All About God

All about God

What would you think if your teacher asked you to write a letter to God? Would you think that was reasonable?

Someone gave me a little book of letters kids had written to God. It was a class assignment. Some of the letters were pretty good, but most of them were not. I was awfully surprised to see what some American children are thinking about that Great Being we call God!

Some wrote to God as if he were Santa Claus – mentioning what they wanted next Christmas or for their birthday – as if God was just waiting to hear the requests of each child. Some thought of him as living in a human-type body, on the moon, or out in space, playing with the planets or pouring down the sunshine or the rain. A few thought of him as a sports coach, or a kind of cosmic engineer; one even asked for his autograph. Another asked if God had a huge computer, and several wanted him to do more miracles. A few requested him to stop all violence and war. Of course, many of the children located him in Heaven, somewhere.

What do you think of all that? Do you think God has a post office box? Is he really out in the sky or in the space between stars and planets and galaxies? Those are such great spaces, maybe it is kind of natural to think that that is where he might be. Of course, because he is everywhere, he must be up there too, but we in Vedanta do not care to think of him in such a gross way.

Besides, here I am all the time calling God "him" or "he"; our great founder, Sri Ramakrishna, did that, too, but most of the time he called God "her", because he felt that God was his Mother, his Divine Mother. Is that a new idea to you? Think about what it means to women and girls; it isn't a "Mrs. God", as a few of the letter-writers made out: it is calling the Divine by what it truly is – both male and female and beyond male and female, too.

Suppose you think of it in this way: one vast ocean of Existence, each of us is a wave, every separate thing in the universe is a wave of that Ocean, and the Ocean is conscious. The waves are formed in the ocean, and after a little while sink back into it again. Such is our life. When you study science in school you will learn that everything is made of waves of energy – in us, through us, all around us, though we see only the play of that energy, not the raw energy itself. This is one way we think of God in Vedanta.

Another way is what you already know about light. Light, too, moves in waves. When daylight shines through colored glass it looks as if the light were green, or blue, red and so on. But you know that the light itself is white, and the colors are just ways of seeing it. Just so, God, being all around us, is overlooked. We think he has to come in colors! All this is about God as the One Beyond; another time we'll talk about God in colored form – Personal God.

Our Swami Vivekananda was a monk, so he didn't have children. But he played with children and loved them. One time he said that if he had a child, he wouldn't teach him or her any religion: he would teach them about meditation – how to concentrate the mind and make it do what we want it to do.

– Swami Yogeshananda