Acharya Prashant explains a common misconception about God's omniscience, which stems from the human ego. He states that while the most knowledgeable person on Earth might know about ten thousand things, we incorrectly extrapolate this to imagine that God, being omniscient ('sarvagya'), simply knows about a vastly larger number of things, like ten crore. This flawed idea is reflected in our prayers when we say, "O God, you know everything." We conceive of God as a superlative version of a knowledgeable human, failing to grasp the true nature of divine knowledge. To illustrate this, the speaker uses the analogy of a nosy neighbor, Mr. Gupta, who is 'vigya' (knowledgeable) about all the trivial happenings in the localityтАФfrom a neighbor's spoiled food to their pet's health issues. We then mistakenly project this image onto God, thinking of the divine as a cosmic version of Mr. Gupta who knows the business of every house in the universe. Acharya Prashant calls this a foolish notion that we continue to carry. The root of this error is the ego's refusal to accept a dimensional change. The ego thinks, "If I know about 25 houses, God must know about 25 crore houses," essentially viewing God as an inflated version of itself. The ego's perspective is that by simply expanding its current self, it can become God. This leads to the conception of God as a bigger, but not fundamentally different, version of a human being. The ego accepts that God is greater in quantity but not different in quality or dimension. The speaker criticizes ideas like "God is the ocean, and we are the drops" as expressions of tremendous ego, as they imply that the only difference is size. We want to believe we are fine as we are, and that God is just further along on the same path we are on. We see God as 'ahead' of us, not 'above' us, because rising 'above' would require us to change our path and ourselves. This arrogance leads us to project our own flaws onto the divine. We create stories of gods fighting out of jealousy or competing for superiority because these are the traits that reside within us. We portray deities like Shri Brahma and Shri Vishnu as having human-like conflicts because our understanding is limited by our own ego-centric worldview. Instead of rising to a higher dimension, we bring God down to our own, demonstrating our unwillingness to truly change.
