Swami Krishnananda

CULMINATION IN IDOL WORSHIP

In as much as God is everywhere, He has to be present in the idol also. There are some people who decry idol worship. They say it is stupidity. It is not stupidity. If God is everywhere, he has to be even in your pencil, your fountain pen, the pig that you offer in sacrifice in homa, and in the idol that you worship, in the portrait, in the yantra, in a diagram – everywhere He has to be. Otherwise, you cannot accept the omnipresence of God. People who consider idol worship as a kind of stupidity and a meaningless caricature of divine devotion do not understand what God is. 

Sometimes the worshipper trembles if he has really equipped himself with this process of self-identification with the parts of Lord Siva, Lord Krishna, Lord Vishnu – whoever it is.

So this performer of the worship gets possessed due to this self-identification of the structure of his being with the structure of the divinity whom he is worshipping.

The cosmic superstructure of the Almighty is represented in the form of the image of the portrait that is worshipped in the temple. The whole cosmos is vibrating there.

- Swami Krishnananda