Gospel | Chapter 6: Oct 28, 1882 (Part 3) | Swami Sarvapriyananda

A Brahmo devotee asks him, sir, has God forms or has he none? Master.

No one can say with finality that God is only this and nothing else.

He is formless, and again he has forms.

For the Bhakta, he assumes forms, but he is formless for the Jnani, that is for him who looks on the world as a mere dream.

The Bhakta feels that he is one entity and the world another.

Therefore, God reveals himself to him as a person.

But the Jnani, the Vedantist for instance, always reasons applying the process of not this, not this.

Through this discrimination he realizes by his inner perception that the ego and the universe are both illusory like a dream.

Then the Jnani realizes Brahman in his own consciousness.

He cannot describe what Brahman is.

Do you know what I mean? Think of Brahman, existence, knowledge, bliss absolute as a shoreless ocean.

Through the cooling influence, as it were, of the Bhakta's love, the water has frozen at places into blocks of ice.

In other words, God now and then assumes various forms for his lovers and reveals himself to them as a person.

But with the rising of the sun of knowledge, the blocks of ice melt.

Then one doesn't feel anymore that God is a person, nor does one see God's forms.

What he is cannot be described.

Who will describe him? He who would do so disappears.

He cannot find his I anymore.

If one analyzes oneself, one does not find anything, any such thing as I.

Take an onion, for instance.

First of all, you peel off the red outer skin.

Then you find thick white skins.

Peel these off one after another, and you won't find anything inside.

In that state, a man no longer finds the existence of his ego.

And who is there left to seek it? Who can describe how he feels in that state, in his own pure consciousness about the real nature of Brahman? Once a salt doll went to measure the depth of the ocean.