I know how confusing it has to be for people to hear me write about God. It’s like hearing me talk about ten different people of different genders and dispositions, and then I switch to an impersonal aspect where God is some kind of a deep energy source, and then I hint that it’s actually what I am.
It’s one thing to understand the concept of many religions having multiple different perspectives on God, and quite another to see that in one person. I get it, it can sound confusing and intellectually challenging. That, however, doesn’t mean that it isn’t normal or expected.
There are multiple reasons for the complexity. The first, most obvious is that God is a higher reality than what we are used to. If you project a higher-dimensional object onto a lower-dimensional space, the result will necessarily be either a lower-dimensional projection or a cut, where multiple different lower-dimensional cuts can be produced from a single higher-dimensional object. Try, for instance, mentally imagining putting a sheet of paper through a cube. Whether you get a triangle, rectangle or a trapezoid is merely a function of angle and position. Now imagine the same thing with a more complex shape, and you get even more of a mess, where the section might look nothing like the original shape, and it’s actually quite possible to get a very large number of different sections and still be unable to assemble a mental picture of the original shape. Basically, you can get an infinite number of human-God intersections, darshans in other words, and still understand very little of the vastness and infinity of God. You can be God and still not understand God.
So, I don’t try to make those things artificially simple in order to be more easily digestible, but ultimately deceptive. I present them as close to the messiness of the original experience as I can manage. There are multiple persons of God, formed when something that is essentially a normal soul, like most reading this, made repeated choices of choosing God against alternatives. What you chose became an aspect of you, in a manner of speaking, and at some point, as you evolve, you become another name of God, another person of God. It’s not that God developed a multiple personality disorder; no, it’s like putting a cold glass in a humid space, and observing condensation of water on the glass, as if droplets of water spontaneously appear on the glass. The water molecules are suspended in the air everywhere, but only if the properties of an object allow it, in this case temperature, will they condense on the glass. If the properties of your personality allow it, the all-present micro-aspects of God, the kalapas, will condense on your soul and make you more of what you already chose to be by altering your “temperature”. If you’re “too hot”, stuff will evaporate off of you, until you yourself evaporate and turn into nothing, because your “heat” repulses micro-particles of divinity that make up a soul away from each other. If you’re “cold”, essentially if you tend to calm down the chaos of the environmental particles by absorbing their “heat” and removing it altogether, your soul will grow by the cumulative amount of divinity-particles you have gathered onto yourself. Sure, this is a quantitative explanation of a phenomenon that includes multiple qualitative leaps as well, but it’s as simple as I can get it for a visual metaphor. Essentially, souls can become God, and since there are so many different ways in which one can choose God, they are actually very different from each other. Becoming God doesn’t mean you dissolve into some amorphous sea of primordial goo, as some teachers of Vedanta and Buddhism make it sound, which just shows me they understand nothing. No, the point of this evolution isn’t to reach the starting point, but to create exactly the kind of diverse mess of God-persons that makes this thing so confusing to read.
Also, those God-persons are not aspects of my personality of reflections of my unconscious desires or anything of the sort. They are actual people, only they are of God, if that makes any sense. It’s like Jesus not being a manifestation of some Freudian psychology, or a myth; no, he was a person like you, only of God.
Sure, people tend to make God fit structures in their minds, and usually visualise God as a parental figure of sorts, which, after having told you about my parents, you will easily understand me not having any affinity for. God was never something that fit a role, or met some psychological need. God just was, and for the most part I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. It wasn’t anything I could even describe or figure out, but it was there. That’s one of the reasons why I think atheists are idiots – they think religious people imagine God as “sky daddy” or some equally silly image that would be easy to dismiss as a psychological projection. To me, God had nothing to do with sky, and he absolutely certainly isn’t my “daddy”. The persons of God are even more complicated and messy. Some of them felt completely indifferent, no emotions towards me whatsoever, but their presence itself communicated something or brought me into some spiritual state like nirvikalpa samadhi. I respect them, I know they are wonderful people, but I can’t say I have a very personal relationship with them other than being grateful for the help they provided when I needed it. Some feel like friends I was separated from by incarnation. One feels like true, actual family. None of them feel like heavenly “mommy” or “daddy”; Goddess was actually quite exasperated with me in the early years of my sadhana because I was resistant to accepting that she’s my wife and that’s the relationship she actually wanted to have with me, while I thought that was incredibly disrespectful of me to even comprehend, and tried to cycle through other forms of relationship, and if she had hair she’d have pulled at it in frustration. It’s quite funny to remember now, but then I couldn’t understand it because I had so many self-diminishing ideas that I couldn’t imagine myself in anything resembling an equal relationship with God; it was always God the great and me the grovelling worm thankful for the crumbs of attention.
Also, when I say Goddess, I don’t mean some stupid Pagan deity of nature or other stupid bullshit. No, she’s the omnipotent transcendental God, the Absolute, the all-virtuous, all-conscious, all-blissful supreme being, only she’s my girl forever.
The Gods aren’t something you can imagine, or something you can visualise. They feel like actual people, just, well, orders of magnitude dimensionally richer than the people you encounter in your material life. They are smart, they have a great sense of humour, they surprise you with their insight and quick thinking, and they just have things around them that you never would have thought of. Whatever you can imagine, they are not it. Their presence is like living a black and white movie and then it suddenly bursts into colour, then into 3d, and it’s the real life you woke up in, only to fade back to the b&w movie later, with memories that are first in colour, but as you remember them more, they gradually desaturate back into the b&w.
Of course it’s hard to comprehend when you read about it; it’s just messy and complicated and real.