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 · 2026-08-21 · Nondual

Chapter 14 of 18 in Ninety minutes with a swami

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. I fail at that constantly, and the failing is measurable in a way that the praying never was.

That is a form of devotion I can do without lying to myself, and it comes from Vivekananda by way of Swami Sarvapriyananda. The problem the swami had set up was this. That a person is 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 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. None of that takes faith. It is there every day, in the street, at every level of society.

So Vivekananda put it in devotional language on purpose. My God the wicked, my God the miserable, my God the poor of all races, of all species. These, he wrote, are the special object of my worship. In the same letter he calls this the only God he believes in, the sum total of all 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.

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, that.

The swami thinks worship is the right word for it. I think it might be, and I would rather argue about the word than do the thing.