Paramhansa Yogananda (author of Autobiography of a Yogi) said, "the vaguest of all human conceptions is man's idea of God". God is invisible yet He manifests as the visible universe. God is in everything...not just in one thing. In contemplating this idea it is important not to fall into the error of supposing that because God is omnipresent and hidden in the life of all beings that somehow our individuality is an illusion or that someday it will be extinguished when we return to the Godhead. This is a fallacy that we find in some eastern religions, particularly in the famous aphorism, "the dewdrop slips into the shining sea". Yogananda says that "one wave is not the whole sea...the sea and the waves together constitute the ocean...thus all manifested creation and the unmanifested pure Cosmic Consciousness together constitute the Spirit".

We manifest as individual units of God Consciousness. In theosophical teachings, these sparks of divinity are called Monads. A Monad is defined as a spiritual entity that is indivisible. Monads are eternal, unitary, individual, life-centres and consciousness centres, which are deathless, therefore ageless. There are an infinite number of Monads and each one is the centre of divinity. This idea conforms to the ancient axiom that Deity has Its centre every-where but Its circumference nowhere. God is infinite multiplicity in eternal unity. The mystery of the One and the Many cannot be comprehended by mortal consciousness. It is only when we reach self-realisation that we comprehend completely that the Soul or Monad is an eternal particle in the total ocean of God Consciousness.

When Jesus said that "we have come from the Father and we shall return to the Father", He did not say that we would lose our individuality as Souls or Monads in the process. Yogananda wrote of an early experience in his life when, in a super-conscious state, he inwardly observed the creation and dissolution of universes and saw universes emanating from the bosom of the Godhead. Having viewed that divine activity from the heights of an expanded consciousness, he, nonetheless, retained his individual Soul nature. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna appears to have had a similar experience when he says, "with a portion of Myself I create the universe, yet I remain". He assures us in the Gita (11:20) that "the Soul is not born, nor does it die; nor, having come to be, will It ever more come not to be. Unborn, eternal, everlasting, the Soul is not slain when the body is slain." We are specialised units of Divine Essence.

The immortal Soul occupies many bodies in the lower worlds during its cycles of manifestation yet It remains indivisible, impartite and eternal. After having harvested the fruits of many incarnations, the Soul reaches a point in the evolutionary process where It is no longer required to enter into the lower realms. This is reflected in the statement found in Revelation 3:12: "Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God, and he shall go no more out". But evolution continues even though the Monad is not required to incarnate in human form. Other avenues of activity are opened on subtler levels of matter/energy. Here, too, the Soul continues to unfold its latent divine powers. Finally when the Cosmos ends its great cycle of manifestation, the Soul returns to the bosom of the Godhead, resting as an individual point of light in the great sea of Cosmic Consciousness. This is one of the final stages of what traditional Christianity calls the Beatific Vision.

When the great manifestation of Life and Consciousness occurs again after an aeonic period of rest, the highly evolved Monad might manifest visibly in a new universe as a Solar System or as a Constellation or as a Galaxy, providing a home for other Monads coming into the realm of time and space for the first time. This is the theosophical concept of the Logos. Monads as Logoi appear in the universe at various degrees of manifestation, the highest being the Cosmic. A fully developed Monad may not necessarily decide to manifest in this manner but rather choose to function actively in invisible realms, performing tasks equal to that of a Logos. We refer to this level of monadic activity as the angelic kingdom. This is the theology of hierarchies, which one finds in the writings of Plotinus and which is evident in the teachings of esoteric Christianity. The idea of the Demiurge or the Planetary Logos or Archangel is found in early Gnostic writings.

In all great philosophies there is a proclamation that there is an Absolute. Some have said that all we can say about It is that IT IS. Most religions teach, however, that within the Absolute there is a Trinity such as the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost of the Christians; the Kether, Hokhmah, and Binah of the Jewish Kabbala; and Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva of the Hindus. The Vedantin philosophers identify the attributes of the Absolute as Sat-Chit-Ananda or Being, Consciousness and Bliss.

This Trinity is the Lord, the Personal Deity, the Cosmic Logos from Whom the universe issues forth. Some might ask how could we have a personality, such as a Personal God, juxtaposed with the idea of an impersonal Absolute. The answer to that is ourselves. We are personal beings. If the root of personality did not exist in the Absolute we would not exist! This notion can be likened to the analogy of a huge oak tree being contained in potency in a tiny acorn. One must postulate that the root of the Lord or Cosmic Deity is within the Absolute. Since the Lord is Creator-Preserver-Transformer, a directing personality, the root of that directing personality must abide in the Absolute. We speak of God as Being, of God as Intelligence and of God as Bliss. God as Being is the directing personality behind the universe, God as Intelligence manifests and unfolds the detailed wonders of the universe and God as Bliss describes the essential nature of the creative processes in the universe which is love. Without this idea of a root of personality in God, we come to a mechanical conception of the universe and of the Source that manifested it. This is the Buddhist idea.

While we look upon God (Cosmic Deity) as our Personal Lord, there is behind Him that grand backdrop of the Impersonal Godhead. This immense realm is, as I have said, the Absolute, which is the Ground of all being - our being and God's being. It is a vast sphere of impersonal energy in which both He and we exist. How do we define that higher sphere? We can only state that that vastness is and that no quality can be predicated of it. It is the metaphysical notion of absolute, abstract Space posited by Madame Blavatsky in her magnum opus, The Secret Doctrine.

