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WHAT IS REAL?
At the same time that the Hindus were exploring the question of what the real self is, they were wondering about their world. What kind of world is it? What was the power that had created the world and still made it continue? They looked about them and saw the trees, the mountains, the plains, and the rivers. They felt the rain and the wind. They came to know all the other living creatures with which they shared the land.
They realized that they could not say that the world was any one of these. Nor was it just the total of the things they saw and felt and knew. The world was more than all these things. The power that had made the world and made it continue was indeed more than the things in the world. But the world, they decided, was an evidence of that power, just as they themselves were. Everything in the whole universe,’ including themselves, was a result of the working of the creative and continuing force. All things were kin, then, because all had the same origin.
Thoughts such as these made them conclude that there is a fundamental unity of all existence and all experience. A Hindu will tell us that all apparent differences which people think so important are trivial and temporary. They seem for a time to be important, but soon they fade away or change. For example, all of us can distinguish between a living being and the elements of the earth. Yet, in death, all living beings return to the elements. There are no exceptions. The Hindu who points to such illustrations is trying to say that in the very beginning there was unity (no differences). In the end, there will also be unity. It is just a matter of time.
In the Rig Veda, there is the Hindu Hymn of Creation, which tries to explain how the world came to be. This hymn stresses that there was unity in the beginning, and no distinctions could be made:
Existence was not, nor its opposite,
Nor earth, nor heaven’s blue vault, nor aught beyond.
Death was not yet, nor deathlessness; the day
Was night, night day, for neither day nor night
Had come to birth.
The hymn goes on to tell about the power behind the world:
Then THAT, the primal fount
Of light -- immobile -- rest and action joined --
Brooded in silent bliss. Itself beside
In the wide universe there nothing was.
The important thing that the hymn emphasizes is the supreme unity of THAT (or THAT ONE). the ALL which lies behind or beyond both existence and non-existence. In THAT, there are no differences. Rest and action are joined, for example. Everything is united.
The Hindus use THAT to refer to the supreme One, Brahman. They use the neuter pronoun in order to avoid any idea of a manlike God or Creator or First Principle. They believe that Brahman is the ultimate reality behind and beyond all the things that men find to be "real" from experiencing them through the senses.
This is a different idea about God from that of most Christians and Jews. Many use the term "God" to mean a personalized God -- that is, a God who has characteristics like a person. For example, we are familiar with expressions like, "God loves," "God is merciful," "the face of God," "the hand of God." Hindus say that such personal descriptions are qualities people admire in other people. And since they believe that God is infinitely good, people surmise that God has unlimited amounts of these admirable qualities. But, say the Hindus, God -- if we use that term to mean the REALITY and the true nature of the universe -- is beyond such human representation. And that is what they mean by Brahman, or THAT.
In the Hindu religion, there are personal gods to be worshiped by those persons who so desire. Often it is these gods about which we are told most in writings on Hinduism. According to Hindu myths, the gods have wives (who are also worshiped), and they live almost like human beings. Out of a large number of gods, three are worshiped most by present-day Hindus. The three together form a Hindu trinity: Brahma, the creator; Vishnu, the savior; Shiva, the destroyer and restorer.
Hindus believe that the creation of the world is a continuing thing in which men share, not something that happened long ago in the past. Therefore, they believe that the three gods work to carry out the continual creation. At the end of each cycle or age in creation, Shiva destroys the old world. Brahma creates a new world. When, during the cycle, men face a problem they cannot solve alone, Vishnu comes as a human being or in some other form, with special powers to give the necessary aid.
The many other gods and goddesses are also worshiped in whatever ways the people see fit, with prayers, praise, and gifts. Devotees appeal to them to attend to and to bless all phases of human life. And yet, even while they worship the personal gods, the educated Hindus know that the gods are essentially human ideals that men imagine to be objective reality. They do not actually exist in the form in which the people think they exist. The real function of the worship of personal gods is to direct the worshiper to knowledge of Brahman, which lies beyond all men’s wondering and speculation about the universe.
One can always raise that most troublesome of all questions: "Why was a world created at all?" To this men have not found a final answer, according to the Hindus. Their Hymn of Creation mentions it:
Ah vain are words, and weak all mortal thought!
Who is there truly knows, and who can say,
Whence this unfathomed world, and from what cause?
Nay, even the gods were not! Who, then, can know?
The source from which this universe hath sprung,
That source, and that alone, can bear it up -- None
else: THAT, THAT alone, lord of the worlds,
In its own self contained, immaculate
As are the heavens above, THAT alone knows
The truth of what itself hath made -- none else
But if men cannot know the reasons for the creation of the world, they can know something more important. They can know Brahman. The Hindu scriptures are full of suggestions about how a person may live his own life in order to experience the essential unity that is the pattern of all creation. When you know the Atman, your own "inner self," you also know the heart of the universe, Brahman, the "inner self" of all creation. A person can know Brahman only by knowing himself. Hindus say, "He who knows himself will know God."
One of their scripture readings describes it in this way:
The spirit within me is smaller than a mustard seed.
The spirit within me is greater than this earth and
sky and the heaven and all these united. It is Brahman.
Happiness lies in the direction of finding real meaning: the real self, the real nature of the universe. Brahman expresses itself in many ways -- in man, through the Atman. But Brahman is not one of the expressions: that is beyond them all. When a man truly knows the Atman, then he may know Brahman. When he knows both, he sees that Atman and Brahman are united. And man realizes the supreme knowledge, gains the supreme happiness. All the creatures and creations of the earth arc the same, bound up in inclusive Brahman. There is no diversity, no real difference in any part of reality. All are the same. All are one. "It is Brahman."
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