17 Oct 2022
[Ms. Thrylokya asked:- Swami, I am quoting a few lines from Your discourse 'Approach to God': "We should not consider Datta as the Incarnation of God because God is beyond imagination. In other words, we should not consider the unimaginable God to be actually modified into the human body of the Incarnation. It is true that Datta is said to be the Incarnation of God. But neither is the inert body God, nor is God modified into the inert human body. God is unimaginable." The statements in bold are contradicting each other. Kindly clarify.]
Swami replied: If a person is taking bath in a bathroom without clothes, he is hidden in the bathroom and is not visible to any outsider. Similarly, the unimaginable God is totally hidden even to the human imagination and is invisible and is unimaginable for any soul. The same unimaginable God became imaginable and visible by mediating Himself with an energetic form externally and this mediated God is God Datta. In this simile, the naked person hidden in the bathroom came out visible to everybody by clothing himself. This means that the same person came out or this means that the same unimaginable God became visible. The visible person is not at all different from the invisible person and hence, God Datta is not at all different from the unimaginable God. However, the precaution here is that this does not mean that the same naked person came out as naked person and if one thinks like this, he has no intelligence (avyaktaṃ vyaktimāpannam…– Gita). This is the meaning of first bolded statement, which means that the new word incarnation is not correct at all because God Datta is not different from the unimaginable God but is the same unimaginable God.
The meaning of the second bolded statement is that there is difference between the original hidden unmediated unimaginable God. There is a difference between the naked person and the clothed person. Hence, the new word incarnation is introduced, which does not show any difference in the core, but shows the external difference of the covering medium only. The second statement is not independent but shall be taken as a statement joined with the first statement.
★ ★ ★ ★ ★