Indirect service to God is a total waste

The unimaginable God requires a medium for expression. When the medium is charged by God the medium is treated as God directly and service to such medium is the direct service to God. When the wire is charged by the current, touching the live wire means touching the current only. But if you touch the picture of a live wire on a paper, you are not touching the current. It is only an indirect representative model of the live wire. Service to the charged medium is called as sakshat upasanam, which is direct service. Service to the representative model is called as pratika upasanam, which is indirect service only. The indirect service is a total waste because neither you are experiencing God in the model nor God is experiencing your service. This second type of worship is the worship of statues of God. Then, why not we do away with this second type of worship? No. It becomes necessary since majority of the human beings does not recognize the contemporary human incarnation due to repulsion between common external media or common external gross human bodies. For such majority, the model worship is maintained so that through such worship, at least the psychological repulsion to the human form is removed because the statues are carved in human form only like Vishnu, Rama, Jesus etc. Some people have repulsion even to the human form in the statue and for such people the Shivalinga, which has no human form, is established. At least the concept of formless God is removed here since Shivalinga has a form. Some worship formless objects like light energy as representative models of God. Some worship qualities like love, bliss, etc as representative models of God. The human body contains awareness (soul), qualities (jeeva), matter (gross body) and energy as the shining and heat of the body and thus is a complete medium. For such psychological treatment of the human beings to remove the repulsion to the human form the rituals in the temples are being carried on even though the service part is a waste. The initiation of life in the statues in the temples indicates the concept of life in the inert material body (statues). This initiation of life (prana pratishtha) advises you to go for the live human form and it does not mean that the same inert statue became alive after such initiation, since no sign of life is witnessed in the statue after such initiation. The ignorant priest says that the radiation of life (pranakala) entered the statue but all this is a brainwash only, since the statue does not even vibrate once. At the Lotus Feet of His Holiness, Sri Dattaswami