What I Believe

An essay published in the Syracuse Post-Standard newspaper, Saturday edition 03.13.2010.

I believe in God as the Supreme Person – beyond the finite dualities of male or female, young or old, and great or small. He is the Living Force within all living beings. He is infinite in qualities and we are His eternal parts and parcels with the same qualities as He but in minute, infinitesimal quantity – just as a drop of seawater has the same quality as the great ocean but is infinitesimal in comparison. We are the same as He but, inconceivably, simultaneously different from Him.

There is a living force, the soul, in everything that lives and nothing lives without a soul. Life never dies and non-living things never come to life. There was no “Big Bang” where life came from lifelessness. Never was there a time when you or I did not exist nor in the future shall any of us cease to be. We are not these temporary bodies. We are all eternal, spirit souls. We live within these temporary bodies for some period of time whether it is a human body, dog body, tree body or fish body or any other body but we will leave this body when our allotted time is up and we will take another body based upon the desires and aspirations we have developed while in these bodies. As spirit souls, we do not evolve, we transmigrate through different bodies.

God is the seed-giving Father. We are ALL His children and He loves each of us equally. He grants us freedom, or independence, to decide whether we want to love Him and live with Him in our eternal, spiritual home free from all miseries far, far from the material world or live here within the body of our choosing and try to enjoy separately from Him by enjoying our material senses. Without that freedom, how could there be true love? If we were to hold God responsible for and ask Him to stop our troubles, our bad decisions, our bad inventions like nuclear weapons, our hatreds, our enemies, our sufferings from natural disasters, etc., would we also not be the first ones to ask, “where is our freedom”? Somewhere along the line we chose, of our own free will, to live in the material world which is inherently full of miseries caused by the illusion of identifying with these bodies.

As spirit souls we are all the same. We are all brothers and sisters of the same Father, in the same family, forever. We only discriminate on the bodily platform conditioned by the material senses and material mind and ego. Ultimately – spiritually – we are not Christian, or Hindu or Muslim, we are not white or black, and we are not heterosexual or homosexual, we are not American or Russian or Indian or Arabian. We are not these bodies!

God is a person and therefore He has a personality. He has unlimited beauty, knowledge, fame, strength, wealth and independence. He is transcendental – beyond our material senses. He is always blissful, eternally. Our relationship with Him is always one of service – whether voluntary or not. Service is our eternal occupation and when it is reposed in a loving relationship with the Supreme Person we are in our constitutional position and we can enjoy equally. Service is the soul’s “religion”. It is not a faith that may change from one belief to another, but is like wetness is to water or heat is to fire – it is the essence of the soul. We will only know true happiness and peace when we return to the loving devotional service of the Supreme Personality of God.