Is God personal or impersonal? || (2016)

Questioner: Sir, is God personal? Some people say that God is impersonal, I don’t know what’s the truth.

Acharya Prashant: For the person, God will always be personal. For the person, everything is personified. Do you ever see anything which cannot be touched, which is not bodily? Whenever the person will try to talk of God, he will always attribute a name, figure, a form, to the Truth. That is his helplessness, what else can he do? Being what he is, what else can he do? He will say ‘God is beautiful’, now what does beautiful mean? Beautiful as the rose. So, he has brought down God to the level of the rose. Now, the rose will wither away, God would also wither away? Now, the rose is very beautiful to somebody and not as beautiful to some other one. So, the perception of God too must be subjective then.

Do not talk of God as a person; as a person talk only of the person. See, what it means to live as a person.

What is your name?

Q: Hiral.

AP: Hiral, is a name given to some person by someone. And hence the expectations and obligations attached with it. And hence the whole burden of knowledge, and hence a pre-decided future. That is what the person is. The person must limit himself to the person. Because that is his proper domain. And if he will go beyond, he will only get more of the person, but will name it as God. And that is blasphemy.

God is neither personal, nor impersonal. God is not. There is no ‘thing’ called God. God is not a thing. God is nothing that you can think of. So, don’t even talk about God, that is the best and the highest respect you can pay to God. Do not even talk of him. By talking of him, you malign him. By building a church for him, you bring him down to your own dimension. By praising him, you lace him with attributes that are suitable only to humans. But that is the kind of treatment we have been giving to Truth, and that explains the kind of treatment we have been giving to ourselves. That explains why we suffer. Because we talk so much about God.

Leave God alone.

Don’t touch that purity with your dirty hands.

Q2: Isn’t that a conditioning to say that God is so pure that men are lower than God?

AP: Well said. Whenever we will talk, we will run into these contradictions. So, don’t even say that God is very pure. Just say that I am not quite pure, and full stop, no need to talk about God. Because whenever you will say that God is pure, you will have some image of purity. Again, you are doing the unthinkable. Again, you are doing what you must not do. God is not even pure, not even superior, God is not great at all. Because if God is great, then Alexander was also great. And now you have brought down God to the level of Alexander. If God is greatest, it is still a comparative statement, greatest to whom? Compared to whom? So, you are still comparing something to something else, then both must be in the same dimension.

Just hold yourself from thinking of God. Think rather of your own situation, and think deeply — that is real religiosity.

Do not remember God, because you cannot remember God. You will remember something else thinking that it is God.

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