Personalism or impersonalism?
Impersonalism or personalism, what is the real difference? It is not so much in the doctrine, but in the behavior that the real test comes. The problem is projection. We see the body or the religious affiliation and so on and we don't see the soul, the person. We don't see the divine or sacred reality of the other. That happens, sadly, as often if not more with people who identify themselves as theists, because they see the religious affiliation as the identifier, i.e., they see the upādhi or covering as the truth, and not the spiritual being. And, like it or not, your religion is an upādhi . You cannot dance around that fact with philosophical word jugglery. So-called impersonalists are often more aware of this problem than so-called personalists. Now whether you call that spiritual truth Brahman or anything else, if you accept that the person with whom you are engaged is a sacred entity and you treat them accordingly, that is personalism. This is true whether you do ...