The Spiritual Import of the Mahabharata and the Bhagavadgita : 14-6.

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Chapter 14: The Absolute Pervading the Universe-6.

Mat-sthani sarva-bhutani na caham tesv avasthitah is another descriptive epithet which is added to this definition of God’s invisible presence in all things.

All things are rooted in God, but the wholeness of God cannot be comprehended by any finite object.

That means to say, though everything is in Him, He cannot be wholly contained in anything.

All things can be contained in Him, but He cannot be contained in anything exclusively, because while the part can be contained by the whole, the whole cannot be contained by the part.

So it is a futile attempt on the part of the human reason, for instance, finite faculty as it is, to imagine that it can know the secrets of the world.

The scientific adventures and rational philosophies of humanity are incompetent to fathom the depths and the mysteries of the cosmos, because the wholeness of reality is not capable of being contained in the finitude of human understanding, or in anything finite, for the matter of that.

There is nothing in this world that is capable of being an instrument in the knowledge of God.

Hence, the world is called a relative world.

There is nothing absolute here, because the Absolute is only One, while the relative parts can be many.

While the entire relative world is contained in God and the relative is in the Absolute, the Absolute is not in the relative, because there is a distracted differentiation of particulars in the world of relativity; and in this distractedness of finitude, the Infinite cannot be wholly present.

That is the meaning of this phrase, na cham tesv avasthitah.

Swami Krishnananda
To be continued  ....


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