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WORSHIP OF WALL AND STATUE ARE SAME

Shri Anil asked: “One Muslim devotee says that the worship of Allah is far superior to the worship of statues. Please enlighten”.

Swami Replied: The P.G. Course is far superior to L.K.G. course. This does not mean that you should blame the L.K.G. course and praise the P.G. Course. One day you were also a student of that L.K.G. course. The only point here is that you should not stop at the level of first step (L.K.G.) and you should climb to reach the last step (P.G.). If you condemn the first step and remove it, all the upper steps including your last one will crumble down. This is very important aspect of the spiritual knowledge and if this is understood nobody criticizes anybody of his religion or other religion.

We have to take God in three ways.

1. The original God, Who is unimaginable without spatial dimensions, exists beyond the space. Even in your imagination, you cannot cross this space (cosmos) and reach its boundary since if you reach the boundary, you will touch the causal unimaginable God. Since you cannot touch the unimaginable God, you cannot reach the boundary of this space even in your imagination. Islam represents this concept by a wall, which is worshipped by them. The wall represents the boundary of the universe giving you the idea of unimaginable God. Allah is represented by such wall. Hence, this concept of Islam must be very much appreciated. But, the difficulty in this is that such worship or even meditation by imagination becomes impossible since such original God is beyond even imagination as stated in the Gita (Avyaktaahi gatir duhkham...). Here also such unimaginable Allah is not meditated upon. Only a wall, a representative model of Allah is meditated upon. But, the merit in the representative model is that it is indicating the original God.
2. Such unimaginable God enters a medium and gets Himself identified with it like the current is identified with the metallic wire in which it flows. Such medium must have awareness in order to preach the spiritual knowledge. Such medium may be energetic form for the sake of the departed human beings existing in energetic bodies in the upper world. Brahma or Vishnu or Shiva or Father of Heaven is such energetic incarnation. For the sake of human beings here, the unimaginable God gets identified with a human form in this world. Rama, Krishna, Mohammed, etc., are such human incarnations. If you call the Father of Heaven as Allah, such energetic incarnation is relevant to the departed souls in the upper world only and not relevant to us in this world. For you in this world, Mohammed is relevant but you do not accept a human being as God. Of course, Mohammed gave this concept and His view was totally different and was essential in His time. In His time, His precede Jesus was crucified by the ignorant people. To save the human incarnation from such danger only, the concept of human incarnation was temporarily rejected by Him. Now, such danger is not there. Hence, you can worship Mohammed as Allah. A wiser worship will be to worship the present human incarnation in your religion as Allah since Mohammed was a past human incarnation. This type of worship of energetic or human incarnation is called as direct worship since the original unimaginable God is directly present in that medium. Leaving such direct worship of the contemporary human incarnation due to ego and jealousy towards a co-human form, people are worshipping the original God resulting in utter failure or worshipping the statues representing the energetic incarnations or past human incarnations. All these ways are either useless or unnecessary if you can conquer your ego and jealousy towards co-human form and catch the contemporary human incarnation to worship it as Allah. But majority of people cannot conquer the selfish ego and jealousy. Such people are advised to worship the statues of energetic incarnations or past human incarnations at least instead of worshipping the original unimaginable God ending in failure. The worship of statues is not correct but has some positive value since it improves your theoretical devotion to God. In view of such benefit, the error is allowed in the beginning stage as said in the Gita (Sarvaarambhahi doshena).
3. This is indirect worship of the original God since you are worshipping an object like statue keeping it as a representative model of the original God. This is inevitable stage of majority of people. You find vast number of L.K.G. schools and rarely only a P.G. Centre. You can keep not only inert matter but also the inert energy as a representative model. Remember that the statue is not only inert matter but also contains inert energy in the form of energetic bonds between the particles in the statue. Some people take the inert and infinite cosmic energy alone for such model. The inert and infinite pure cosmic energy was only present in the beginning of the creation and now this entire cosmos contains inert matter, inert energy and awareness also due to the presence of living beings in this cosmos. You can compare the present cosmos to a human being since matter, energy and awareness exist in both. The only difference is that the cosmos is infinite and the human being is finite. If you take this cosmos as Allah, you are naturally taking an ordinary human being also as Allah. In this case, the infinite cosmos is also a representative model of Allah since Allah is not present in this universe in natural way. The human incarnation existing in this universe is an extraordinary case and comes under direct worship. The cosmos treated as Allah is only indirect worship and in no way is different from worshipping a good person as Allah. The original God is beyond this space or cosmos as told above. If you say that the original God is everywhere in the cosmos, the existence of bad in the cosmos also touches the original God. People treat God as Omnipresent in order to make Him omniscient and Omnipotent. They feel that unless God is present everywhere, He cannot know everything and cannot control everything. This is worldly logic, which need not be applied to the unimaginable God having the unimaginable power by which He knows everything and controls everything even without His presence everywhere. God becomes greatest only by such unimaginable way. This worldly logic fails even in the case of some worldly examples as in the case of an efficient king, who knows everything and controls everything in his kingdom even without his direct presence. Hence, treating Allah as cosmos comes under the category of indirect worship only.

The conclusion is that if you are in the P.G. Level, search for the contemporary human incarnation in your religion and worship it as Allah. If you are in L.K.G., you worship the wall as Allah. If you are somewhere in the middle level, you can worship any good respectable elder person or the entire cosmos as Allah. The highest level is only the P.G., which is the direct worship of Allah. All other levels are the indirect worship of Allah, which are also not wrong but belong to lower level. L.K.G. is lower than P.G. but it does not mean that P.G. only is correct and L.K.G. is wrong. At the end, I like to point out that the worship of the wall is no way different from the worship of the statue since both are finite inert representative models of matter and energy. By this if you are criticizing the majority of Hinduism, unknowingly you are also criticizing majority of Islam also simultaneously!

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