him. If, however, they begin to believe in the new concept of God as Power which science is bringing to the world through higher education, then faith in their original idea of a personal God tends to disappear. The two do not meet and mingle very well.

Much of the confusion in the religious world arises out of its dependence on feelings alone, unchecked by reason. There is no proper test for Truth in such dependence. We need not be naively uncritical of religion even when we accept its fourth-dimensional perspective of life’s meaning. The doors are shut, the bolts have been pushed in, and our pious friends are no longer free to entertain a true thought. Every mystic can get up and say, “I have seen God,” but how does he know that he has seen God? There is no label, and if there were, that would not necessarily prove its wearer to be God. It is a subject which has unquestionably been more misunderstood than perhaps any other. No, we must find a universal test for Truth which will always be applicable, and about which there could never be any difference of opinion.

The whole concept of God depends entirely upon where you stand, and the idea that suits you is the one which helps you most. And because people change their concepts, whether as child or adult, savage or scientist—for they will change their ideas at different times and under different circumstances—we are compelled to come to the conclusion that the concept of God is a relative one. In other words, there does not seem to be any absolute, ultimate, unchanging idea.

Man does not know God as He really is, but only as he imagines Him to be. “Not with this or that attribute,” says the divine sage Krishna in the scripture of the yogis, “but in Essence.” If, however, we admit that the concept of God is purely relative and not eternal, then we must also admit that we have not found reality in such a God. We have found what we think is real, but not Reality itself.

The worshipper in a temple or mosque or church holds within his mind a picture of what he believes God to be. That picture is purely a mental image and he is worshipping that image, not Reality. This image has come down to him by tradition through hundreds of years, perhaps, and backed by the force of the great organized religions though it may be, still it is only an idea passing through his consciousness, a picture which he has held because other people have suggested it to him.

Because he is worshipping an idea, something which by its very nature is not eternal, but comes and must eventually go, as all ideas must, he has not found Reality, and from the standpoint of deep inquiry he is even worshipping an illusion, if by the word “illusion” we mean “that which is not real,” and if by “reality” we mean “that which is eternally true and abiding.”

It may seem an appalling statement to say that millions of people have been worshipping their own idea, which they take to be God. Surely, you will point out, in religious buildings we often feel a holy presence. How is it that we are awed in such a place, and that these religions have, during their best days, exercised such a spell over the people?

It is because the power which man has found in religion, the power to help him and to lift him up, has come from man himself. He himself has given himself the guidance, help, exaltation, and spiritual consolation which he believed he found in his church or in his faith or in his idea of God. When man has learnt to build a quiet church inside his own heart and to be a ministering priest to his own self, religion will have done its true work.

Man has unconsciously deceived himself into thinking that an external power, something outside himself, has come to his help or guidance. This was only his belief, and an erroneous one. Man himself, through his concentration, called upon his own inner resources, and drew out from within himself, from his own spirit, that which he thought came to him from the God whom he believed to be outside himself.

It does not matter where the power comes from so long as he gets results. He must be practical, and if man believes in external deities, and thinks that they are helping him, it is all right for him. It does not matter so long as he is ready to let this idea go when he begins the quest of Truth—when he wants to understand the inner significance of life and of the universe.

Those who are content to accept their faith from the superstitions of a past age or from the suppositions of the present one, belong to a disappearing race. Every creed must now be able to prove its point, and that not by reference to faded bibles or yellowing parchments, but by the facts of the present day, by life, science, and knowledge. The anguishing horrors of the last war have caused religion to bow before realism; they have brought the scepticism of the scientist’s laboratory into the popular life of the street.

When the time comes that man no longer wishes to remain a child, but wants to grow up and become an adult, then he must understand and neither deceive himself nor others. Then he will see that God is to be found not in any particular form, but in all forms, not in any particular place, but everywhere, not through any single vehicle, faith, cult, religion, building, or man, but in the Infinite.

