Pariprasna

Srimat Swami Tapasyananda Ji (1904 – 1991) was one of the Vice-Presidents of the Ramakrishna Order. His deeply convincing answers to devotees’ questions raised in spiritual retreats and in personal letters have been published in book form as Spiritual Quest: Questions & Answers. Pariprasna is a selection from this book.

Meditation

QUESTION: In perfect meditation, there should be no body-consciousness. But if we have a personal deity with a form to meditate upon, are we not likely to be fixed in body-consciousness? Can we have a personal God in any other form than a bodily form?

MAHARAJ: In meditation what is to be achieved is the obliteration of our body-consciousness through absorption in the object of meditation. If there is real concentration, this obliteration happens automatically. Even when our mind is intensely absorbed in an external object or in reading a book, we forget ourselves, and our consciousness gets fused with the object that occupies the field of our attention. There is therefore nothing incompatible between practising meditation on the deity with a personal form and overcoming the sense of our body-consciousness during meditation. Trouble arises because the practitioner is doing more of reflection on himself than concentration on the deity.

Personal God does not necessarily mean a being with a human body. It means Saguna Brahman—Supreme Being with attributes. He is without form and with form. Personality is the highest category within the knowledge of man and so, when God is apprehended in terms of the highest known to us, we call Him personal. We do not thereby mean that he is an individual. He is a presence that is Sat, Chid, and Ananda, that knows us and responds to us, that loves and can be loved. An individual can be only himself and none else, but the personal God can manifest himself as any individuality. Such individual manifestations to devotees by the Personal God, we call Murtis (forms of God) and Incarnations of God. The creation we perceive is nothing but countless individual forms, each having its speciality distinguishable from every other. He who is the source of all these diverse forms,—why could He not be possessed of an archetypal seed form which can express itself as any Ishta Devata the devotee meditates upon?

Sri Ramakrishna conceives these divine forms as the regions of the ocean of Satchidananda congealed like ice into solidified forms under the cooling influence of devotion. An ideal divine form helps meditation, if the intellectual conflict which some have got in regard to it is overcome by deep thinking. Those who are averse to form can think of Him as a presence pervading everything and commune with Him as Sat, Chit and Ananda in the recesses of their own beings.