But there are big differences between our bodies and God's. Ours are perceivable by our present material senses; His isn't – unless, that is, He chooses to make Himself visible and tangible to us, which He seldom wants to do except for those devotees who are 100% pure in heart, with no faults whatever. Ours are full of ignorance where His is full of all knowledge. Ours can give us pain whereas His is full of nothing but bliss. Ours are temporary – able to be killed, and certain to die in the end – whereas His is invincible and eternal.
When
these points have been clarified, the next objection is “Well, how
can anyone believe that the Unlimited has some kind of body – even
a spiritual one? Doesn't a body necessarily impose limits on His
extension – doesn't a form automatically make Him measurable and
therefore finite?”
The
answer is that this type of thinking, too, is based on our material
conditioning (i.e., our having lived in this material world for so
long and being accustomed to the way stuff works here). Here in this
world, with material forms all around us, the idea that “form means
something limited” is very correct, logical and reasonable.
However, things work differently on the spiritual plane, and God's
(Krsna's) body is pure spirit. The Vedic scriptures describe many
wonderful things that He's able to do with His spiritual body, which
would be completely impossible with a material body. For one thing,
He can separate endless “portions” out of Himself (living
personalities who are endowed with different percentages of His
nature and qualities), or even multiply Himself into many equally
powerful forms / copies of Himself, and yet His original form remains
full and complete. A material form, if something is removed from it
or if it's divided into many, becomes diminished – as Srila
Prabhupada says, in the material world, 1 - 1 = 0; but the spiritual
realm is the absolute plane, where 1 - 1 = 1. So this is one way of
explaining how God's / Krsna's form can be unlimited: you can take
from Him endlessly yet He remains as full and complete as before.
Then
there are the many accounts of how Krsna's devotees failed in
attempts to accurately measure His body, and found out instead that
He was truly infinite, although He appeared before their eyes in what
looked like
a measurable form. Mother Yasoda (the foremost devotee who eternally
serves Him in the mood of a mother) saw the entire universe within
His mouth, including herself holding Him on her lap, which conjures
up images of infinity. (Was there another, smaller universe in the
mouth of that small form of the Lord that she saw inside His mouth?
And were she and her divine son, and the universe they were enacting
their pastimes in, also within the mouth of some unimaginably
gigantic form of the Lord??? And so on and so forth.) Another time,
Mother Yasoda kept trying and trying to tie Krsna up with ropes as a
way of putting Him in “time out” for being naughty, but no matter
how many long ropes she tied together, when she attempted to encircle
His waist with them, they always came up two inches too short. How
could any number of ropes be successful in encircling the unlimited
Lord – even if He had taken the form of a small boy in order to
give pleasure to His beloved Mother Yasoda? And I have heard a
couple different versions of pastimes in which the Lord is put on one
side of a balance scale, but no matter how many heavy material goods
are piled on the other side, He can't be lifted off the ground; not
until something else of incalculable spiritual value is placed on the
other side can He finally be lifted. So in spite of having a form
that looks like ours in many ways, and looks like it could be
measurable, the fact is that the Absolute Lord and Sum Total of All
can never actually be measured.
To be continued...
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