"What is God?"

The question would be better phrased, 'Who is God?'
For the uninformed philosopher, the obvious answer would be, "I am God." But this fool-osopher would only be revealing his fool-ishness. For, anyone who claims to be God, anyone who posits that the jiva soul is equal to the parabrahman, is quite insane. We are all more or less insane, especially because we believe we are the body. But why are we not God? Is not God everything? Is not the energy and the energetic one and the same?
So, how is it we are just minute, tiny, tiny little microscopic jiva souls? For one thing, we are imperfect, not the least of which imperfections is that we are illusioned!!
So, how can one claim to be God while in illusion? Thus, he who claims to be God IS in illusion. God is in illusion? An unreasonable proposition, since Webster defines God as, "the Being perfect in power, wisdom and goodness." Since God is perfect, it is logically impossible for Him to be lacking in such flawlessness...

So, we have established that the "I," the individual ego, jiva soul, is not God. Then,what are we? Are we just a complex protoplasm of cells, made of matter and doomed to extinction at the end of one life? Or are we 'something' that continues on, is there what we usually refer to as, a soul?

One assumes that there is something which continues after death...is there reason for such a presupposition?

Let us turn to the ancient Vedas. The Bhagavad-gita states, "As the embodied soul continuously passes, in this body, from boyhood to youth to old age, the soul similarly passes into another body at death. A sober person is not bewildered by such a change." [Bg.2.13]

In his translation and commentary of Gita (known as 'Bhagavad-gita As It Is') A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, writes on this verse, "Any man who has perfect knowledge of the constitution of the individual soul, the Supersoul, and nature-both material and spiritual-is called a 'dhira', or a most sober man. Such a man is never deluded by the change in bodies."

And what is the constitution of the individual soul? The essential characteristic of the soul, the dharma of the soul, is to render service. We can see that even an old man, alone in the world with many years, many worries, will take a cat and feed and care for it. He is, actually, serving the cat. Everyone in both the material and spiritual universes is serving; one cannot exist without serving something or someone.

So, one may ask, if one is a servant, how to perfect oneself as servant? To be a perfect servant, one must serve the Perfect, Sri Krishna, the Supreme Personality of Godhead. It is like watering a tree. One nourishes the entire tree, bark, twigs, leaves, by watering the roots of the tree. Likewise one serves and nourishes the entire cosmos, created and uncreated, by worshiping the Supreme Personality of Godhead.

So, we come back to our original question..."What is God?"

God is He to Whom we offer worship and service.

He, being satisfied and pacified, supplies us all our necessities and our greatest necessity is Love. God is Love, as Jesus said so eloquently...God gives Himself in the form of the Guru. The Guru is an embodiment of Love, is Love itself, and he never fails us in our time of greatest need and testing...