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Is God One or Many?

By Vrinda Dar
General Secretary of the Kautilya Society

When I was a child, my grandmother would hold my little hands and take me into her prayer room. We used to cross the threshold of reality, leaving the world behind, and step into serenity, mystery and magic. "God is one", she would say as she offered prayers to brightly-coloured images of Gods and Goddesses in the gorgeous wooden temple in her prayer room. For a long time, I accepted what she said as the Final Truth. But then one day I couldn’t resist asking her "If God is One, why do you pray to so many?".

"God", she told me in the tranquil voice of one who knows the truth, "is One and He is Many". It is how you look at Him that changes, she said, not He. He has many forms and He reveals himself to you in the form you want to see Him. It is the world that calls Him with different names and follows different paths to understand him, to unite with Him. He has always been One.

I still remember clearly when my grandmother took me to our neighbours. When we entered the house, I saw a lady kneeling down on a small asana (or carpet) in the middle of the room. Her eyes were closed. She would raise her head, say something and then put her head down on the floor, repeating this many times. My grandmother asked me to be silent and told me that she was praying. I was surprised. The energy and the deep silence in the room told me that she was praying but for me, until then, the only way I knew to pray was my grandmother's way. So, I thought to myself, not only does God have many forms and many names but people pray to Him in different ways.

These words of my grandmother would remain etched in my memory but I would start understanding them only years later. I would understand her words when in school we'd celebrate all religious festivals, when I would start reading the sacred books of the world’s religions, when I would finally perceive that mine wasn't the only truth, that there really wasn't One truth, One path, One form or One expression of God in this world, that the thread binding us humans together is the love for God, that all religions profess peace and brotherhood. Only then would I understand that it is not God who divides us but it is our diverse ideas about God and society, norms and dogmas and our fears of being colonised.

We all speak the same spiritual language but we constantly fear that the other may shake the pillars of our beliefs. Often we just talk to others, not communicate. We don't listen to them. And if we listen, it is only when we feel that they are reinforcing our beliefs. And if we find something different from what we are used to, we often run away from it. Is dialogue reaching a consensus, or accepting one belief as the truth or is it accepting and respecting the difference, accepting that all are parts of the Whole but not the Whole and that all need each other to grow spiritually, to discover and glimpse the Vision of the Whole?

Polytheism urges a spirit of dialogue and helps you perceive the One spirit behind the multiple creations. It helps you realise that all is One and One is Many, that the Spirit is One and the forms many, that it is the relationships between the Spirit and the forms that sometimes makes them seem One and sometimes Many. Often the dust of liturgical expressions becomes so thick that it covers our spiritual vision. It makes our minds and hearts blind to the value and spirit beneath others' expressions. No religion has ever been able to push aside completely the polytheistic desires of its followers and so the fire of dialogue has always been kept burning. And this is what we too are trying to realise together in this newsletter.

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