Relationship of God to His Creation

Divine Life Society Publication: The Spiritual Import of the Mahabharata and the Bhagavadgita by Sri Swami Krishnananda

God is the Creator, the Preserver and the Destroyer of all things. The great relationship of the universe to the Creator and the attribution to the Creator of the great functions of creation, preservation and dissolution are great interesting subjects in theological studies. God is all things—Creator, Preserver and Destroyer. These are the usual attributes that we assign to the supreme Creator of the universe. What are the characteristics of God? They are creation, preservation, destruction. Now these are the primary attributes, together with the great attributes of omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence. God creates, God preserves and God destroys. But this theological concept of God being the Creator, Preserver and Destroyer has many subtle implications which have created the huge science of theology, which also creates the subtle differences in theological doctrines of the various religions of the world. If we read the theological dogmas of various religions, we will find they differ, one from the other. Every religion describes the process of creation in a peculiar manner of its own.

Why are there these differences in the theological doctrines of creation? The reason is the variegated concepts of the relationship of the universe to the Creator. What are the implications that have given rise to these differences? The implications are very subtle, very deep and difficult to probe into. How God is related to this world is a question that cannot easily be answered. A child’s concept of God’s relation to the world is simple, and we are also thinking in a child-like manner. We cannot escape the subtle prejudice of the imagination that God is somehow or other outside the world.

Logically, by mathematical arguments, we may accept that God cannot really be outside the world. But sentimentally, emotionally and by social gospels into which we have been introduced from childhood, we persist in the imagination that God is somewhere outside the world. So we always speak of reaching God—“I have to reach God”, “I have to go to God”, “I have to attain God”, etc. There are lengthy descriptions in various scriptures of even the passages through which we have to pass to reach God.

Now, we do not know how God is related to this world. Is God outside the world, or is God inside the world? If He is outside the world, what is the connection between Him and the world? Is there a gap of emptiness between the world and God? If so, then He cannot be regarded as omnipresent, all-pervading; He is only somewhere, like a large personality.

To remove all these misconceptions at one stroke the Teacher of the Bhagavadgita says: Mattah parataram nanyat kincid asti dhananjaya—“Outside Me nothing can be, and higher than Me, nothing is.” Mayi sarvam idam protam sutre mani-gana iva. How can we describe the relationship of God to His creation, when He says that nothing outside Him can exist? If outside Him nothing exists, creation is not outside Him. If creation is not outside Him, where is it? The answer is given in various stages. As beads are sewn on a thread, and all the beads are connected by a single thread that passes through all of them in a necklace or garland, so is God present continuously through all the various particulars of the world. Just as a thread passes through all the beads and is continuously present without any break in the middle, it is indivisibly present throughout, entering into every bead throughout, so also God, the great Creator of the universe, is present in every particle of creation. It is like beads which are strung on this cosmic thread—the sutratman.

Again a doubt will come that God is not the world, and the world is not God. For the time being we are told to satisfy our initial curiosity that God is present in all things, and we need not be under the impression that He is far away, unreachable as a so-called transcendent. Yet, when God is taken as a Creator and as a thread passing through all the beads of things in the universe, the subtle misgivings of the transcendence of God persists, inadvertently, willy-nilly.

However, keeping this question aside for the time being to be answered later on, we are told that everything in this world, whatever be the variety that we see, is constituted of a single divine creative will. Ye caiva sattvika bhava rajasas tamasas ca ye, matta eveti tan viddhi na tv aham tesu te mayi. Good things, bad things, pleasant things, unpleasant things, beautiful things, ugly things, right things and wrong things—whatever it be, the things that exist in this world are somehow or other included in this cosmic comprehensiveness of the Creator. They are arranged in such a pattern in the cosmic set-up that there seems to be the sattvica, rajasa and tamasa, as they appear before our eyes. This is another great revelation here. Before the eyes of God the world stands transfigured, and it does not stand as it stands before us. Before God, the world does not exist as an object to be confronted every day, as it does with people. We have to confront the world; we have to face it; we have to attack it. Sometimes we are subjugated by it, and those are our sorrows, because our minds accept certain characteristics of the world according to the capacities of comprehension with which the mind is endowed, and what it cannot accept is rejected by the mind, just as a certain spectrum of colour in the leaves of a tree absorb a particular ray of the sun, and appear to us as green color. The green colour of the leaf, for instance, is the effect of an abstraction. All colours have this feature—everything is of this character.

So, when this selectiveness in perception is overcome by the intuitive character of comprehension which is the vision of God, it is not a sensory perception. God does not see the world with eyes as we see, but He has an intuitive, instantaneous, transcendental comprehension, at one grasp, at the totality of creation. And here, the distinctions that appear to our minds do not exist at all—they get transmuted into a single wholeness of indivisibility. When the great Creator is said to be inclusive of all things in the world, of every character, desirable or undesirable, necessary or unnecessary, pleasant or otherwise, we cannot understand. We cannot think as God thinks, because we have no intuitive comprehension of things. We have only sensory organs. We see, hear, taste, smell, and touch—but God is not like that. His existence is His Self; His perception is inseparable from His Being. His existence is His Knowledge, whereas our existence is not our knowledge—there is a difference. All things are existent in some form or the other, ultimately, in their archetypal Creator, in God the Almighty.

The sorrow of the ego, which is inflicted with pain of self-annihilation, is asking for God. When we ask for God, we are asking for death, and who likes death? There is a terror which makes the ego shudder at the very thought of the immersion of the soul in God. These difficulties appear like mountains later on, and therefore, at the beginning, we have to go through all the various chapters of the Gita, and not suddenly jump to the later chapters.

There are many students who think that the sixty-sixth verse of the eighteenth chapter is the sum and substance of Gita—Sarva-dharman parityajya mam ekam saranam vraja, aham tvm sarva-papebhyo moksayisymi ma sucah. We too have to pass through the emotional turmoil through which Arjuna passed in the first chapter, and we will also find ourselves in the same condition of utter misery and helplessness in which he found himself emotionally. We will have to find ourselves in this condition, if we have not already done so. The spiritual seeker has to face a fire in which he has to be burnt and burnt. The demands that God makes upon us are hard indeed, harder and more inconceivable than the demands of a hard-boiled creditor. It is as if God is a creditor; we owe something to Him and He will take the last farthing. This word ‘farthing’ actually occurs in the New Testament—you have to pay the last farthing, and you cannot go scot-free.

But this religious, spiritual or mystical requirement on our part will take us beyond religion itself. As long as we are dogmatic in our adherence to a fanatical theological doctrine, as long as we fight over languages and kin, and stick to our prejudices of nationalities and various cultures, to that extent we are far from God. The Bhagavadgita, in a super-national gospel, gives us this great caution, asking us to transmute ourselves into super-national individuals not belonging to any nation. In our spirit we are super and exist above these limiting shackles of wealth and power, of distinctions of umpteen types and we may say that the Bhagavadgita’s gospel is a gospel of the universalisation of the individual.

Excerpts from: Relationship of God to His Creation - The Spiritual Import of the Mahabharata and the Bhagavadgita by Sri Swami Krishnananda