Introducing the Many Faces of God

A Journey from the Known to the Unknown

I never thought much about God growing up, except to know that I didn’t believe. God, in my mind, was a distant figure—somewhere in the sky, with a consciousness like my own, watching and controlling everything, rewarding good behavior and punishing the bad. I saw little difference between God and Santa Claus. Yet, unlike God, I did believe in the magic of Santa at an early age. Something in me was never fully satisfied with that conclusion. I wasn’t convinced by religion, but I wasn’t convinced by its absence either. What if my understanding of God had been too small? What if I was rejecting not God, but my own limited perception of what God could be?

William Blake, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The Evolution of a Concept

It wasn’t until I encountered spirituality outside of my cultural paradigm that I began to reconsider my assumptions. My first real belief in God didn’t come through Christianity but through Gaudiya Vaishnavism—commonly known as the Hare Krishnas. There was something liberating about stepping away from the baggage that “God” carried in my world and seeing the concept anew, through different eyes.

In Gaudiya Vaishnavism, God is understood as "Acintya-Bheda-Abheda-Tattva," a Sanskrit phrase meaning “the inconceivable simultaneous oneness and difference” of the Supreme Lord and His energies. This struck something deep within me. God, in this view, was both separate from and intimately interwoven with the world, transcendent yet present. And in that, I saw my own experience mirrored—I, too, felt both part of and apart from the world around me, contained within my body yet deeply connected to something greater.

Yet, my journey didn’t stop there. The organization surrounding this tradition, ISKCON, came with its own challenges—historical scandals, rigid dogma, and claims that tested my rational mind. I sat through lectures where I was told that if I chanted my mantras diligently, I would be reborn on planets filled with lakes of milk. I didn’t know what to make of these things. But rather than immediately rejecting them, I did something new: I allowed myself to sit in the mystery. I learned that spiritual narratives weren’t necessarily about historical or scientific accuracy—they activated something within us on a different plane. Just as mythological stories could reveal deep truths about the human condition without needing to be “true” in a factual sense, so too could religious narratives illuminate something profound about the nature of reality.

Some of the Faces of God

As my perception of God expanded, I encountered Vedanta—the philosophical foundation of much of Hindu thought. Vedanta helped me see that even within a single religious tradition, there were multiple ways to conceptualize the Divine. Much like the Christian doctrine of the Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), Vedanta articulates three primary ways of understanding the ultimate reality:

• Brahman: The infinite, formless, unchanging reality beyond all conceptualization.

• Atman: The individual soul, which is ultimately one with Brahman.

• Jagat: The empirical world, where the divine manifests in forms that we can engage with.

  
  

Beyond this, different schools of Vedantic thought present distinct perspectives on the relationship between God, the soul, and the world:

• Advaita Vedanta (Non-Dualism): Brahman alone is real. The world and individual souls are illusions (Maya), and our true nature is pure consciousness beyond all division.

• Dvaita Vedanta (Dualism): God and the soul are eternally distinct. The individual soul is dependent on God, much like a wave is dependent on the ocean, but remains separate.

• Vishishtadvaita Vedanta (Qualified Non-Dualism): The soul and the world are real, but they exist as expressions of God, inseparable yet distinct—like the sun and its rays.

These perspectives are not merely intellectual ideas but deeply experiential paths. Some find comfort in a God who is wholly transcendent, while others find fulfillment in an intimate, personal relationship with the Divine. This brings us to another distinction:

• Theistic Personalism: God as a personal being with whom we can relate, whether as Jesus, Krishna, Shiva, or another personal deity.

• Theistic Impersonalism: God as an abstract force, a formless presence beyond all description, as in Advaita Vedanta or Islamic Sufism.

The deeper I went, the clearer it became: defining theism is no simple task. The conversation only expands the more you look.

Wrestling with the Unknown

O. Baumer, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

One of my favorite examples of someone who wrestled with the infinite ways in which God can be understood is Swami Abhishiktananda. Born Henri Le Saux, he was a French Benedictine monk sent to South India as a missionary. But his encounter with Hinduism transformed him. He adopted the life of a Hindu renunciate, exchanging his tonsure for saffron robes and the name Swami Abhishiktananda—“the Bliss of the Anointed.”

When he met the great non-dual sage Ramana Maharshi at Arunachala, he had an experience that shook him to his core. His understanding of God as a personal Christ collided with a direct, undeniable encounter with the impersonal Absolute. His journals reveal a soul caught between knowing and unknowing, between personalism and impersonalism, between Christianity and Hinduism. He lived in this tension for the rest of his life, sometimes resolving it, sometimes not. And yet, his writings express something deeply beautiful—a heart fully open to the paradox of God. He wrote:

In my own innermost centre, in the most secret mirror of my heart, I tried to discover the image of him whose I am, of him who lives and reigns in the infinite space (akasa) of my heart. But the reflected image gradually grew faint, and soon it was swallowed up in the radiance of its Original. Step by step I descended into what seemed to me to be successive depths of my true self… Finally nothing was left but he himself, the Only One, Infinitely Alone, Being, Awareness and Bliss, Saccidananda. In the heart of Saccidananda I had returned to my Source.

Living in the Mystery

At its core, theology is not about absolute knowledge—it is about wonder. We, as humans, have an innate intuition that there is more to life than what our limited senses reveal. Science itself reinforces this; discoveries like dark matter and quantum entanglement suggest that reality is far more interconnected and mysterious than we once thought.

Exploring concepts of God is not about certainty but about leaning into that mystery. It is about giving up control, stepping beyond rigid definitions, and embracing the beauty of not-knowing. Whether God comes to you as a form, a deity, a prophet, or a formless presence, know that you are not alone in this search. People have walked this path before, and they have left behind travelogues that continue to inspire. Eventually, if you walk far enough, that unknowing may transform into a knowing beyond words—one that does not need to be defined, but simply is, resting deep in the seat of your heart.

It took me a long time to see that the question is not what is God? but how am I willing to encounter the Divine? There is no single answer, and perhaps that is the greatest gift of all.

Live like dust lit by fire,

Nicho