What is the Way to Realize God in Hinduism?

If religion is experience, what is it that we experience? What is the nature of reality? In our knowledge of God, contact with the ultimate reality through religious experience plays the same part which contact with nature through sense perception plays in our knowledge of nature.

In both we have a sense of the other, the trans-subjective, which controls our apprehension. It is so utterly given to us and not made by us. We build the concept of reality from the data of religious experience, even as we build the order of nature from the immediate data of sense.

In the long and diversified history of man’s quest for reality represented by Hinduism, the object which haunts the human soul as a presence at once all- embracing and infinite is envisaged in many different ways. The Hindus are said to adopt polytheism, monotheism, and pantheism as well as belief in demons, heroes, and ancestors. It is easy to find texts in support of each of these views.

The cults of Siva and Sakti may have come down from the Indus people. Worship of trees, animals and rivers, and other cults associated with fertility ritual, may have had the same origin, while the dark powers of the underworld, which are dreaded and propitiated, may be due to aboriginal sources.

The Vedic Aryans contributed the higher gods comparable to the Olympians of the Greeks, like the Sky and the Earth, the Sun and the Fire. The Hindu religion deals with these different lines of thought and fuses them into a whole by means of its philosophical synthesis. A religion is judged by what it tends towards. Those who note the facts and miss the truth are unfair to the Hindu attempt.

The reality we experience cannot be fully expressed in terms of logic and language. It defies all description. The seer is as certain of the objective reality he apprehends as he is of the inadequacy of thought to express it. A God com­prehended is no God, but an artificial construction of our minds. Individuality, whether human or divine, can only be accepted as given fact and not de­scribed.

It is not wholly transparent to logic. It is inexhaustible by analysis. Its inexhaustibility is the proof of objectivity. However far we may carry our logical analysis, the given object in all its uniqueness is there, constituting a limit to our analysis. Our thinking is controlled by something beyond itself which is perception in physical science and the intuition of God in the science of religion.

The eternal being of God cannot be described by categories. An attitude of reticence is adopted regarding the question of the nature of the Supreme. Those who know it tell it not; those who tell it know it not. The Kena Upanishad says: the eye does not go neither thither nor speech nor mind.

We do not know, we do not understand how one can teach it. It is different from the known; it is also above the unknown Sankara quotes a Vedic passage where the teacher tells the pupil the secret of the self by keeping silent about it. ‘Verily, I tell you, but you understand not, the self is silence. The deeper experience is ‘wordless’ doctrine.

The sages declare that ‘wonderful is the man that can speak of him, and wonderful is also the man that can under­stand him. Buddha maintained silence about the nature of ultimate reality. ‘Silent are the Tathagatas. O, Blessed one.

The Madhyamikas declare that the truth is free from such descriptions as ‘it is’, ‘it is not’, ‘both’, and ‘neither’. Nagarjuna says that Buddha did not give any definition of the ulti­mate reality. ‘Nowhere and to nobody has ever anything been preached by the Buddha.

A verse attributed to Sankara reads:’It is wonderful that there under the banyan tree’ the pupil is old while the teacher is young. The ex­planation of the teacher is silence but the doubts of the pupil are dispersed.’ This attitude is truer and nobler than that of the theologians, who construct elaborate mansions and show us round with the air of God’s own estate agents.

When, however, attempts are made to give expression to the ineffable reality, negative descriptions are employed. The real is the wholly other, the utterly transcendent, the mysterious being which awakens in us a sense of awe and wonder, dread and desire. It not only fascinates us but produces a sense of abasement in us.

Whatever is true of empirical being is denied of the Real. ‘The Atman can only be described by “no, no”. It is incomprehensible for it cannot be comprehended. ‘It is not in space or time; it is free from causal necessity. It is above all conceptions and conceptional differentiations. But on this account it is not to be confused with non-being.

