7.4.1 - HOW CAN POLYTHEISM AND MONOTHEISM BE RECONCILED?

This question rises in the minds of most of the people. Monotheism and polytheism reflect different levels of thought and action and that the two are poles apart. In one sense that is true. Yet it is also the recognized truth in the lives of great souls and in the history of nations that the two co-exist and are reconcilable in Mysticism. This is well illustrated in Hinduism.

Is God really one or many? In the case of the one God, is worship necessarily external and formal or might it be equally advantageous, if not more advantageous, without external formalities? The realization of pure Sat Chit Ananda is worship? If it can be termed worship, then probably the term worship must have an extended significance, which ordinarily it does not have. When a person is simply enjoying Satchitananda he is generally referred to as in a blissful state, and he might even express his own condition by the words Main Allah Hum, I am God, Aham Brahmasmi, Soham, that is, if the individual soul has so completely surrendered itself to and got identified with the Paramatman, then there may be no such thing as relation of one soul to another. Worship is usually understood as the attitude of one soul, a Jiva, towards God, viewed not as identical with it, but as in some way different from it, though the Godhead might include the Jiva. One might worship a God, which includes oneself because it includes others also, and is thus different from one. If worship must necessarily bring about differences between the worshipper and the worshipped, it is not correct then to say that the merger of the individual soul in the Paramatman is an act of worship. It may be the ultimate end of worship. There is Atma Nivedana worship ends. But ordinarily no one would think loss of identity is worship. As in the pages of Wordsworth, we come across passages where the soul is lost in admiration of the beauty, the infinite character and the glories of Nature treating them as expression of love and joy arising on God’s Visitation. That is described sometimes as an act of worship as loss of self is only temporary. Even the person who worships a God-form is lost in it for a time and then comes back to himself and treats that from as different from him. A mystic has various stages, one stage of which is losing himself in Nature or in a God-form other than Nature. Thus Nature and he are two different objects, and that is how the term worship may be applied to such cases.