Page 15 - All India Magazine Nov-2023

a higher and truer, a spiritual or mystic knowledge. The Gods al-
ready exist, they are not created by man even though he does
seem to conceive them in his own image; fundamentally, he for-
mulates as best he can what truth about them he receives from
the cosmic Reality. An artist or a bhakta may have a vision of the
Gods and it may get stabilised and generalised in the conscious-
ness of the race and in that sense it may be true that man gives
their forms to the Gods; but he does not invent these forms, he
records what he sees; the forms that he gives are given to him. In
the "conventional" form of Krishna men have embodied what they
could see of his eternal beauty and what they have seen may be
true as well as beautiful, it conveys something of the form, but it is
fairly certain that if there is an eternal form of that eternal beauty
it is a thousand times more beautiful than what man had as yet
been able to see of it. Mother India is not a piece of earth; she is
a Power, a Godhead, for all nations have such a Devi supporting
their separate existence and keeping it in being. Such Beings are
as real and more permanently real than the men they influence,
but they belong to a higher plane, are part of the cosmic con-
sciousness and being and act here on earth by shaping the human
consciousness on which they exercise their influence. It is natural
for man who only sees his own consciousness individual, national
or racial at work and does not see what works upon it and shapes
it, to think that all is created by him and there is nothing cosmic
and greater behind it. The Krishna consciousness is a reality, but if
there were no Krishna, there could be no Krishna consciousness:
except in arbitrary metaphysical abstractions there can be no con-
sciousness without a Being who is conscious. It is the person who
gives value and reality to the personality, he expresses himself in it
and is not constituted by it. Krishna is a being, a person and it is as
the Divine Person that we meet him, hear his voice, speak with him
and feel his presence. To speak of the consciousness of Krishna as
something separate from Krishna is an error of the mind, which is

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