In God Makes the Rivers to Flow; An Anthology of the World’s Sacred Poetry & Prose, Eknath Easwaran has included a selection from the Isha Upanishad and entitled it “The Inner Ruler.”  I have written a series of poem-like reflections based on this selection.  This is the eighth one in the series.

Transcendent and Immanent

In dark night live those for whom the Lord
Is transcendent only; in night darker still,
For whom he is immanent only.
But those for whom he is transcendent
And immanent cross the sea of death
With the immanent and enter into
Immortality with the transcendent.
So have we heard from the wise.
—from “The Inner Ruler” in the Isha Upanishad

Many of us have been raised with the concept of the Lord as the Old-Man-in-the-Sky, a God for whom the material world is soiled by sin.

We see God as separate from us, and separate from creation.

God seems to be in the distance, at the other side of a gulf we despair of ever crossing in this life.

Our despair is a cloud hanging over our head, a thorn in our side.  We can never be good enough for God.

Some of us take the opposite approach, and see God only in the material world.  The material world becomes sacred, holy.  And sacred and holy become ordinary.

And when we are confronted by darkness in nature and darkness in human nature, God seems capricious, volatile, uncaring.

God becomes the mystery that touches us, that we can touch, and the mystery that burns our homes.

We are never separate from God, but can we trust God?

A God who is both transcendent and immanent is a God we can trust.

A God who transcends the machinations of the ego, which creates so much darkness, is a God of Love, a God who does not control us, a God who does not condemn us.

A God who is within us and within and beyond all creation is a God we can know and be in awe of.

Those of us for whom God is both transcendent and immanent seek to transcend our egos and connect to God within.

The death of the ego is the end of one journey, a sea we long to cross.  God rides with us across the sea, we find God on both sides, and we lose our fear of death.

Union with the Immortal One—the Lord Creator, the One we find within our True Self, the One that transcends our mortality—is the other journey, the journey we have been on before the beginning of creation, the one that will never end, the culmination of every longing.