This entire story, from Titles to Gods as actual persons and not merely convenient shapes for That which is without name and form, is a very new realisation for me, believe it or not. It’s not like I didn’t understand it in theory. I even wrote about some of it before. It just didn’t click with me, make the connection that makes you say “aha!”. I even made mistakes recently, treating two God-persons as interchangeable, which resulted in some consternation from one of them, and shock on my side when I understood that I apparently did something awkward and offensive without ever meaning to. I was just too used to my combination of impersonal and personal concepts of God, where a person is merely a face you’re interacting with, but there’s one God behind all of them.

Interestingly, I would never treat physical or astral beings that way, because it’s obvious that they are distinct people and of course they are not interchangeable with one another. Treating them as mere manifestations of the same unmanifest reality of brahman and not as distinct people would be crass and offensive. However, for some bloody reason I assumed that this applies only to beings that are not, how would I say it, “of God”, “one with God”, enlightened, or however one would put it. Now that I look at it, there’s absolutely no reason to assume any of that, except for the fact that various teachers of Vedanta absolutely assume this interchangeability – God will appear to you as this or that, but God is One, beyond name and form.

That’s such obvious nonsense. Imagine two spiritual people who attained enlightenment. Are they now the same person? Obviously not. When they shed the physical body, are they now the same person, or, rather, is their personality lost or sublimated into the unmanifest and formless ocean of brahman? I never saw this happen, or saw evidence that it’s a thing, other than Vedanta assuming that’s how things work. However, I already knew that Vedanta seems to be unique among philosophies in getting every single practical and verifiable thing completely wrong. The fact that it got this one wrong as well should not have been a surprise that it was, but I guess Vedanta, too, is one of those rotting logs in my mind, whose remains are just left there because I didn’t get around to revisiting all the implicit assumptions that are left standing there and occupying space in my belief system after the main structure was abandoned for, well, being proven wrong.

Sure, there’s a reason why I didn’t get around to it yet. I had multiple decades filled with all kinds of emergencies, disasters and hardship of the kind that makes you deal with other stuff – I developed quite an understanding of different things, such as for instance the inner workings of this hell-hole, but I didn’t deal with the concept of darshan of different persons of God for a very long time for a very simple reason – I didn’t experience it during all those long years. I was told to expect as much somewhere in 2007 or close enough, but I didn’t expect it to be this long. All of it being of no direct consequence to the things of my immediate concern, it just wasn’t dealt with, and so some rotting remains of Vedanta were left unchecked in my belief system, causing trouble as soon as it again became relevant, because things changed a lot in the last year. As Goddess visited me, the previous visits lit up in my memory and connected, and I was able to connect the dots that were too dark to really work with in her absence. Also, the experience of darshan of different Divine beings that are completely distinct from her and from each other finally led me to the correct conclusion – that things that I know working in cases that are in my personal experience actually work like that everywhere. Souls are not just some separate waves on the ocean of brahman that melt back into the ocean with enlightenment, as Yogananda stupidly taught people. It’s actually the opposite – with enlightenment, you give God a different person and a name. You don’t become less; God becomes more. How can something infinite and all-encompassing become more? Well, it obviously can, because if now you exist as separate from God and in ignorance, and at some point you gain awareness of God and become of God, it’s obvious that God’s existence extended, and the existence of darkness and ignorance subsided. So yes, sure, the persons of God are all God in a way, but Jill and Joe are both humans and in some abstract way they are aspects of humanity, but that doesn’t mean they are indistinct and interchangeable. When a child is born, humanity gains another aspect, so to speak. When a person becomes enlightened, or liberated, or contains enough God-stuff, or whatever you want to conceptualise it as, God gains another name, form and title. There is no “The One God” in the Relative, because That stays on the other side of all manifestation. You interact with That by drawing from a pool of virtue, by becoming more of God, and the practical, Relative way this works is by absorbing additional kalapas into your spiritual body. Internally, it means expanding your soul to become more, and purifying it to become less chaotic, more clear, organised and transparent, which means more in alignment with reality. That aspect of God is not something on the outside, to be seen or interacted with, because you interact with it by being – being in truth, being in reality, being in kindness, being in awe, being touched by greatness. It’s always inside of you, as an option to choose, and an alternative to illusion and evil. But it’s also in other people, as their source of personal reality and a choice to make, and as people interact with each other from God, their choice to see God in another makes their own connection to God and choice for God greater. Eventually, God gains not only this or that choice that you make, but your entire person, and you as a person became a God. Not the God, but God. It’s weird, and human language isn’t really made for this kind of thing, and one should probably use mathematical notation, but since I’m a shitty mathematician this will have to wait. 🙂