People often ask, “What is the logic of meditation? What is wrong with idol worship?”
Gurus have clarified that there is nothing wrong, but it is a limitation. And if God is everywhere, it is a denial of that truth to have to go to a temple to find Him there. If He is in everything, surely He is in me as much as in that place of worship. Why not seek Him within?
An idol is a representation of the Divine. If a person is capable of understanding this, then there is nothing wrong in idol worship. When we are able to transfer our worship to the Ultimate, then where is the need to depend on a representation?
God is not confined in form or ritual, nor is He resident in scriptures. We have to seek Him in the innermost core of our heart. Swami Vivekananda said, “It is good to be born in a religion, but it is bad to die in a religion.” It means that you start off with something — a capital, a heritage, a system of philosophy, but you have to grow out of it eventually.
It is felt that we prefer to worship Him outside us because it is possible then to isolate Him from ourselves. A God in the temple, in the puja room, can be safely locked up until one needs Him again. A God within is perhaps a perpetual ‘nuisance’ for one whose intentions are not so genuine, whose aspirations are not so good, whose practices are not so ethical. He does not want a permanent witness.
Idol worship has perhaps evolved out of this need to isolate God from our existence, to be accessed when we need Him, through prayer or offering so that we can come back thinking, “I have sacrificed, and surely I will get,” forgetting that what we have is also His.
Objects of worship in temples have to be sanctified by what is known as the “Prana Pratishtha”, and unless this has been done there is no sense in worshipping any material object. Without a great Master capable of transmitting the Divine essence, the “Prana Pratishtha” cannot happen irrespective of the ceremonial or ritualistic forms associated with this act.
It is, therefore, necessary to understand what precisely our spiritual Guru does, and how it is nothing but this very same “Prana Pratishtha”, now being done to human individuals, thereby converting such individuals into temples of God. In essence, therefore, what is done during transmission is to put divinity back into the heart of the individual where it really belongs.
In meditation the adoration is, therefore, directed to one’s own heart, to the divinity present therein, and by this act of transcendental worship, the divinisation of human beings is made possible, to culminate in the ultimate achievement of total divinisation of the individual.
The message of spirituality is: “Look within.” This is the message of the Gita, this is the message of the Upanishads: “I am in the heart of every creative being. Look for me there. I am you.”
The ones who are aware of the divinity within would say, “Where religion ends, spirituality begins; where spirituality ends, reality begins; where reality ends, bliss begins.” The system must conform to the time in which we live, so that the situation in which we are placed in our temporal existence enables us to do these things satisfactorily, continuously, regularly, and effectively.