You will never find God anywhere else but in those conditions; the rest is merely your idea of God, your mental picture. These are purely intellectual things, they are not God or Reality.

So if man wishes to awaken, if he wants to understand himself, he must face the fact that the real avenue to contact with God is not outside himself but within, directly inside. He must find his own way to God through and within himself. That is, if he seeks God there is no other way, but if he is looking for ideas, concepts, or mental images, then he can take what orthodox religions and cults offer him. And because most people have been content to let others do their thinking and their questing for them, they have been satisfied with those conditions.

During the past two or three centuries the mind and intelligence of man have begun to awaken at a most extraordinary rate, and he is no longer able to sit still within the mental prisons which have been built for him. He wants to know for himself. And the moment the mind begins such a quest, then there is no hope in finding other satisfaction; the ancient dogmas which convinced past generations are no longer sufficient. They no doubt suited the simpler mentality of earlier generations, but they will not suit ours. We want the truth—that which is scientifically true.

But first we must divest ourselves of the notion that truth is a creed, a set statement to be swallowed like a pill. Truth cannot be the prerogative of one age alone. The periods of Christ and of Buddha were sacred in the world’s history, but unless there is a new revelation in our own time, there cannot be a new regeneration.

New wine cannot be put into old bottles without bursting them. Truth is not for existing organizations. The world is tired of dry intellectualism. It wants to hear fresh, living voices, the voices of men who have been privileged to come face to face with God, or who can report vital spiritual experiences in our own day and age.

The scientist is the man who commands this age, and what you see around you, from the electric light to almost everything else that you touch and use in your daily life, is the result of applied science. If you will remember that the goal of the scientist is ultimately truth, you will understand what is likely to be the fate of those beliefs and dogmas upon which mankind has been fed for thousands of years. However, the scientist has only begun. At present he has reached a borderland on the very edge of another world, and now that he is there he will sooner or later have to cross over. And when he finds truth, it will be the same truth that the seer and the sage have also found, because there is only one Ultimate Truth.

If that is so, what will the scientist discover about this question of God? He has already begun to perceive that there is no room for a personal God in the universe. The source of the universe must be infinite, because the scientist knows that the universe itself cannot be measured, and the part cannot be greater than the whole, nor the creation greater than the creator. Therefore this infinite universe must have an Infinite Creator, and no form, no personalized being—which means a form—can be the Creator. The Creator is something which is beyond form, a Force if you wish. Hence God must be an Infinite Force.

The scientist will see that. He sees it now, only he will not call it God; he finds other names. Is there no room in this creation for the Creator himself? Is man so blind that because he watches the evolutionary stages through which a boot is fashioned, he shall say there is no bootmaker? Alas, it is because ignorant theologians and unseeing priests have taught him to look for a God who is but a glorified man; no such being exists and he finds it not. God is life, intelligent life force, and all the evolutionary cycles of this universe merely display the outworkings of this power, not the arbitrary moves of a man.

“I have swept the heavens with my telescope, and have not found a God,” announced Lalande. Alas! he had but to put his telescope aside, still his mind, and there God would be found.

The materialist is not to be blamed because he is unaware of ultimate truths. He is to be blamed only if he will not investigate them. If he does not try to inquire, he can never find truth. He deceives himself and wants to deceive himself. Ignorance is often excusable, but not the will to remain ignorant.

If, as the scientist has already found, matter is ultimately a unity, then all the different kinds of matter, all the elements can be resolved into a single element, and all matter into a single Force. Eventually he will be compelled to say, as he has just begun to say today: “The source of the universe is a unity out of which the multiplicity of objects and forces which we see around us have sprung.”

There is one root, a single root, and everything else has grown, developed, or evolved out of that root. The scientist will also have to admit that the Infinite Force which is God, is a single force—there is only one such Force, only one God and not two. And because it is an Infinite Force and not something which can be bottled up in a form or any shape whatsoever, he will have to look for God beyond the laboratory. I do not mean that he must fly out into space, but he will have to turn inward to his own mind, because when he has exhausted all the instruments of his laboratory, he will have to sit down and look at the man who has been using those instruments, and find his way with that mind alone.

