The Spiritual Import of the Mahabharata and the Bhagavadgita : Ch - 17.4.

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Ch-17.The Vision of God-4.

The vision of God is the intuition of the supreme Absolute. It is not a perception; it is not seen as we see an object. God is not seen with open eyes, and not heard with the ears. These sense organs, which give knowledge of things, diversify the objects and cut off colour from sound and sound from color, smell from taste, and so on, whereas in the vision of God all sense faculties join together, so that it is taste, smell, sound, colour—everything. It is not merely a colour that we see when we see God, not merely a sound that we hear, not merely a taste, not a smell. It is also not merely a total of these perceptions.

We are incapable of even imagining what sort of experience it would be, if all the senses simultaneously act at one stroke. That means to say, if we were to be endowed with a faculty which is sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch altogether, what would be the kind of feeling in us? At present our sensations come in succession. We see and hear and smell and taste and touch, one after the other, and they are not commingled in one single act of awareness. Hence, we cannot even imagine what God-consciousness can be.

The awakening of the self to Godhood is not only to be understood in the sense of a total action of all sense perceptions at one instantaneous moment, but also the joining together of the thinking faculty, the rationality, the feeling and the volition all together. Not all together like a multitude of people or an isolated totality of individual particularities, but a blend of a mass of honey wherein the pollen of different flowers cannot be singly perceived or isolated one from the other.

We have a condensed mass of sweetness in the honey where we do not know the constituents of which the honey has been manufactured by the bees. Likewise is God-experience. It is not thinking and reasoning and feeling and seeing and hearing, etc., one after the other coming in succession. It is an instantaneous, timeless awakening into a cognition which is the same as the experience of Being.

Swami Krishnananda
 To be continued  ....


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