By s. chaitanya
Last Saturday, the last of 2012, it snowed 8 inches here in
Providence. Late night it stopped but temperatures were dropping more and more.
Early morning, when it was still quite dark, I casually looked at the snow in
the backyard of Vedanta Society of Providence. A very unusual thing, close to one of the cars
covered with snow, caught my attention. Wow!
Someone had made a snow-man last night! A closer look revealed that the artist
has put in a good deal of effort to make the sculpture as perfect as possible
in the given situation. The arms were there with gloves, the eyes were
well-made and glasses were put on them; a muffler adorned the neck (the snowman
wanted to stay warm too!), the mouth held a pipe and so forth.
As Bhagavad Gita says
(18/61) , “God, the Creator-Controller-Destroyer is in heart of all beings. …”
That makes everyone crave to create, to control and to
destroy. Children and grown-ups, men and women, rich and poor, all like to express
the divine creativity etc in their own way. To the extent the divinity is
manifest in that individual, the creativity etc of that individual also has the
divine expression. And as many scriptural sayings tell that God made us in His
Own image, people too take special interest in creating images similar to them.
People too want to be perfect as God is perfect.
Of course, logically speaking, this whole link between God
and us can be put in a reversed manner too! One can surely say, because we
crave to create, control, destroy, our God, our ideal gets pictured as the
supreme creator, controller and destroyer. Because we crave for perfection, our
god is, by definition perfection supreme, absolutely free from any blemish or
defect. Our god has to be, by very definition,
the absolute ultimate of what we wish to be.
That is why Vivekananda has said that it is man who has made
god in his own image.
