# The Nectar of God (Part 4) In the vast expanse of human inquiry, few questions have proven as persistent and vexing as the existence of God. Across centuries and civilizations, this singular question has divided hearts, sharpened minds, and set loose both the noblest and basest impulses of our kind. We come now to examine it not with the fervor of the believer or the certainty of the skeptic, but with the patience of one who has learned that truth, when it exists, is rarely simple. The problem, as it has been inherited by us, presents itself as a dichotomy. Either God exists in some absolute, transcendent sense, or the universe proceeds according to laws indifferent to consciousness, purpose, or meaning. Between these poles, we are told, there is no middle ground. Yet this very framing, upon closer inspection, reveals itself as a construction—a narrowing of the possible landscapes of thought. Consider the nature of existence itself. We live within time, bound by its current, unable to stand outside it as the mathematician stands outside geometry. Our deepest certainties—memory, identity, causation—are all corrupted by this temporal condition. If this is our condition, what faculty within us could possibly verify or refute claims about the eternal, the unchanging, the absolutely real? We are beings of the riverbank attempting to measure the river itself. Yet there is something remarkable in the human capacity to reach beyond the prison of the present moment. In art, in mathematics, in the sudden stillness of contemplation, we touch something that seems to transcend our ordinary condition. A melody carries within it an order that cannot be explained by physics alone. A mathematical truth is discovered, not invented, as if it existed before we found it. These experiences form the bedrock of our intuition that there is something more than the material, something that calls to us from beyond the threshold of the ordinary. The question of God, properly understood, is not merely a question about the existence of a being, cosmic or otherwise. It is a question about meaning, about whether the universe is fundamentally hospitable to consciousness, to value, to purpose. It is a question about whether there is a ground to our deepest intimations of beauty, truth, and goodness, or whether these are merely the accidental byproducts of blind matter in motion. Here, tradition offers us guidance. The Upanishads, those ancient wells of speculation, teach us that Brahman—the ultimate reality—is not a being among beings, but the ground of being itself. It is not somewhere else, in some heaven beyond the clouds, but woven into the very fabric of existence, intimate as breath, subtle as the space between thoughts. To know Brahman is not to know something distant but to awaken to what has always been present, closer than our own self. This conception liberates us from the crude literalism that has sometimes plagued theological discourse. We need not imagine God as a cosmic monarch seated upon a throne, dispensing rewards and punishments according to a ledger. Nor need we reduce the divine to a mere abstraction, a principle so rarefied that it cannot touch the texture of lived experience. Instead, we may understand the sacred as the deepest dimension of reality itself—that which, when truly perceived, transforms our understanding of everything. But perception remains the eternal difficulty. The eye cannot see itself; the knife cannot cut itself. If the ultimate reality is truly ultimate, truly the ground of all that is, then how can consciousness, which is itself grounded in this reality, achieve distance from it sufficient to perceive it? This is not merely a logical puzzle but the central predicament of spiritual inquiry. It is why the mystics have always insisted that knowledge of the divine is not knowledge *about* the divine, but a transformation of the knower, a death of the separate self and an awakening to something vaster than the ego. Here, too, we may find resonance with our own experience. In moments of genuine creativity, when the artist's conscious will dissolves and something seems to flow through her, the boundary between self and other becomes permeable. In the embrace of love, when another's joy becomes our own, the wall between self and world grows thin. In the silence that sometimes overtakes us in nature or in solitude, we taste a peace that seems to come from beyond ourselves, yet paradoxically, from within. These are glimpses, perhaps, of the very truth the traditions speak of. The rationalist will object that such experiences are merely neurological, the firing of synapses in particular configurations. But this objection mistakes the map for the territory. The fact that an experience has a neurological correlate does not explain away the experience. The biochemistry of love does not diminish its reality; the physics of sound does not exhaust the beauty of music. The deepest truths, it seems, are always met at the intersection of the material and the transcendent, where body and spirit are not opposites but partners in the dance of existence. We must also acknowledge the problem of evil, which has haunted theology since time immemorial. If God is omnipotent and benevolent, why does the world contain suffering? It is a question that admits of no easy answer, and the attempt to resolve it too quickly is itself a species of dishonesty. Yet it is worth noting that the question presupposes a certain picture of God—one in which power and benevolence are arranged according to our human understanding. But if God is truly transcendent, truly other, then our categories may not apply. This is not to say we should cease asking difficult questions, but rather that we should ask them with humility, recognizing that the deepest truths often resist the neat formulations of logic. The path forward, then, is not to demand certainty—for certainty in such matters is the privilege of the shallow. It is rather to cultivate openness, to examine our intuitions with rigor, and to allow the possibility that reality is larger and stranger than our conventional thinking permits. To ask the question of God is to open oneself to the possibility of transformation, to confess that there may be more within us and beyond us than the everyday consciousness ordinarily suspects. In this spirit, we conclude not with an answer but with an invitation—to look more carefully at the world as it is given to us, to listen to the voices of tradition without slavish adherence, and to trust that in the deepest movements of the human spirit, we are perhaps not speaking into the void, but answering a call that has been sounding since before we learned to speak.

