My God the wicked
Vivekananda's answer to people who could not believe in a God in heaven was to point at the street. You are looking at it.
By Sovandarapor (James) Kong · · Nondual
Chapter 14 of 18 in Ninety minutes with a swami
This is the one that stopped being intellectual for me, and I want to try to say why.
The problem Swami Sarvapriyananda had set up was this. That you are conscious is not a belief. That there is a cosmic being, God, consciousness identified with the whole universe, is a belief, and many people cannot manage it. So how does such a person worship. What does devotion even mean without a leap.
The answer he attributes to Vivekananda, and calls a genuine innovation rather than a restatement, is that the limitless consciousness you are being asked to believe in is not hidden. It is staring at you. If you are that, then so is every other person, and consciousness in association with all bodies and minds may or may not be the God of religion, but it is certainly all of humanity, and all of life. That is not a matter of faith. You are confronted with it every day, in the street, at every level of society.
So Vivekananda put it in devotional language on purpose. My God the poor. My God the sick. My God the hungry, the weak, the ignorant. My God the wicked. These, he said, are the special objects of my worship. And elsewhere, the only God I believe in is the sum total of all human souls.
A senior monk told the swami how this works in practice, and the order surprised me. Service first. The love comes after. You treat the sick and teach the children and help people out of whatever they are in, and it is through that, persistently, over years, that a love for the one consciousness in all of them arrives. Not the other way round. You do not wait to feel it and then act.
He traces it back to Ramakrishna, who once said in a strange mood, not compassion, who are you to show compassion. Rather, worship. Worship Shiva by serving jiva. Shiva being the non-dual consciousness, jiva being the individual in front of you. Even the wicked. Anyone raised Christian will hear the parable of the stranger at the door who turned out to be Christ, and the swami agrees, yes, exactly that.
What hit me is that this is a form of devotion I can actually do without lying to myself. I cannot pray to a being I do not believe in. I can treat the worker at the milk depot as something other than a cost line, and I fail at that constantly, and the failing is measurable in a way that the praying never was.
I do not know whether it is worship. The swami thinks the word is exactly right. I think it might be, and I notice that I would rather argue about the word than do the thing.