blog (January, 2001)
Emanation Station
Reading Advanced Course in Yogi Philosophy, by Yogi Ramacharaka, last night, I came across this:
The ordinary religious man may find it difficult to conceive of God as manifesting in Substance or Matter; in Force or Energy. He thinks of Him as making, of using, these things, but is not accustomed to regarding Him as in them. The Gnani Yoga will help him to see God on all sides, and in all things.
It seems as if Christianity, (the only religion I can, with any experiential authority, speak for,) dearly hangs onto its view of God as an all-powerful man. A being infinitely more superior than us, but anthropomorphized all the same. Christ was certainly a God-man, but when we say His Father it always seemed we were talking of another great God-man being.
Maybe it was just me that wasn't thinking the right way, but when I read this, and the enclosing chapter, I couldn't help feeling that it is with extraordinary egotism that we refuse to give up our God-man for the understanding that every spinning atom, every physical law we don't have a fundamental answer for, every human consciousness is really a manifestation of The Absolute; of God. Made in His image:
The Sun is the Sun itself--the centre--the source of the vibrations that proceed from it... Strictly speaking, nothing outside of the Sun is the Sun, and yet each bit of vibration is an emanation from the Sun--a part of the Sun, as it were. And each ray of light or heat which we perceive through our senses is really "Sun," in a way, and yet it is not the source. The ray is the Sun, in this sense, and yet the Sun is not the ray.
A good analogy, I think.