Question 1: When someone says God is Nirakar (formless) and when they say that God has suddenly became man and after that slowly the men degenerated. How to express that God is like us with a spiritual body, that men and women are His creation and not that He has Himself become men and women. Please explain briefly.
Answer by Romapada Swami: Krishna resolves all doubts about His nature in the Bhagavad-gita where He says that the idea that He was impersonal before and has later assumed this form as Krishna, is incorrect. (Bg 7.24) The form of the Supreme Lord is called sac-cid-ananda vigraha, which means that His form (vigraha) is eternal and has not come into being at some point in time. The term Nirakar (formless) only negates the idea that His form is within the scope of our mundane conception. As far as the living entities are concerned, both human beings as well as other species, Krishna says that He is our Father, and He is the supreme creator. (Cf. Bg 14.4) Another way to explain this is if we were ‘God’ at some point of time, then please consider: why did we degrade? Why is that we are suffering, and covered by illusion? This would mean that illusion is greater than God! Why is that we cannot just remember that we are supreme and immediately resolve all problems? Bhagavad-gita teaches that our true identity is that we are fragmental parts and parcels of God (Bg 15.7). We are His dependents, equal to Him in quality but not in quantity.
Question 2: Some people say that God became man when He wished to, and later the generations degraded, until now where the present situation prevails. My question is, has God created man as His eternal servant, to enjoy Himself with human beings, or did He become man/woman by his will. Why should he create human beings?
Answer by Romapada Swami: There are some assumptions that I would like to clarify in this question. First, there is a distinction between the living entity (spirit soul) and the species ‘human being’. The soul is eternal, an eternal servant of God. But man is not eternal. By man, we mean the human body. Vedic literatures explain that the soul, being eternal, was never created, and is meant to enjoy in service to God, in the spiritual world. God has created the material world and the various species of life here (i.e. the different forms of body). The conditioned soul accepts a body in the material world, evolving through different species of life. In the human body the soul gets the special facility to understand his real nature and his relationship with God, and thus go back to the spiritual world.