We come back again to Yogananda's statement that "one wave is not the sea - the sea and the wave together constitute the ocean". The waves are us as Monads or Souls manifesting in temporal and changing forms; the Sea is God, a loving Personal God, and the Ocean is the cosmic backdrop of the Absolute. The waves and the sea together not only constitute the ocean of Spirit but manifest It as well. Deity and the offspring of Deity, Soul, reside eternally within the mysterious depths of Spirit emerging as and in numberless universes, which endlessly appear and disappear in the cycles of time and space.

In our human form we are subject to Maya, the law of changing, until we unite our temporarily isolated human consciousness with God's omnipotent consciousness. When a human wave discovers by self-realisation that he is really at one with the sea, when he knows his wave of consciousness is part of the sea, he understands that he may pass through many changes but yet remain as the immortal Soul. Yogananda says that the human wave of consciousness "will never be lost or annihilated". He says that "one who is liberated, as Jesus is, becomes one with Spirit. Yet he retains his individuality" (Man’s Eternal Quest, p.232). Or again as Krishna unequivocally declares, "I remain!" The Master Jesus affirms the immortality of the Individuality when He asks (Luke 12:6) "Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them is forgotten before God?"

The philosophical view of God and Soul that I have presented here is known as qualified non-dualism or qualified monism. Simply stated, this view says that we are part of God but are not God. There are two more schools of thought. One is absolute monism. It would suggest that we and everything else in the universe are God with no distinctions. This notion prevents its adherents from dealing logically with the binary nature of reality, in other words, the play of opposites (good and evil, pain and pleasure, light and darkness, etc.). The reality of evil and the free choice between good and evil cannot be reconciled in a universe where the only entity in existence is God. Consequently, there is a tendency in absolute monism to lapse into illusionist theories such as those propounded by Mary Baker Eddy and some followers of Shankaracharya - in other words, the suggestion that the manifested universe and matter itself is an illusion. This mistaken idea neatly dismisses evil because it is intertwined with an allegedly "unreal" material universe. However, once we do a reality check, we know this to be absurd because we do live in a relatively real universe where bad things happen! Not to recognise this is to live in a kind of spiritual schizophrenia.

The other school of thought is Dualism. It states that we are completely separate from God, having been created at a certain point in time and space and are kept in existence by His will. Dualism gives birth to a form of Deism, which suggests that God created the universe, wound it up like a clock, and then sort of walked away from it. Deism suggests no real connective link between God and His universe except to say that He made it, feels sorry for it once in a while, and occasionally intervenes. Traditional Christianity softens this mechanistic idea by saying that God sent His divine Son into incarnation to fix His creation that human beings continually botch up.

Qualified monism is the Middle Path between these two extremes. Its proponents would agree that there are Divine Incarnations, like Jesus, but that His life was a result of the unfolding of a divinity that was already within Him without annihilating in any way His individuality. His life and the lives of other Divine Saviours are meant to serve as inspirations that we too can accomplish the same thing. Even though this effort involves many lifetimes of struggle, the goal can be reached. If this were not possible Jesus would not have declared that the "Kingdom of God is within you" (Luke 17:21), nor would He have asked the rhetorical question "Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?" (John 10:34). Notice He said "ye are gods", not "ye are God".

While this presentation may appear to be rather abstract, it does have a practical application, and that practical application is the understanding that we should not, as esoteric Christians, fall into the mistaken notion of New Ageism (California Hinduism) that we are God. If we are all God, where are the restraints on our conduct? If we are God, then we can make up our own rules and then everything is permissible according to our own standards. We would then fall into the error of moral relativism or situation ethics. That means that truth is relative - what's true for you is not necessarily true for me. This view holds that we are each manifesting our own good, even though my good may not necessarily be your good. Does this notice apply to the criminal, the murderer, the sexual deviant, and the hedonist? We can easily see the logical fallacy of such a view. We would end up worshipping our whims, deifying our lower passions and canonising our cravings. The result is ethical chaos.

Qualified monism, on the other hand, provides us with the idea that although we are not God we are part of God. It affirms that there is a transcendental yet loving God who offers us guidelines for behaviour in the teachings of Jesus Christ and the Saints of the Church. This provides room for the fact that we do indeed live in a moral universe, that there are codes of values to which we must adhere to, that there are moral absolutes as well as a world operating under the universal Law of Ethical Causation or Karma. Jesus Christ said, "Wherefore by their fruits, ye shall know them" (Matthew 7:20).

It is interesting to note that a proponent of qualified monism, Ramanuja, was responsible for infusing new life into the followers of Vishnu, the Hindu name for the Second Person of the Trinity. Upon Ramanuja's death in 1137 AD, a great revival of devotion to Vishnu expressed itself in the flowering of mystical poetry, music, worship, and art in the Middle Ages in India and is still widely felt there today. This happened because Ramanuja rightly recognised, like Jesus, that God is an accessible object of devotion and is lovingly responsive to the devotee.

Jesus revealed to us that God is not an abstraction. Rather He taught us that our Heavenly Father is a loving God Who relates to us in a personal way. This means we can take our problems to God, talk to God and have God as our constant Friend and Companion. The God of Jesus Christ is a God of Love to whom we can continually offer our devotion.