How to Know God (Miniature)
by Deepak Chopra
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Book Summary Information
Author: Deepak ChopraEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Format: Abridged
Published: 2001-09-12
ISBN: 0762411589
Number of pages: 96
Publisher: Running Press Miniature Editions
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Book Reviews of How to Know God (Miniature)
Book Review: A new perspective on God
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a great book that will open new doors to the way you perceive the world around you.
Does God exist? If so, who is He, and more importantly, how can we get to know Him?
We evolved to find God. God for us is not a choice but a necessity. Almost a hundred years ago the great psychologist and philosopher William James declared that human nature contains a "will to believe" in some higher power. Personally James didn't know if God existed or whether there was a world beyond this one. He was almost certain that no proof of God could be found, but he felt it would deprive human beings of something profound if belief was stripped away from us. We need the hunt. God, it turns out, isn't a person; God is a process. Your brain is hard-wired to find God. Until you do, you will not know who you are (p. 14).
Is God Love? Dame Julian, who lived in England in the fourteenth century, asked God directly why he had created the world. The answer came back to her in ecstatic whispers: You want to know your lord's meaning in what I have done? Know it well, love was his meaning. Who reveals it to you? Love. What did he reveal to you? Love. Why does he reveal it to you? For love (p. 5).
If God is Love, either God is causing these diseases and violence we see every day or else he can't do anything to stop them. Which one is the God you want to accept? This is actually a hard question to answer. Whether you see God as an almighty judge who punishes and causes suffering on Earth or as a benign source of inner peace, he isn't exclusively that. When someone asks, "Is there really a God," the most legitimate answer is, "Who's asking?" The perceiver is intimately linked to his perceptions. The ancient Vedic seers put it quite bluntly: "The world is as we are. If you accept that the world is as we are, it is only logical to accept that God is as we are." Indeed, the whole universe is as we are, because without the human mind, there would be only `quantum soup', billions of random sensory impressions.
Therefore God is in the evil as much as in the good. God created both because both are needed. The saint sees the sinner inside himself just as the saint accepts evil as calmly as any other occurrence. If Hinduism is right, then trying to resist evil is ultimately pointless. The demons never give up. They can't, in fact, since they are built into the structure of nature, where death and decay are inevitable. As the Indian sages see it, the universe depends as much on death as it does on life. "People fear dying without thinking," one master remarked. "If you got your fantasy of living forever, you would be condemning yourself to eternal senility." Death is the escape route life has devised. It is the force that opposes evolution.
"If you spent every moment turning every thought and action to good," an Indian master told his disciples, "you would be just as far from enlightenment as someone who used every moment for evil." Surprising as this sounds, for we all equate goodness and God, the force of goodness is still karmic. Good deeds have their own rewards, just as bad deeds do. What if you don't want any reward at all but just to be free? This is the state Buddhists call nirvana, much misunderstood when it is translated as "oblivion." Nirvana is the release from karmic influences, the end of the dance of opposites. For example, wanting A or B is always going to lead to its opposite. If I am born wealthy, I may be delighted at first. I can fulfill any desire and follow any whim. But eventually boredom sets in; I will grow restless, and in many cases my life will be burdened by the heavy responsibility of managing my wealth. So as I toss in bed, worried about all these irksome things, I will begin to think how nice it is to be poor. The poor have little to lose. To illustrate, in 1918, long before anyone in England could foresee the importance of Gandhi, the noted scholar Gilbert Murray made a prophetic statement: "Persons in power should be very careful of how they deal with a man who cares nothing for sensual pleasure, nothing for riches, nothing for comfort or praise or promotion, but is simply determined to do what he believes to be right. He is a dangerous and uncomfortable enemy, because his body, which you can always conquer, gives you so little purchase upon his soul."
How do we each individually perceive God? In Buddhism, for example, God is experienced as eternal silence and pure being. Some masters experience God as Nothing; a void with no activity. If God has a home, it has to be in the void, otherwise he would be limited. In Christianity, God is viewed as compassionate and as Love, and hence all Christians will be forgiven and go to Heaven (Christ died on the Cross for their sins). Judaism views God as revengeful, and sinners will burn in hell with no one (such as Christ) to help them. God is symbolized in some religions as a monkey. Why would anyone worship a monkey, even a mythic flying one? Their face could be as devout as anyone praying to the Christian or Hebrew God. Are their prayers going astray because of who they pray to? Is it going anywhere at all? Some religions teach to worship the self. The anecdote is told of an English anthropologist researching into the beliefs of Hinduism. One day he goes creeping through the forest and spies an old man dancing in a grove of trees. In ecstasy the old man embraces their trunks, and says, "Lord, how I love you." Then he falls to the ground and chants, "Blessed are you, my Lord." Jumping to his feet, he raises his arms to the sky and cries, "I am overjoyed to hear your voice and see your face." Unable to stand the spectacle any longer, the anthropologist jumps out of the bushes. "I must tell you, my good man, that you are quite crazy," he says. "Why is that?" the old man asks in confusion. "Because here you are all alone in the woods, and you think that you are talking to God," says the anthropologist. "What do you mean, alone?" the old man replies. To anyone who worships God as the self it is obvious that none of us are alone. In the third century of the Christian era, an unknown heretic wrote, "If you can't make yourself equal to God, you can't perceive God."
So which God of which religion is the true God? The God of any religion is only a fragment of God. This has to be true, because a being who is unbounded has no image, no role to play, no location either inside or outside the cosmos, whereas religions offer many images--father, mother, lawgiver, judge, ruler of the universe etc... There are many versions of God. Each one is a fragment, but so complete as to create a unique world (p. 42). "You believe that you were created to serve God," an Indian guru once pointed out, "but in the end you may discover that God was created to serve you."
To illustrate how God only reveals a portion of himself at any one time, consider the following: Each blind man grabs a different part of an elephant. The blind man who grabs the leg says, "An elephant is very like a tree." The one who grabs the trunk says, "An elephant is very like a snake." The one who grabs the tail says, "An elephant is very like a rope," and so forth. The mind is unable to grasp the nature of God, the moral being that divine reality is too vast to be understood by thought, sight, sound, touch, or taste (p. 284).
Consider the following: There is a Zen story about two disciples who are looking at a flag fluttering in the breeze. One says. "No one can doubt that the flag is moving." The other disagrees, "No, it is the wind moving. The flag has no motion of its own." They continue this debate until the master comes along, and he says, "You are both wrong. Only consciousness is moving." (p. 187).
To know God personally, you must penetrate a boundary that physicists call "the event horizon," a line that divides reality sharply in half. What we do know is that God can't be on this side of the event horizon. Since the Big Bang, light has been traveling for about ten to fifteen billion years. If a telescope is pointed in any direction, it cannot receive light older than that; therefore an entity farther away must remain invisible. This doesn't mean there is no existence beyond fifteen billion years. Strangely enough, certain faraway objects appear to be emitting radiation that is older than the universe, a fact cosmologists are unable to comprehend. If the human brain contains its own event horizon (the limit of photons to organize themselves as thought), we must cross over to find the home of spirit.
One of the most famous of modern Indian saints, Sri Aurobindo, speculated that all human beings are on the road to enlightenment via a process of mental evolution. (The late Jonas Salk devoted many years to a similar theory that human beings were about to make the transition from biological evolution, which perfected our physical structure, to "metabiological" evolution, which would perfect our spirit.)
To close, consider the following:
When I was born and saw the light
I was no stranger in this world--
Something inscrutable, shapeless, and without words
Appeared in the form of my mother.
So when I die, the same unknown will appear again
As ever known to me. GATANJALI
I highly recommend this book!
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