Part XVII — Professor Savyasachi Dastidar

PCG 19. Department of Politics, Economics and Society, State University of New York, Old Westbury, NY

Professor Savyasachi Dastidar: I am told that God is an all-powerful and merciful Mother. How can She allow the deliberate killing of small children by men in times of war?

Sri Chinmoy: My esteemed Professor, when we are on earth, on the physical plane, living in the physical consciousness, we see life and death in one way. But when we are in a very high consciousness, we see life and death in a totally different way. On earth, life gives us joy, death gives us pain. These experiences we get through our physical senses. But when we are in the subtle body, we go beyond, far beyond the experiences of human pain and joy. Here the omniscient and omnipotent God wants to have an experience in the omnipresent God.

Because of our own experiences with fathers and mothers in the physical world, we have formed our own concept of God the Father or God the Mother. We may see God as all Affection, all Love, all Compassion or something else. But when God plays certain other roles in His Cosmic Game, we do not understand. God is not Someone who can be understood. He can only be realised. When we establish our conscious oneness with Him, on the strength of countless years of our sleepless and breathless aspiration, we see that each action of His has a special purpose.

We may see destruction on the physical plane. But from another level of consciousness, that very experience can be seen as the transformation or illumination of certain embodied souls. The true God-lovers will always be able to justify God's Actions because of their constant love for Him. This is not a blind belief in God's Goodness. It is an inseparable oneness with God's Will. The true God-seeker and God-lover knows and feels that God the Creator and God the Destroyer are the selfsame Being.

I can build a house, and I can break it. When I build a house, people congratulate me and say that I am very great. When I break it, they say that I am foolish, arbitrary, destructive. But they do not know my reasons either for building or for breaking. Similarly, God created this body of mine. Has He no right to destroy this body, if so is His Will? If I have the right to build something, do I not also have the right to break it? Perhaps I want to break it in order to build a better house. With your eyes, you see it as an act of random destruction, but if you knew my reason, you would change your opinion. On another plane it is not destruction at all. It is only moulding and remoulding. God moulds us in one way, and then He may want to remould us in another way and give us different experiences and different opportunities.

The one who creates also has the authority to destroy. It is our stupidity to say that when God creates something He is good, and when He destroys it He is bad. We are judging the Almighty God according to our limited, very limited, human understanding. God is beyond our appreciation and deprecation. As human beings, we feel free to build and break our own property at our sweet will. When God creates something, which is His property, why do we feel that He has no right to break it?

If we build something and see that it is not to our satisfaction, then naturally we will break it and build something that is more perfect. Similarly, if God's creation is not to His Satisfaction, He also may try to do better. Why do we want to give Him only the right to build, to create?

You are seeing God as the Mother. If She sees that somebody has killed one of Her innocent little children, She has the wisdom to say, "My child has been killed. I will produce another one to take his place, and this one will be infinitely better." God the Mother tolerates it when She sees that some of Her children have been killed in times of war or during a flood or famine. She allows it to happen because She knows that She has the capacity to create something far better. If someone comes to my house and starts destroying my garden, I may allow him to do it because I know that afterwards I can easily plant new flowers, new trees and make the garden much more beautiful than it was before. Similarly, God the Mother can easily use Her divine Force to create a better creation and give a better life to those embodied souls who meet with an untimely death in this incarnation.