Thread: Brahman versus God.

Yes, prayer to Shiva is a prayer for change that is guided and nurtured by a benevolent force and a praise for all the things God has caused to happen, all the times you have been protected and sheltered from the possible horrors of this world.

If you pray to Vishnu (Krishna) you are giving thanks for the world you are currently in. You would pray to Krishna when about to eat, or when in awe of the beautiful sky.

There is overlap between the idea of creation and change. Thinking of Brahma as creation is confusing as change is creation. A seed changes into a plant, so is that creation or change. Instead Brahma is the force that is driving creation, and Shiva is the redirection of that force. Brahma has almost no following, probably because it is harder to relate to in our daily lives.

It is false for the Krishna consciousnesses people to say Krishna is Brahman. They have just decided to claim ultimate power for the God of their religion. Brahman is the unchanging reality behind everything that can not be known, Vishnu is one aspect of that.





Samsara-Nirvana: Not everyone is wanting to escape Samsara. Let's describe Samsara as the physical world in which life takes place in cycles of birth and death. Many groups want to leave this world and merge with the non-duality, meaning to give up there individual force and be reabsorbed into the unknowable truth. This must have been a sad and hungry group of people who wanted that. The truth if you dig deeper is that once able to obtain that state, they gain the ability to re-enter physical worlds and bring the equivalent of waking lucidity with them. It depends on who you ask. Some say the goal is to cease to be individual, but if you ask me that is basically working very hard to commit spiritual suicide. Others feel the end goal is to become like Buddha.

Those who follow Shiva in the way I do, see another path. Another line of Hindu thought says that those who master mental yoga (Shiva is the master of yoga) can grow in power and pattern until you can reach the ability to exist on higher realms. This is what the Krishna follower was referring to. This is basically an idea of dream like realms controlled by powerful beings that have much less suffering because they are basically invitation only. To have a heavenly realm, you must have a way to keep out those who would harm the peace of the setting. This is basically the idea of Heaven. It is not to be taken as the end to spiritual growth, and in a sense is still Samsara. You do not have to be born and die, but it is still a cycle and involves experience of a physical reality which changes. It should be viewed as a reward or vacation between journeys into this type of physical world. It would be expected that upon re-entry into this world you would spread knowledge and help others reach enlightenment.

People do not like the idea of eternity, at least not one in which they are always having to improve, work towards a goal, so humans tend to create false end points. Be it the merging with the whole, or eternity of heaven. The truth (IMO) is that both are steps that do not last. Those who merge with the whole are embraced and then placed back into duality after a rest. Those who find their way to heavenly worlds, find that they are still expected to improve and eventually preform some sort of service like teaching others in the physical world.

The end of this all? Hinduism holds to the idea of cycles even in the grandest sense. The personalities that are guiding creation are not the unknowable truth. They were like you and me once and grew in goodness and strength and pattern. The idea is that after what seems like eternity (let's say 100 billion years) the universe fails. This is sort of a big bang/ entropy idea of a beginning and an end. Maybe the universe becomes so expanded that it can no longer create life bearing planets. There are then two course for souls. Either you have made something beautiful out of yourself or even after so much time you have failed to become anything worth keeping. Those who are still petty and nasty are not punished, they are simply reabsorbed, and they have reached the conclusion of their journey (the end). Those being who have become powerful and wonderful are removed whole from the universe and preserved. The universe is then reabsorbed. When a new universe (there are now infinite universes) is created those preserved are given positions which are god like as jobs. They may be in charge of any number of divine tasks, say creation of life forms via evolution, or designing wonderful natural events. After very long this universe will end also, then another and another. Eventually these beings have reached overwhelming size and beauty (having existed for say 1,000 billion years). At that point they may actually become the Vishnu, Shiva, and Brahma of a new small universe.

The whole time Brahman is still in the back ground, an unknowable truth that forms all things. So, you can see why I feel it is silly for anyone to claim Krishna is Brahman, like being the personality of the universe as it is, is not grande enough.