However, if we pursue this scientific quest of Truth and find the Ultimate Force which must exist as the root of everything, we shall then discover to our astonishment that we are verifying the oldest teachings in the world, teachings which were first given verbally, and later written down on parchment, tablets, or metal plates, declaring that God, the Sun, and Light are synonymous. The Bible says the first creation was light, and after that came all other forms. In other words, God could not create his universe until he had first made light.

And if you ask how God, then a single unit in existence, created light, how could He have created it except out of Himself, out of His own Being, as a spider spins a web out of its own body? The web is not different from the spider’s body, it is really a part of it. And so God created light out of His own Being, which means that Light is none other than God, the Being of God. Light is God.

In the oldest Hindu scriptures, which are the Vedas, you will find the same statement, that in the beginning Brahma, which means “the Creator,” made light, and out of light he made all other forms. The Babylonian tablets repeat the same statement.

The Egyptian and Druid priests, among many other ancient peoples, worshipped the sun, because they regarded it as the Father of all their life. To them it was the visible proxy on earth of the invisible Deity; not God, but the agent of God. Its splendour was a living thing and its rays full of divine life.

To the ancient Egyptians, light was the most spiritual of all material things. We call it “material” because it is present and visible in the universe, and therefore we may say with those ancient Egyptians that light is the element in the material universe which is nearest to divinity.

During the last two or three years scientific research has discovered increasing confirmation that all matter is ultimately the condensation of radiant energy, that is, of light. In fact, it is possible in the laboratory to convert light into matter, and to convert matter back again into light. In other words, this marvellous structure of the material universe which we see around us, and which the nineteenth-century scientists thought was nothing but matter—solid, hard substance—has dissolved away, does not exist when you inquire into it and try to find its true nature. It dissolves away and becomes that most intangible of all things, light.

Until recently, the monistic view of Nature had been mostly a matter of speculation, belief, and opinion. Thirty years ago, however, Professor J. Arthur Thomson, in his Introduction to Science, ventured to state that, “modern work [on the atom] is suggesting that there may be a common basis for matter of all kinds.” The latest discoveries of the modern laboratory confirm this theory. Consider the great advances made in our knowledge of atomic structure. The solid atom, once considered the building stone of the universe, was broken up into whirling electrons. When matter disappeared into electrical energy, the first steps were taken.

Our solid material substance has dissolved into the mist of electrons, protons, and deuterons. Matter has been pursued until it vanished into energy. The results of these developments are described by Dr. Karl K. Darrow, Research Physicist of the Bell Telephone Laboratories, in a lecture he gave at the Lowell Institute, and reprinted in his book, The Renaissance of Physics:1

