Bhagavagd Gita - Session 25- Track 2503

Yes, one does not recognise God first of all. In the state of ignorance, one only recognises others, and feels that one is independent from all the others. God hardly appears…in the ignorance you don’t see anywhere God. Most of the people who are egoistic, they live only in the consciousness of ahaṁbhāva, manas,and buddhi, and nothing farther than that. Even if they hear about God, it is only an idea. Even if they speak of their surrender to God, it is only the surrender to an idea of God, but there is no palpable reality experienced about God, no presence of God experienced. Therefore, in the egoistic consciousness normally it is experience of independence…not experience of independence, but sense of independence from all the rest, the world and the other human beings and other creatures of the world and other things in the world. But there is a sense in which somebody may have an experience of God from time to time. And in the egoistic consciousness, if it is Rajasic, there is a competition between the ego and God. When you experience God sometimes, and when you feel that God is so powerful, egoistic consciousness also wants to be as powerful as God.

This is what Asuras do very often: the more they heat about the greatness of God, the more they feel “why am I not like God, and should I not be as independent, as supreme, as majestic as God”. As we hear the story of Prahlad’s father, he wanted to be worshiped as God; he had known something about God, but he wanted that instead of that God, it is ‘he’ who should be enthroned as God. So, even there, there is a sense that well, “I am independent of that God”; and “I can be as big as that God”; and “I should be worshiped as that God”.

In other words, normally the experience of God is absent in the egoistic consciousness and this sense of independence is only with regard to the creatures, things and others. But even if God happens to come in the experience in some way or the other, the ego feels competitor of that God and wants to establish himself to be independent of Him, and wants to be enthroned as God. Is that clear?

Question: Is there a realisation of God and then you feel that you are independent of the others?

This is not a realisation. There is a difference between an experience and realisation: if you realise there is no problem. Experience: you can get an experience and you forget about it. Or you get a glimpse of it, but it is not held permanently. The important point in Moksha is: this permanence. When you realise God it is not like a fleeting experience of God, which comes and goes like the breeze, but it is something so established that it is afterwards impossible for you to view the world except in the perception of unity with the Supreme.