The Total Solution to the Total Problem - 1. Swami Krishnananda

1.

(Spoken on September 26, 1983)

In a more important sense than the ordinary mind can comprehend, man is regarded as an image of God, and the sense in which this proclamation is to be appreciated is a little different from the way in which we may understand a reflection in common parlance. An object getting imaged through a particular medium and seen at a different location altogether, and sometimes even in a different context, is very often regarded as an image or a reflection in the ordinary sense.

There is no distance between man and God. “How could there be a reflection?” is, therefore, one of the questions that a philosophic position raises in the Brahma Sutra, for instance. Two things which are not separated by spatial distance cannot cast a reflection one upon the other, and the infinitude of God would prevent such a concept as we interpret, calling it a reflection or an image. Nevertheless, it is said that man is made in the image of God.

The difficulty in grasping at this knotty point before us, a point which devolves upon the very relation between man and God, arises due to the peculiarity of this relation. The reflection of an original or a prototype is spatially and temporally conditioned, and such a condition in fact does not seem to obtain between man and God, merely because the supposition that God is a principle of omniscience and omnipresence means it cannot get reflected anywhere, because there is nowhere where it is not.

Swami Krishnananda
To be continued  ...

SATSANGAM