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Why is God so biased? || Acharya Prashant, with IIT Bombay (2021)
5.8K views
4 years ago
God
Ego
Creator
Advait Vedanta
Truth
Suffering
Projection
Brahman
Description

Acharya Prashant responds to a question about suffering and God's impartiality by first deconstructing the question's underlying assumptions. He states that the question is based on stories and projections, primarily the idea of a God who created the world and must adhere to human values like justice and equanimity. He challenges the notion that a creator entity exists in the same way the world exists and questions why human values like mercy should be attributed to such a being. He explains that these are projections, and one might have a stake in these projections. Acharya Prashant elaborates that the argument for a creator is an extrapolation from personal experience. Within our world, we see that created things have a creator, and we extend this logic to the universe. He points out that this makes one's own experience the absolute standard. If this argument is followed to its logical conclusion, the individual perceiver becomes the sole creator of their perceived world. He dismisses the idea of a God sitting somewhere, controlling events, punishing, and rewarding as a "juvenile, childish thing." He clarifies that Advait Vedanta has no space for such a personal God; Atma (the Self) and Brahman (the Absolute) are not God, and Truth is not God. He asserts that the God that man either affirms or denies is nothing but a projection of his own ego. Therefore, both theists and atheists who debate God's existence are essentially egoists. In contrast, there are those who seek to know the Truth, which involves transcending the self and going beyond the ego. They recognize the ego as false and seek to proceed into the Truth. This process of transcending the ego is true spiritual progress. It involves the dissolution of both the experiencer and the experienced object, the seer and the scene. When one starts seeing the falseness within, the external creation also begins to dissolve and lose its meaning. This dissolution of the duality of the seer and the seen is the alleviation of suffering.