Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
At some point in time every God-loving individual makes the earnest plea to the Divine, “Please, Oh, please let me see you…let me behold your form!” Even I have done this countless times and often would get angry when God does not respond. Then I began thinking, how foolish am I for expecting a formless God to take form and appear in front of me. How foolish am I to expect my physical eyes to behold God who is beyond the senses. How foolish am I to want to “see” God when God has manifested Himself into the nature that surrounds me. Oh, how utterly foolish am I!
I began thinking about this when someone in lecture asked Swamiji, “Swamiji, isn’t darshan (the vision of God) conditioned by triputi (the triad –seer, seen, sight), therefore making it unreal?
Swamiji replied, “Darshan is a perception based upon intense Divine feeling. The value of darshan is in the feeling. This feeling awakens inner experience and cannot be described as ‘physical’ as everyone does not have the same experience. This type of phenomenon leads to samskaras (subtle impressions) of samadhi (super-conscious state) and contributes in developing sahaja samadhi (constant experience of superconscious state). Furthermore, anything that prepares you for Enlightenment is a type of darshan and is real for you.”
This means each of us has had darshan at some point in time and the essence of darshan lies in intimate-experience.
This made me realize that I need to simply re-invent the way I understand darshan to be. God stands before us in so many ways. He is the sky, the oceans, the trees…He our next door neighbors, our friends and foes. He is the very body and that which sustains the body. He is infact everything. Sahasrasheersha purushah sahasraaksha sahasrapaat, sa bhoomim vishwato vritwaa atyatisthadaddashaangulam. Purusha Suktam explains to us that the Cosmic Being has a thousand heads, eyes, and feet, is spread beyond the entire universe, and beyond all measurements. Each of us are part of this Cosmic Being, and have found ourselves in a wave-like predicament asking, “Where is the ocean?”
Real darshan of God is that stirring emotion deep within the soul, when you firmly feel, “there is nothing more I need.” So now I don’t beg God for physical vision but the divine vision of intuition and the times when I do long for darshan of God, I simply look around and behold the vastness of His Creation.
