One class of transcendentalists are the devotees, who have realized the Absolute Truth to be the Supreme Person. A second class are the yogis, who have realized the Supersoul. And the third class are philosophers, who can only realize the impersonal feature of the Absolute.
This material nature is constituted in such a way that we have to suffer; it is God’s law. And we are trying to relieve the suffering by patchwork remedies. Everyone is trying to get relief from suffering; that is a fact. The whole struggle for existence is aimed at getting out of suffering.
The poet John Berryman was my teacher at the University of Minnesota the year he jumped from a bridge over the Mississippi and killed himself at the age of fifty-seven. In some respects, his suicide puzzled me.
Personalistic Bhagavad-gita scholars reject the idea that God is a formless entity. On the contrary, the personalists, or Vaisnavas, maintain that God’s personal form is the source of all others.