God the Creator

Question

Is there a "Creator" in the Abrahamic religion sense of the word? If not, what is there?

—Arjun, USA

Answer

As the woman saint, Ananda Moyi Ma put it: “It is, and it isn’t!”

Surely “God” is not some man with a beard sitting on a throne in some antiseptic corner of space! As we are conscious and self-aware (though not very much, I’m afraid), there must needs be a greater Consciousness from which our own has descended and which asks, “Who am I?” “Who made us, and why?”

How can mud, so to speak, produce consciousness, beauty, or the incredible elegance and complexity of creation and all creatures? We know from our experience of creativity that it flows from the inspiration of ideas, images, and feelings upon which we act often at great seemingly self-sacrifice to manifest and accomplish.

Thus it is this great Consciousness which we call God, or many names, or no name and which is Bliss itself, Bliss Eternal and whose nature, being blissful, is to expand and share its bliss with many, vibrated with the impulse to share and create and set into motion intention, energy, joy, love, and will until the ideas and energy, infused with these qualities, began to produce offspring so to speak of the myriad forms of creation.

In so being endowed with intention, intelligence, and energy this outflowing power assumed unto itself a separateness which has no true substance and which is, in the ultimate sense, a delusion. This separateness was necessary that the great show of creation might continue.

As we awaken towards the desire to know the truth that will free us from suffering, including the existential dis-ease of separateness even in the face of all material gains, we ascend to pierce the veil of God’s dream-maya.

God has become personal in you and I and in every atom of creation. God, being infinite, is also infinitessimal; in being impersonal He is also very personal. So while not perhaps in the Abrahamic sense of God-man, in the both-and sense of abstract and material at the same time, and yet, above it all, untouched by his own Dream just as novelist is no more good nor evil for having created characters who must needs be, for a good novel, good or evil.

Blessings,

Nayaswami Hriman