Are GODs just symbolic ???

[Jagannath Chatterjee]

Srikrishnaji,

Namaskar.

Mythology, I think, comes in between history and symbolism. Even historians
study mythological texts intently to study the history behind our history!
Our history would not have been what it is without taking recourse to
mythology. Take the case of the Saraswati river for instance. It is all
over our Puranas but till recently historians totally ignored it. It was
only after satellite data images revealed the existence of a huge river
flowing from the Himalayas to the Arabian Sea that everyone woke up to the
fact.

The forms of the Gods described in sacred texts are the results of visions
of rshis. They are not totally imaginary. (of course modern science dubs
the visions of our sages to be the result of schizophrenia!)

Let us take another example. Suppose one has a vision of Bhagawan Sri
Ramana and describes it, we can always tally it with His photograph! When
Swami Abhedananda went to America, he carried a photograph of Sri
Ramakrishna. When his landlady saw the photograph she exclaimed that she
often had visions of Him but it was the first time she was seeing the
photograph. How I wish our sages would have devised means to photograph our
Gods!

Yours sincerely

Jagannath.