What is There to Let Go Of?

By Steve Beckow On February 23, 2013

God created this whole illusory world for His/Her/Its own pleasure. (God has no gender.) He/She/It created a game of life.
To avoid such a clumsy if correct construction and to offset patriarchy’s arrogation of God to itself as “He,” let me call God “She.” Of course, neither is accurate but perhaps the latter may have a beneficial, consciousness-raising effect.

God sent “bits” of Herself out into the world to know Herself. God is Indivisible so this too is a loose manner of speaking. Anything said about God is equally loose. But we are obliged to communicate so we must deal with each other in words, as loose as they may be.

Since God is all there is, knowing Herself is a challenge. Many of us know ourselves as a result of interaction. But there’s no one for God to interact with and so She created us finger puppets. We interact with each other. And each time one of us realizes who we really are (God), God meets God.

God made up certain rules for this game of life called “natural” or “universal laws.” They governed what could be done and what could not.


God made certain statements that reveal that She has made a world and made up the rules of how to participate in that world. Here is one from the Bhagavad-Gita, the Song of God:

“This entire universe is pervaded by me, in that eternal form of mine which is not manifest to the senses. Although I am not within any creature, all creatures exist within me. I do not mean that they exist within me physically. That is my divine mystery. You must try to understand its nature. My Being sustains all creatures and brings them to birth, but has no physical contact with them.” (1)

She allowed us the limited ability to create. She gave us freewill to do as we like. She created a graduated world in which, the more we learned of our own true nature, the more we advanced through these layers or dimensions. The “higher” the dimension, the more wonderful they become as we approach “nearer” and “nearer” to God. (All these are loose ways of speaking.)

As we learned more, we created more. But sometimes what we created was “not-Divine.” (How can anything be “not Divine” in a world in which only the Divine is? Again more loose speaking and more paradox.)

That which increased our separation from God could be said to be “not-divine.” Ignorance, hatred, vengefulness, coldness – all of these increase the (apparent) “gulf” between us and God and can be said to be “not-divine.”

God gave us hints on how to return home. For instance, Krishna, an Incarnation of God, gave us this clue:

“I am all that a man may desire
Without transgressing
The law of his nature.”  (2)

If one asked what could be safely embraced as being Divine, then Krishna has answered that question: “I,” that is God, am all that can be desired, sought, or embraced without invoking a compensating and correcting natural law.

The Divine Itself and everything that is qualitatively like the divine is all that we can desire, seek and embrace without incurring karma or corrective action.  In this game of blind man’s bluff, it is as if God were saying: “Not that. Not that. I am over here.”

The world that God created is full of paradoxes. For instance it is equally true to say that “I am not within any creature. … My Being sustains all creatures and brings them to birth, but has no physical contact with them” and to say that God exists in the heart as the Self, Christ, or Atman.

The mind reels at that statement and says how can God not exist within any creature and exist within every creature as the flame in the heart? God is too big to enter the heart. God is indivisible. Etc.  One answer is that that flame does not exist as any physical entity. Another answer is that God does not “exist” within anyone. Still another answer is that a small “particle” of God, and not God Herself, exists within anyone, as far as the Indivisible can be said to have or make fragments of itself or particles.
The answer is that the mind cannot figure out this puzzle. It never could and never will be able to.

So what there is to be let go of is equally a paradox. Because what there is to be let go of is anything that is not divine. But given that everything is divine, what could be “not divine”? Again that is left for us to discover. And it cannot be discovered by the mind, although it can be discovered by the heart.

Anything that “separates” us from God could be said to be “not divine.” Anything that obscures God in Her native state could be said to be “not divine.” Anything that harms another, disadvantages another, blocks us or another from knowing ourselves as divine could be said to be “not divine.”

And the list goes on.

So what there is to be let go of, speaking in common and simple language, though inviting paradox, is everything that is not divine. It is left to us, in the course of many lives, to find out what is not divine, to find out what it means to “let go” of it, and to discover what results.

Footnotes

(1) Sri Krishna in Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood, trans., Bhagavad-Gita. The Song of God. New York and Scarborough: New American Library, 1972; c194, 80.
(2) Ibid., 71.