Small and Large

The Bhagavad Gita has helped me to a fascinating new way of conceptualizing something. It says: “Your soul, your self, is too small to be harmed by any weapon.” “The individual soul is smaller than a tiny fraction of the size of the end of a hair, but God/Source/Creator is the smallest of all, and can easily enter into the heart of the individual soul.”

The Bhagavad Gita also compares the smallness of the Creator to the gigantic material universe which came from that smallness. I’m exhilarated and inspired by the idea that creation is from the smallest to the largest, from inside out. That makes sense to me. Crystals grow that way. Even when I stir my coffee, my instinct is to make an expanding spiral which begins in its center.


My mind was conditioned, probably because of the way the Bible was interpreted to me, to think of the Creator/God as outside myself, and very large. On the other hand, when I thought of something “within” I could visualize only the dark inside of the body. Thousands of creaky old teachings gave me the idea that to “face God” in some way, I should look up and lift my hands.

The Old Testament creation stories caused me to imagine a gigantic Being fashioning the earth, the sun, humans, animals, like a big potter at a wheel, or a child making mud pies. Biblical language leads to that. This naturally caused me to conceive of myself as a small creature on a big stage created by the Biggest of all, looking down on me.

For that reason I’ve always had trouble with statements like, “look within for God,” and “The Source is within you.” Now, with the idea that God/The Source is the smallest of the small, and is within my own very small (relative to the size of the body) Soul, I finally am able to conceptualize, if only in a crude way, God as within.

I can’t help immediately thinking of quantum physics’ ”string theory” -- that everything in the universe is made up of vibrating bits of energy, possibly the smallest of the small, from which all the physical universe is constructed -- the vibrations of the smallest creating and sustaining the components of sub-atomic particles, then atoms, then structures made of atoms, molecules -- sphere expanding outside sphere -- and on out to humans and elephants and cars and stars and galaxies.

I realize that the Source is inconceivable by my human mind, that non-physical things like the Soul can’t be compared in size to physical things, and that Creation is perhaps what we’d describe as a grand illusion in which nothing is really smaller or larger, but a new way of conceptualizing nevertheless has helped me to entertain the feeling of God “within” instead of outside and above.

The Source

I want to write soon about an independent realization stemming from the writings of schizophrenics -- one of those “knowings” that we occasionally experience which was not handed down to us by other people – but first I need to tell you more about “where I’m coming from”.

I’ve already mentioned that when I was young I moved from fundamentalist Protestant Christian teachings to an independent realization that there was a single spiritual underpinning of all that exists. Just about everything I’ve since learned about that general subject has come from reading, including such things as the “Upanishads”, the “Bhagavad Gita”, Aldous Huxley’s “The Perennial Philosophy”, and writings on Taoism, mysticism, Spiritualism, and New England
Transcendentalism, among many others. There are interesting contemporary views in Tolle’s “The Power of Now” (my personal favorite), “Conversations with God”, “Seth Speaks”, and books by Deepak Chopra.

The Tao is the power or essence which envelops, surrounds and flows through all things, living and non-living.

In the Bhagavad Gita, the Supreme (the Source) expresses these concepts: “All states of being are manifested by my energy. I am, in one sense, everything, but I am independent. I am above and inexhaustible. I am the origin and dissolution of all things material and physical. All manifestations of being are within Supreme Consciousness. The quality of the existence of living entities is one and the same with the Supreme, but they are never equal to the Supreme in quantity of power.”

The Transcendentalists spoke of the Oversoul, the divine "spark" within, which connected all facets of nature, including humans. They believed that one's "spark" and connection can be discovered through intuition and not through logical reasoning.

I believe that there is a single Source, an ultimate universal Beingness, which creates and sustains all things. The Source is as incomprehensible to us as It is to a goldfish, and must remain largely a mystery to humans in this life, but we can intuitively be aware of Its ultimate reality as well as perceiving Its physical creations. It is what some would call God, but my upbringing has crushed that word under so many unacceptable meanings and emotional connotations that I need to find alternatives. I wish I could also find better words for the vague and overused terms “spirit” and “spiritual”. Words are the greatest enemy of awareness of reality.

In this context, I plan to post some thoughts about schizophrenia.