It manifests in the entire universe, both animate and inanimate.
The Infinite of the Upanishads is Satchidananda, that which Exists, is Conscious and is Blissful (Sat, Chit, Ananda). For both Christians and Muslims this means accepting their theology, or else! The Supreme Being envisaged by monotheists is an extension of their historical adherence to the words of a prophet and therefore brings with it an entire baggage. Hindus are in fact polytheists (like it or not!) and they worship murtis in temples this is a reality the monotheists either profess not to understand or misinterpret for political purposes. They have, in a sense, squeezed the life blood out of Hinduism and Hindu religious practice. But, from the Hindu perspective, they have downgraded both the Vedas and the Agama tradition of Hinduism. This latter part is grudgingly and belatedly admitted. They too worship the ONE Supreme Being and the deities are simply manifestations of this Being. They ‘admit’ that Hindus are not mere idol worshippers, nor are they polytheists (worshipping many gods and goddesses). And neither are the deities of the Vedas left behind in the Upanishads, as the ONE god-ists try to make out.Ī recent statement from them illustrates their incomplete understanding of the Hindu world view. It is a spiritual part of Brahman in its entirety. The Self and Brahman are not the same as the monotheist soul and god. The ONE god-ist views are based both on their political agenda and on their misperception of the Upanishadic Self and Brahman and the presence of innumerable deities. From a Hindu perspective, this approach, namely the worship of the Word of prophets, is the worst form of idolatory, as Sita Ram Goel once observed. Why the mere words of prophets should be privileged over the vision of the Vedic seers is not explained.
The moral of the story is: Brahman is not yet the Abrahamic god. Here too, according to the monotheists, the Vedic ‘Aryans’ were deficient because Brahman, who should be standing outside of his creation, is being identified with it. Subsequently, as they progressed into the age of the Upanishads, the search started for a single Creator, and they hit upon the idea of Brahman. The common theme is that the Vedic ‘Aryans’ in the Asian homeland had abandoned / forgotten the pre-Vedic monotheism and ‘fallen’ into polytheism. In other words, they treat the Vedas as simply an early immature, undeveloped version of their monotheist faith. The strategy clearly is to detach the Upanishads from the Vedic tradition, mangle them somewhat by forcing a monotheistic interpretation of them, after which the Vedas can be dealt with, or so they hope. The attention paid to certain select passages from the Rig Veda and more especially the Upanishads is both a strategy and a lack of understanding of the sacred texts. This means the entire Vedic corpus including the Upanishads.
The authentic Hindu tradition is the Vedic-Agamic tradition which was transmitted down the millennia and is currently what constitutes Hinduism as practised by millions of Hindus. On the other hand, the Upanishads are mined frequently. They do not go anywhere near the other three Vedas (Yajur, Sama and Atharva) and stay as far as they can from the Brahmanas (the prose commentaries on the Vedic rituals) and the Aranyakas, which are basically a continuation of the same. In previous articles, the writer pointed out that monotheist appropriators of Vedic Hinduism lift a few lines or verses from the Rig Veda to emphasise the similarity between their beliefs and those of the Vedas and Upanishads.