THE UNIVERSAL GODS

The ancients commonly held that God administers the universe by means of the gods—universal gods and celestial gods—who carry out divine will on different scales of time and space.

In the Vedic tradition, the universal gods (vishva-devas) correspond directly to the universal layers of consciousness that lie above the half measure. These are also known as immortal gods because they possess imperishable bodies of Logos (instead of perishable bodies of Cosmos).

Each universal god above (endowed with synthetic power) was viewed as “married” to its own creative power (shakti) below (endowed with analytic power); the gods and their powers are compared to husbands and wives or divine couples engaged in creative union. Therefore, the gods and their shaktis correspond to the sets of matched pairs outlined in chapter 3. The two sets of layers are compared literally to the fathers and mothers of creation. By means of their creative unions the divine couples conceive the universe, the perishable from the imperishable, as the divine embryo (hiranyagarbha) or cosmic egg (brahmanda) within the unbounded cosmic womb.

Although tradition held that both the gods and their shaktis are required to conceive the universe, the act of creation is initiated not by the shaktis, but by the gods above. Just as an egg in the female womb is incapable of developing into an embryo unless it is first inseminated by male seed, so the layers above were viewed as inseminating the layers below with the synthetic power of consciousness, so that the otherwise incoherent and local parts of creation might become nonlocally organized into coherent wholes—or conscious created beings.

In this sense, the gods above were viewed as stronger than their powers below, because they have the potential to infuse the analytic fields of force and matter with the self-organizing power of consciousness.

Even though the strength of the synthetic powers above may be equal mathematically to the strength of the analytic powers below, they were still viewed as stronger, because they have the potential to infuse with consciousness otherwise incoherent matter-energy. The universal gods and their shaktis represent all-pervading fields of consciousness that span a particular range of space-time scales. God, the Supreme Being, on the other hand, was viewed as the one eternal self of them all. Unlike the gods and their shaktis, who embrace a particular range of scales, the awareness of God spans the entire spectrum of scales, ranging from the infinitesimal to the infinite.

Unlike God, the Supreme Being, the gods were viewed not as fully omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, but as limited aspects of the Supreme Being who possessed limited values of knowledge, power, and presence.