Short of the contrast between life and death, no contrast in Nature can ever have seemed greater than that between matter on the one hand and light upon the other. Unlike as are the photon which is the corpuscle of light and the electron which is the smallest particle of matter, either may vanish and be replaced by the other.… Matter has been augmented out of light, but even in that reaction there has not been complete creation of a new piece of matter out of light. May we aspire to convert a corpuscle of light into a corpuscle of matter where there was none before? This is so vast an ambition that we must moderate it to the last possible degree. The rest-energies of nuclei being as I have described them, we shall require a photon of more than a billion electron volts for creating a nucleus or an entire atom. Neither any apparatus of ours, nor any natural radioactive substance on earth, provides us with such photons. Perhaps they occur among the cosmic rays, but if so, they are not at our command. But energy enough to create a single electron is contained in much more modest corpuscle of light, one possessing but half a million electron volts and photons such as these are available at will.… In 1932, such particles were discovered and the manner of their discovery suggested strongly that they had just been born out of light in this very way. These positive electrons were found among the cosmic rays. When we expose a plate of dense matter to a stream of photons such as these, we find electrons springing two by two from the plate, negative and positive leaping from the same point, and when we assess the kinetic energy of the members of the pair, we find that they add up to the sum which was foretold. A photon has died in giving birth to each of the pairs. This then is the reaction in which electrons are formed out of light. May not the reverse reaction occur, in which a positive and a negative electron meet each other while roaming through space, merge with each other and form a corpuscle of light? The fixity of matter itself has vanished, for we are able to convert its substance from the form of electrical particles into the form of light. No element, nor matter itself, nor light itself, is permanent. All that is perpetual is something of which they are all made, incarnating itself in all of them by turn, and passing unimpaired from form to form. For this immortal substance the least inadequate name, I presume, is “energy,” but the name is of little concern. To this have we come by applying the methods of physics to the rubbing of amber and to all that followed from it; how great a way, from so humble a beginning! The stone which so many builders rejected became the cornerstone of the temple; the little effect which seemed so trivial to so many of the wise became the key to wisdom, and supplied a physical meaning to two of the most ancient tenets of philosophy. Atomic theories existed long ago, but ours is the generation, which first of all in history, has seen the atom. The belief that all things are made of a single substance is old as thought itself, but ours is the generation, which first in history, is able to receive the unity of Nature not as a baseless dogma or a hopeless aspiration, but a principle of science based on proof as sharp and clear as anything which is known.

I have given this extract at such length because it is of such high importance. If, as now seems likely, laboratory developments will vindicate the theory of a single substance underlying all manifestations of material Nature, we shall have to grant that the assertions of the Hindu philosophers on this point, made thousands of years ago, are not worthless primitive beliefs, but results of the insight practised by keenly perceptive and concentrated minds.

If God be Light, and if all material objects without a single exception—whether you take your own physical body or the chair upon which you are sitting—if all these are nothing but condensations of that radiant energy of Light, do you not see that God is, therefore, everywhere present? It is not merely a poetical fancy, but a literal fact that you cannot run away from God, no matter where you go. The whole material world is built up out of God, and is filled with Him, and you are near and within God all the time. There is no escape from Him, go where you will. He is infinite.

Is this not, after all, a more satisfactory conception than the theological notion of a God who is just a glorified human being, a God made in man’s image who arbitrarily does what He wishes with human beings and universes? Is it not better to believe, and not merely to believe but to be able to prove intellectually, and not merely to be able to prove intellectually but to know intuitionally, that God is an Infinite Power, the Power back of all other forces and back of every materially created thing; a Power which is everywhere present and therefore within us and always within reach, because wherever you go, God is there.

That, I believe, is the conception of God toward which we are moving, and which is not so very far away. Thus the circle will complete itself, and the most ancient teachings about God will come back, but they will return strengthened and buttressed by scientific support. They will be strong because they will be built up not only on the basis of faith, of intuition, but also of intellect and reason. God is worth worshipping, and such a concept of God can be safely held, because it is not merely a relative one which is going to be changed or displaced. It is the final and the ultimate conception which man can hold. He cannot conceive a higher one, therefore his mind will have to come to rest on this notion of God. And that is the God, the ever- and everywhere-present Light, which the world will find through its own use of intelligence and its own search for Truth.

And now, look at the question from an angle with which you are all perhaps more familiar. When people practise meditation, whether they are religious mystics, so-called occultists, or whatever they may be, eventually they begin to have certain visions and experiences within their own hearts and minds. You hear that the more fortunate of these mystics have visions of blinding light.

“The ultimate aim in the trance practice is to find the vision of God as Light. This Light is so intensely powerful that were it to be seen suddenly without proper preparation, one could be blinded through reflex action on the optic nerves,” said a Himalayan adept to me once. Mystics who have this experience feel themselves to be immersed in light, and they say this is the highest realization. You can read other descriptions in Bucke’s book, Cosmic Consciousness, and in the literature of the medieval religious mysticism, where the meditator, or the mystic, seems to be engulfed in a sea of light, and with that light comes a sense of extraordinary freedom and understanding, of happiness and peace and stillness.

