The Human Need for an Object to Venerate and to Be Guided By in the Spiritual Path

For the vast majority of individuals, the idea of confronting the vast consciousness without any discernable or identifiable form is overwhelming. Anything that is undefined or unlimited breeds discomfort and fear in our being. in the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna is confronted with a vision of the Divine in a vast, all-powerful form, far beyond what he was prepared to handle. He begged Sri Krishna to return to his normal ‘four-armed’ form and to shower grace upon him. Few are those who can confront the larger forms of the universal creation, much less the vast, formless reality.

When our hearts and minds turn toward spiritual growth, we therefore seek out and associate ourselves with some specific form of deity, or specific manifestation of the Divine in form, or at the very least, with intermediaries, teachers, Gurus who provide us a close and defined relationship with the Divine. This allows us to grow and mature in our spiritual understanding over time within defined limits that we have set at each stage of our growth.

Not every individual follows the same form of God, or the same incarnation or the same teacher. Yet, as a general rule, each individual aligns with someone or something that can aid us in our growth. Even the atheist, who denies the existence of God, finds some object or person with whom he aligns himself in his own path of growth. Meanwhile, we cast our teachers as avatars or incarnations of God and, in many cases, believe and act upon that belief, that the divinity we worship, the teacher we follow us the highest divinity and ultimate world-teacher. What we then fail to recognise is that the form the divine guidance takes for each of us is unique to our own personality, societal background and religious or spiritual tradition. Thus, a Christian will have visions of Jesus or Mary, while a Hindu may experience the presence of Lord Krishna or Lord Shiva. This does not set one deity above another, but simply represents the form that the specific individual, based on his background and experiential mind-set, can see and understand.

Sri Aurobindo notes: “The spiritual progress of most human beings demands an extraneous support, an object of faith outside us. It needs an external image of God; or it needs a human representative , — Incarnation, Prophet or Guru; or it demands both and receives them. For according to the need of the human soul the Divine manifests himself as deity, as human divine or in simple humanity, — using that thick disguise, which so successfully conceals the Godhead, for a means of transmission of his guidance.”

“the Hindu discipline of spirituality provides for this need of the soul by the conceptions of the Ishta Devata, the Avatar and the Guru. By the Ishta Devata, the chosen deity, is meant, — not some inferior Power, but a name and form of the transcendent and universal Godhead. Almost all religions either have as their base or make use of some such name and form of the Divine. Its necessity for the human soul is evident. God is the All and more than the All. But that which is more than the All, how shall man conceive? And even the All is at first too hard for him, for he himself in his active consciousness is a limited and selective formation and can open himself only to that which is in harmony with his limited nature. There are things in the All which are too hard for his comprehension or seem too terrible to his sensitive emotions and cowering sensations. Or, simply, he cannot conceive as the Divine, cannot approach or cannot recognise something that is too much out of the circle of his ignorant or partial conceptions. It is necessary for him to conceive God in his own image or in some form that is beyond himself but consonant with his highest tendencies and seizable by his feelings or his intelligence. Otherwise it would be difficult for him to come into contact and communion with the Divine.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Growing Within: The Psychology of Inner Development, Chapter III Growth of Consciousness Basic Requisites, pp. 52-53