When the devotee reaches such a state, he beholds in every corner of this vast world the manifold sport of one eternal power. The learned person, when discoursing on knowledge, finds the wisdom of the supreme truth itself coming to embrace and illumine his intellect, and witnessing this, both he and others bow their heads in humility and reverence. The virtuous, perceiving within the inspiration toward justice and good the invisible beckoning of the beneficent Creator, advance with courage along the path of their duty. The lover finds in every form of selfless love within his heart the taste of the infinite love of the Infinite Beloved, and attains supreme fulfillment. The devotee no longer beholds in the hidden power of this great world merely the strange play of a heartless, loveless, sightless vast force—as might the atheistic non-dualist or the fatalistic Vedantist—but instead savors the love and benevolent sport of an infinite being full of truth, knowledge, love, and goodness, and thereby attains boundless peace. His mind becomes filled with the truthfulness of the True, his conscience with the benevolence of the Benevolent, his heart with the love of the Loving One; and the devotee, surrendering his life at the feet of that greater stream of being, finds fulfillment. Thus the various facets of his inner devotion unite at the Lord's feet, and through the natural flowering of each faculty, the devotee's wholeness is perfected; and through the touch of this complete devotion, the faculties within his heart undergo a novel and extraordinary unfoldment.

When this universal power, once developed, becomes established in the ground of self-knowledge, and when man has progressed some distance along this path of practice, devotion arises in his heart and unfolds naturally in a simple manner according to his own nature; otherwise, entangled in the ancient conditioning of his society and community, bound by age-old customs, he adopts a complex course, and this devotional feeling assumes an unnatural form.

Man has tested devotion in countless ways. Through ages, much deliberation and effort have gone into asking what is the highest development and practice of devotion. The lives of the world's saints abound with such accounts. As in other matters concerning God, man's endeavors in the realm of devotion have ultimately failed nearly everywhere. Yet by repeatedly fitting the arrow to the bow, one eventually strikes the mark. When we look to the history of religion, we see that this universal law of human continuous effort holds sway there too. Before correct methods in agriculture, navigation, or statecraft were discovered, mankind had to labor extraordinarily, making countless attempts and experiments in myriad ways. The history of science is the history of man's continuous errors; the history of astronomy is the same. When we look to the history of religion, we find that through long contemplation, man wandered down various wrong paths before finally discovering the right one. Therefore, it is only natural that even after attaining devotion, when one seeks to cultivate and express it, he will commit numberless errors and mistakes.

The methods of devotional practice vary from age to age, from region to region, and from community to community. Under certain favorable conditions, devotional sentiment can flourish even in childhood. There are indeed certain particular methods well-suited to the development of devotional feeling in the young. The surrounding environment, the family, and the processes of socialization can play a valuable role in this. Yet once the religious faculty has developed to a considerable degree, there is no further necessity or utility in external accessories. Then one need not depend upon those outward means. As the mind develops, one must continually search for fresh methods suited to the mind's evolving faculties.