And so, because that seems to them the highest experience which a man can have, especially to mystics who look for God, you will find that when these people return to ordinary consciousness and begin to describe their experience, because they have not been initiated by a competent teacher into the esoteric training, they often report having had a vision of God amid the Light, or of hearing an inner voice, or that certain things have been revealed to them within the Light. In other words, they look upon the Light as a state or condition within which they had to look for something, to find a form, the form of God. They did not know that the Light Itself was God, and it was not necessary to expect or to look for any image, any picture, or to hear any voice.

Moses approached the burning bush, and God spoke to him. The burning bush was aflame. The flame was the Light of God, but the voice which came to him was not the voice of God—it was the voice of his own mind, inspired, yes, but still the mind. Because God is Infinite Power and cannot be compared with human beings who speak, nor can He be limited by definite shapes. You cannot think of God as Infinite Power without a shape, and then proceed to imagine that He can be so limited as to converse with you. What really happens in those reports of voices or visions is that the mind of the mystic is so illumed by the Light which he is contacting that it draws his consciousness into the planetary overmind, which may give him accurate guidance or prediction, or do all sorts of wonderful things—but he is still in the region of mind.

Remember that it is the Light alone that is God. And yet, although this Light is God to the mystic and the meditator, it must be understood aright even by them. If it is not correctly understood, that experience, instead of being a help, might become a hindrance. I mean that if you want truth you must be prepared to stop at nothing until you find Ultimate Truth. You must not stop by the wayside because you have made some wonderful discovery. So long as you think that reality is to be found in any experience you are deceiving yourself.

For most of us, if not for nearly all of us, such an experience would be sufficient. Still I must frankly tell you that it is not the Ultimate, and after this glorious experience comes on the path of meditation, another path is sooner or later found to open up, and that is the Esoteric Path—a Path which leads to the Ultimate Reality, to Absolute Truth.

In that Path there is neither Light nor Darkness, nor experiences, because you then learn to transcend time. Experiences which begin must also have an ending. You must find the Eternal which has no beginning and no ending. When you have found it, then you have found That out of which God Himself draws His own Substance. You will then merge with God into the Ultimate Reality.

You see now how far removed the true concept of God is from those barbaric notions which we so often meet in various parts of the world. Yet even those notions have been helpful to different people who cannot find a higher understanding at the time. Everything which helps you, wherever you stand, is good for you. That is why the man who knows the Truth has no quarrel with anyone. He knows that everyone finds just that amount of Truth which his experiences in life have brought him to, and he sees just what he should see at that stage.

Even though different people have different thoughts about God, it does not matter so long as you understand that these are merely thoughts, and depend upon the place where the individual stands. You then know that man is evolving through his various thoughts and ideas to the ultimate and highest concepts of God. When you discover that, then all ideas melt away and you become harmonized with God instead of thinking about Him. Thought is a shadow, something secondhand, but to be means that you unify yourself with God, and then you can really know Him. So you must give up thinking about Him and begin to be God, which means to become one with Him. Then knowledge and intelligence merge into God.

Thought puts a veil between you and God. When you can tear aside the veil, then you merge into God. It is possible for everyone to find his way back to God because God is present in each of us. But we must begin to search and look, and the right place is within, not outward. You must first look inward and find the sacred atom in the heart—the spiritual self within. When you have found your inner spiritual self then you can look outward again, and you will find the sun—in other words, the Universal Self. You will see God in every thing and every body—after you have seen God in yourself!

Thus, after following other gods, after believing in a multitude of deities, man finally understands that there is but one Spirit behind all creation, and after believing in a personal spirit, a personal God, he ultimately realizes the truth that the highest deity is impersonal and universal.