The Divine is one, but He is accessible and can be experienced in one of these three poises and/or ultimately in all the three together.
There is the immanent Divine who dwells in each and every element of creation. The Gita uses the term Kshara Purusha, the Divine in mutable forms. To discover this aspect of the Divine within is to discover Immortality. It is to be freed from all fear. One is then guided by the Divine Presence within oneself and life becomes a beautiful blossoming. The path of bhakti and sewa, love and service, brings us in contact with the Divine within us and grants us an inner freedom even in the midst of the battle. One finds the Divine not only in oneself but in everything.
Then there is the Impersonal and Universal, Akshar Brahman of the Gita. It is generally the path of Knowledge that leads us to this state of Brahmi sthithi, in which one is unaffected by everything, physical, emotional and other dualities related to the mind. Eventually this realisation completely dissolves the ego and one is freed from the sting of birth and death. One grows in inner sense of Vastness. One begins to live in the true intuition and various cosmic powers.
The transcendent Divine is the Paratpara Purusha, the Parabrahman, the Purushottama of the Gita. This leads either to a complete dissolution of the individual in the Transcendent arrived at by a complete inner withdrawal, the neti neti. Or it may lead to the discovery of the One Divine everywhere, iti iti. It is the absolute freedom in the absolute. One arrives at this experience not by any method but by the Divine Grace and a complete surrender to the Divine. Or else one arrives at this state through a hard and assiduous tapasya. It is the discovery of the Eternal.
These three are beautifully described in Savitri as below.
‘The master of existence lurks in us
And plays at hide-and-seek with his own Force;
In Nature’s instrument loiters secret God.
The Immanent lives in man as in his house;
He has made the universe his pastime’s field,
A vast gymnasium of his works of might.
All-knowing he accepts our darkened state,
Divine, wears shapes of animal or man;
Eternal, he assents to Fate and Time,
Immortal, dallies with mortality.
The All-Conscious ventured into Ignorance,
The All-Blissful bore to be insensible.
Incarnate in a world of strife and pain,
He puts on joy and sorrow like a robe
And drinks experience like a strengthening wine.
He whose transcendence rules the pregnant Vasts,
Prescient now dwells in our subliminal depths,
A luminous individual Power, alone.
The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone
Has called out of the Silence his mute Force
Where she lay in the featureless and formless hush
Guarding from Time by her immobile sleep
The ineffable puissance of his solitude.
The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone
Has entered with his silence into space:
He has fashioned these countless persons of one self;
He has built a million figures of his power;
He lives in all, who lived in his Vast alone;
Space is himself and Time is only he.
The Absolute, the Perfect, the Immune,
One who is in us as our secret self,
Our mask of imperfection has assumed,
He has made this tenement of flesh his own,
His image in the human measure cast
That to his divine measure we might rise;
Then in a figure of divinity
The Maker shall recast us and impose
A plan of godhead on the mortal’s mould
Lifting our finite minds to his infinite,
Touching the moment with eternity.
This transfiguration is earth’s due to heaven:
A mutual debt binds man to the Supreme:
His nature we must put on as he put ours;
We are sons of God and must be even as he:
His human portion, we must grow divine.
Our life is a paradox with God for key.’
(Ref. https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/33/the-secret-knowledge#p161)
All the three can and should be fused together in a single unity of the triple Divine. This is the supramental state that comes by a complete abandonment of oneself in the hands of the Divine Mother.
The first realisation liberates us from mistaking the body and mind as our self. The second liberates us from the limited ego self. The third frees us even from the individual and the cosmic becoming. The fourth liberates us from everything. It is to become Divine.
Affectionately,
Alok Da