When a person grows older, they do not go about reciting religious verses or hymns as they did in childhood; the practice loses all its necessity. This is true for the individual just as it is for communities and nations. Those mantras, tantras, sacrifices, and forms of worship that were prevalent in society during childhood as part of devotional practice—after the development of knowledge, they no longer hold the same utility. Yet we often observe that people, out of sheer indolence, wish to remain forever clinging to these antiquated ways even as their age and knowledge increase. It is precisely this laziness that confines people within their own narrow realm, that keeps them from leaving—or wanting to leave—their comfort zone. Those who manage to step beyond survive; those who cannot, perish.

When a child grows up, their parents provide all manner of help and assistance. To teach the little one to walk, they make continuous efforts. To amuse the child, they purchase various toys. They arrange for physical exercise by buying spinning tops, kites, bicycles, and the like. They employ numerous methods to develop the child's intellect, keeping them occupied with toys that aid in mental growth. To foster the learning of letters and words, they bring picture books, rhyme books, story books, and various educational playthings. They procure books on basic literacy, works containing diverse information, and educational materials written appropriately for children, so as to cultivate mental steadiness and to sharpen their developing wit. In imparting religious education, they teach various rules and rituals, tell stories of the virtuous, instruct them in arithmetic in different ways, teach them letters and train their handwriting, introduce them to the stars and constellations of the sky—through countless such methods do parents nurture the child's mental growth.

When the child, through these various processes, eventually reaches adulthood and their body and mind grow mature and fully formed, they no longer play with wooden dolls. Instead, like all others in society, they engage in various professions, demonstrating their strength and capability. Through prolonged engagement in some occupation or business, both their vigor and their working capacity reach fullness. When their intellect too attains maturity, it becomes engaged in service to society, and through it they can serve their family and their nation in various ways. As intellect continues thus to be exercised and employed over long years, it gains new powers and new knowledge.

In these matters, a person's physical and mental capacities naturally execute various tasks according to their sense of responsibility. The very objects and subjects that brought joy to a child, the very methods through which he acquired knowledge—all of these come to be regarded as unsuitable and useless as years accumulate, and he readily abandons them. When a person's learning grows, no one expects him to sit about reciting the alphabet, or to repeat the elementary rules of grammar, or to spend time learning arithmetic. This is because to waste time on such work sits uneasily with the maturity of a grown person, and seems in no way conducive to the preservation or advancement of his intellect.

If I were to tell a mathematician to step away from his mathematics, to return to childhood, and to rest rocking in a cradle, such counsel, if followed, would serve nothing in his mathematical practice. If he were to forgo playing with tops or kites, spend no days in his mother's lap, or never roam about playing in the streets, his mastery of mathematics would neither be preserved nor enhanced—no one speaks such madness. Yet it is true: these things once served him in the building of himself, but now he no longer needs them. As a person advances along life's path, much that was once wonderfully apt and fitting he leaves behind, and the use of such things he gradually comes to forget.

Now I turn to the matter of religion. Even when a person has, by God's grace, attained full and flourishing devotion, we see that people urge him to spend his entire life pursuing the methods of childhood practice, studying the abc of faith and hearing the fables of worship. The situation has become such that even the one blessed by God's favor is seized by those around him, forcibly sent to religion's village schoolhouse, made to learn addition and subtraction and arithmetic by compulsion—otherwise everyone begins to say that his soul is unwell, he has gone mad, there is no devotion in his heart, and he stands against religion itself. The one who walks silently in God's path must still prove his piety before fools! He whose wandering is in the infinite sky, at the very feet of the Almighty—even he is torn down from that height and cast to earth, all to suit the common understanding, so that he might pass the various tests of religion for the entertainment of all.

To fail in pleasing the masses is to be branded an atheist, a hater of God. In the realm of religion alone do we hear this refrain: whatever teaching, path, or practice once kindled the flame of religious life must be followed again and again, perpetually. That path is praiseworthy and necessary everywhere, in all times. There is no other way beyond it; whoever walks a different path must surely be condemned. The notion has lodged itself in human minds that beyond the creed one believes and the road one travels, nothing else exists. Whoever stands outside this is a heretic and a disbeliever. One must walk and reach one's destination—but only along one prescribed path; all other paths are false—only fools make such a claim.