How can we understand God completely?

[An online spiritual discussion was conducted on March 07, 2021, in which several devotees participated. Some of the questions of devotees answered by Swāmi are given below.]

[A question asked by Śrī Rajasekhara Reddy.]

Swami replied: If one understands that God cannot be understood by any soul and that the maximum knowledge a soul can have about God is to know God exists, then God is said to be perfectly understood. Here, God means the unimaginable God, who is the original absolute reality. This unimaginable God present in medium (body and soul of a selected person) is called mediated God. In the mediated God too, the medium alone is well understood. The unimaginable God, who is the Possessor of the medium, remains totally un-understood, as usual. Since the unimaginable God perfectly merges with the medium, the medium and the unimaginable God become identical. So, understanding His medium is equivalent to understanding the unimaginable God. Through the medium, the unimaginable God is thus, not only understood but also seen with one’s own eyes.

The mediated God is a single phase of the two components namely the unimaginable God and the imaginable medium. The mediated God is visible and is understood from the angle of the medium. The same mediated God remains invisible and un-understood from the angle of the original unimaginable God. The unimaginable God thus remains unimaginable as well as imaginable, without any mutual contradiction. The medium exists based on the borrowed reality from the unimaginable God, which otherwise is unreal by itself. By this, the medium acquires absolute existence, as long as the unimaginable God does not withdraw His absolute existence from the medium. The medium had the absolute reality, even before the merging of the unimaginable God with it. But remember that this absolute reality of the medium is not inherent to the medium. It is only a granted reality, granted by the unimaginable God. In this way, when the unimaginable God merges with the medium, He need not grant His reality once again to the medium. Thus, we can say that the merging is between two items—one having inherent absolute reality and the other having a borrowed absolute reality. To distinguish between these two, we say that the first one is the absolute reality, whereas, the second one is the relative reality. Hence, relative reality does not mean that which is totally unreal. It means the unreal which has borrowed absolute reality of God. The merging makes the absolute reality as well as the relative reality co-exist and merge with each other. By this, God becomes not only absolutely-real, but also relatively-real, as said in the Veda (Sat ca tyat ca abhavat) and in the Gītā (Sadasaccāhmarjuna). The clarity in this concept represents the relative reality, whereas, the confusion in the same concept represents the absolute reality. You can never get 100% clarity in this concept because the unimaginable God still exists in the mediated God.

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