It is being in a more satisfying sense than empirical being. The inadequacy of intellectual analysis is the outcome of the incomparable wealth of intrinsic reality in the Supreme Being. The eternal being is utterly beyond all personal limitation, is beyond all forms though the sustainer of all forms. All religious a system in which mankind has sought to confine the reality of God are inadequate. They make of God an ‘idol’.

While the negative characteristics indicate the transcendent character of the real, there is a sense in which the real is also immanent. The very fact that we are able to apprehend the real means that there is something in us capable of apprehending it.

The deepest part of our nature responds to the call of the reality. In spiritual life the law holds that only like can know like. We can only know what is akin to ourselves above and beyond our rational being lies hide the ultimate and highest part of our nature.

What the mystics call the ‘basis’ or ‘ground’ of the soul is not satisfied by the transitory or the tem­poral, by the sensuous or the intellectual.’⁷ Naturally, the power by which we acquire the knowledge of God is not logical thought, but spirit, for spirit can only be spiritually discerned. While the real is utterly transcendent to the empirical individual, it is immanent in the ultimate part of our nature.

God’s revelation and man’s contemplation are two aspects of one and the same experience. The Beyond is the within. Brahman is Atman. He is the antaryamin, the inner controller. He is not only the incommunicable mystery standing for ever in his own perfect light, bliss, and peace, but also is here in us, upholding, sustaining us: ‘Whoever worships God as other than the self, thinking he is one and I am another, knows not.

Religion arises out of the experience of the human spirit which feels its kinship and continuity with the Divine other. A purely immanent deity cannot be an object of worship and adoration; a purely transcendent one does not allow of any worship or adoration.

Hindu thinkers are not content with postulating a being unrelated to humanity, who is merely the Beyond, so far as the empirical world is con­cerned. From the beginnings of Hindu history, attempts are made to bring God closer to the needs of man.

Though it is impossible to describe the ultim­ate reality, it is quite possible to indicate by means of symbols aspects of it, though the symbolic description is not a substitute for the experience of God.

We are helpless in this matter and therefore are obliged to substitute symbols for substances, pictures for realities. We adopt a symbolic account when we regard the ultimate reality as the highest person, as the supreme personality, as the Father of us all, ready to respond to the needs of humanity.

The Rig- Veda has it: ‘All this is the person, that who is past and that which is future. It is the matrix of the entire being. The Vaishnava thinkers and the Saiva Siddhantins make of the Supreme, the fulfilment of our nature.

He is knowledge that will enlighten the ignorant, strength for the weak, mercy for the guilty, patience for the sufferer, comfort for the comfortless. Strictly speaking, however, the Supreme is not this or that personal form but is the being that is responsible for all that was, is, and shall be. His temple is every world, every star that spins in the firmament. No element can contain him for he is all elements. Your life and mine are enveloped by him. Worship is the acknowledgement of the magnificence of this supreme reality.

We have accounts of the ultimate Reality as Absolute and God, Brahman, and Isvara. Only those who accept the view of the Supreme as personality admit that the unsearchableness of God cannot be measured by our feeble conceptions. They confess that there is an overplus of reality be­yond the personal concept. To the worshipper, the personal God is the highest. No one can worship what is known as imperfect. Even the idol of the idolater stands for perfection, though he may toss it aside the moment he detects its imperfection.

it is wrong to assume that the Supreme is either the Absolute or God. It is both the Absolute and God. The impersonal and the personal conceptions are not to be regarded as rival claimants to the exclusive truth. They are the different ways in which the single comprehensive pattern reveals itself to the spirit of man.

One and the same being is conceived now as the object of philo­sophical inquiry or jnana, now as an object of devotion or upasana. The conception of ultimate reality and that of a personal God are reconciled in religious experience, though the reconciliation cannot be easily effected in the region of thought. We cannot help thinking of the Supreme under the analogy of self-consciousness and yet the Supreme is the absolutely simple, unchang­ing, free, spiritual reality in which the soul finds its home, its rest, and its completion.