Sitting on my bed one morning, I fell into a deep reverie. "What is behind the darkness of closed eyes?" This probing thought came powerfully into my mind. An immense flash of light at once manifested to my inner gaze. Divine shapes of saints, sitting in meditation posture in mountain caves, formed like miniature cinema pictures on the large screen of radiance within my forehead.
"Who are you?" I spoke aloud.
"We are the Himalayan yogis." The celestial response is difficult to describe; my heart was thrilled.
"Ah, I long to go to the Himalayas and becomes like you!"
The vision vanished, but the silvery beams expanded in ever-widening circles to infinity.
"What is this wondrous glow?"
"I am Ishwara.* I am Light." The Voice was as murmuring clouds.
Autobiography of a Yogi
Now, as wonderful as this indeed sounds, it is clearly something like a dream or hallucination. His eyes are presumably closed but his mind is still quite active - registering auditory stimuli, visions, and flashes of light, engaging in conversation.
But of even greater interest to our discussion about God is the fact that he refers to Ishwara, which is the Hindu version of what westerners typically think of as God, i.e., a personage of some kind.
Oddly enough, a few lines later, Yogananda writes this:
Out of the slow dwindling of my divine ecstacy, I salvaged a permanent legacy of inspiration to seek God. "He is eternal, ever new Joy!" This memory persisted long after the day of rapture.
Autobiography of a Yogi, Italics added by me.
So it is not quite clear how we are to distinquish between Ishwara and God. God is eternal, ever new joy, according to Yogananda here. But Ishwara is not eternal. Consider Sri Ramana Maharshi's statement here:
Q: You say that even the highest God is still only an idea. Does that mean that there is no God?
A: No, there is an Iswara.
Q: Does he exist in any particular place or form?
A: If the individual is a form, even Self, the source, who is the Lord, will also appear to be a form. If one is not a form, since there then cannot be knowledge of other things, will that statement that God has a form be correct? God assumes any form imagined by the devotee through repeating thinking in prolonged meditation. Though he thus assumes endless names, the real formless consciousness alone is God.
Be As You Are
Again we are faced with a similar bit of confusion. Ishwara exists and is God, but not really. This peculiarity of explanation may highlight a big difference between eastern and western thought; not to mention the limitation of thought to comprehend mysticism in the final sense. The idea of changing definitions, however, is something that I believe western thinkers would generally have trouble wrapping their heads around. It seems God keeps jumping around; one minute he's this, the next minute he's that, and so on.
Consider this statement by David Godman, a widely recognized scholar of Sri Ramana's teachings.
On a lower level he spoke about Iswara, the Hindu name for the supreme personal God. he said that Iswara exists as a real entitiy only so long as one imagines that one is an individual person. When individuality persists there is a God who supervises the activities of the universe; in the absence of individuality Iswara is non-existent.
Be As You Are
It's not hard to see why someone might throw their hands up in exasperation at all of this.
Interestingly, you mentioned that the ego is a reflection of God, not the other way around. I think this is a notable point because I have heard it said so often by mystics and sages, like Ramana Maharshi. So, it seems in some way fundamental. Yet, as I have just pointed out, we aren't very clear on what God is to begin with.
Finally, to wrap up.
"Know yourself before you seek to decide about the nature of God and the world." - Sri Ramana MaharshiBe As You Are
So, basically, it seems to me that according to this strand of Hindu mysticism, we can conclude that God is more or less a conceptual placeholder for something that can't really be understood by the intellect - a mysterious insight that can apparently only be had, not understood. Buddha, for example, laid no importance on God. And that makes a lot of sense to me.
