The Gods We Create
The bhakta creates the god. When someone has a profound spiritual experience, they generate divine presence through the intensity of their devotion. The god doesn't exist first, waiting to be discovered. The god emerges from the devotional attention itself.
Watch a devotee in deep bhakti toward Ishvara. That ecstasy, that sense of overwhelming divine love—that's not reception from an external deity. That's creation through focused spiritual yearning. The devotee's attention, sustained and intense enough, becomes the god they're experiencing.
This is why you can't just adopt someone else's god. Allah responds to Arabic devotees because he is the crystallized spiritual yearning of Arabic culture. That specific way in which Arabs approached divine relationship created Allah.
When an African tries to worship Allah, something fundamental is missing. Not the techniques or philosophy, but the god himself. Because Allah wasn't there before his devotees created him through their particular form of devotion.
When missionaries arrive with their pre-packaged god, something feels hollow. The divine relationship has no roots in local soil, no connection to the particular way that culture approaches the sacred. The imported god lacks the specific spiritual frequency that emerges from indigenous devotional attention.
Gods emerge from sustained collective spiritual attention the way consciousness emerges from neural activity. When enough people focus their devotion in the same direction, using the same symbols, addressing the same needs, something coalesces. A presence. A personality. A divine relationship that becomes completely real—but only as real as the devotional attention that creates it.
We're probably creating new gods right now. New forms of collective spiritual attention. New ways of focusing devotional energy, and divine relationships emerging from our current circumstances and needs.
We see new gods being born in our kirtan gatherings and our spiritual communities. When enough people focus their devotional attention on a particular teacher or practice, something coalesces. A presence responds, and a relationship becomes real.
Spiritual communities forming around particular teachers or practices are potentially creating new divine relationships through their collective attention and devotion.
Point being, that, perhaps gods aren't eternal beings we discover. They're emergent properties of human spiritual capacity. Created by devotion. Sustained by attention. Real in proportion to the spiritual energy that generates them.
Consider Shirdi Sai Baba. There's ongoing controversy about whether he was a Muslim man, whether he had dubious intentions. Whether you like him or not, look beyond the obvious and you'll see a man who was transformed into a god through his devotees' attention. Each story they told, each miracle they recounted, added layers to his divine presence. By the time thousands flocked to Shirdi, they weren't meeting the same man his original devotees knew. They were encountering a god that decades of focused devotion had crystallized into being.
But here's the danger: if bhaktas can create gods, they can also create false ones. Not every intense devotional experience generates genuine divinity.
The difference lies in what the devotion serves. Genuine gods emerge when spiritual attention flows toward something larger than the ego—toward truth and realization of our true selves. False gods crystallize around the devotee's desires, fears, and need for control. They feel powerful but leave you smaller.
Real gods dissolve boundaries. They create compassion, humility, a sense of connection to all existence. False gods inflate the ego. They generate superiority, exclusivity and the need to convert or condemn others.
A genuine god emerges when the bhakta's attention moves beyond personal gratification toward universal principles. The devotional energy flows upward, outward, toward what serves all beings.
False gods emerge when spiritual energy gets trapped in the devotee's psychological patterns—the need to be special, the fear of death, the hunger for power over others.
You can sense the difference in how these divine relationships feel. Genuine gods make you more human, more loving, more present. False gods make you more rigid, more superstitious, more separate from life itself.
The divine presence you experience is the divine presence your spiritual attention creates. That's how gods work. That's how they've always worked. The bhakta creates the god.
