DISCOVER GOD WITHIN
What happens when we pass through a kindergarten, pass primary school, high school, college, and university? We ultimately achieve the goal of knowledge, of wisdom and we become a Master. When we go on a Spiritual quest taking the help of a Spiritual Master, we ultimately realize the Truth about God. The only difference is that in university, many students are able to achieve the knowledge that they are seeking but in Spirituality, very few are able to realize the Truth about God. This is because it is not just knowledge and wisdom that matters, we also need the grace of the Divine. If we are not passionately in love with God, we may know the Truth about God, but we will never realize God. This is not an easy task. It is taking the road less travelled. It is not going with the herd, but rather being like a bird that flies up in the sky seeking God. Our goal is to find God, to discover God. How will we do that?
Realization makes us understand that God is not on a distant planet somewhere far away. God lives right here, in the temple of our heart. How will we be able to realize the Truth? Of course, first of all we need to let go of our beliefs that we learnt when we were kids. We need to let go of the kindergarten of Religion to evolve Spiritually. If we want to discover the ocean, then we have to have the courage to lose sight of the shore. As long as we tie our boat to the shore, we can never discover the ocean, the ocean of divinity, the ocean of Truth, the ocean of God. If we want God, then we must have the courage to do everything to reach the Divine.
The mind stops us from realization
Those on a quest realize that God is not a statue, God is not a saint, God is not a picture that anyone can paint. God is a power, a power beyond human comprehension. God is the Creator of this universe. Not just the Creator, in fact, everything in this universe is a manifestation of God, which means that everything is God. There is nothing else! It appears as the mountains and the seas, the rivers, and the trees, as you and me. But in reality, everything is God. Everything is made of God. It appears as, but the appearance is an illusion. The Truth is God. Nothing else.
However, the mind stops us from realizing the Truth. The mind is a rascal, it gets trained by Religion. As kids, we are taught that God is Jesus or Allah or Shiva, somewhere up in the sky. The mind has registered this and does not want to budge because the mind is a slave, an enemy to self- realization.
For instance, if we take a ring, a chain, a bracelet and we ask the mind what these are, the mind will say, these are all jewellery, the ring, the chain, and the bracelet. But the fact is these are not jewellery. These are just gold. If we remove the gold from all the jewellery, there will be no ring, no chain, no bracelet. It’s not a difficult thing to realize, but the mind refuses to accept this because it has been programmed to believe these are a ring or a chain. Even though the mind is made to realize that they appear as jewellery, the cause is gold, but still the mind refuses.
Even science admits that we may appear to look as human bodies, but the fact is that we are energy, Divine energy. But the mind does not accept this. As long as the mind refuses and remains in the kindergarten of Religion, believing that we are who we seem to be, the body, mind and ego and God is who God is believed to be, the statue or the saint, we will never realize the Truth. It needs us to go beyond the mind to realize the Truth.
Transcending body, mind, and ego
Since we human beings are so strongly personated as ME, Mind and Ego alive in a body and we believe this is my house, my car, my family, we are unable to break the thought chain to realize the Truth. To break free from the influence of Religion and go beyond the kindergarten, it first calls for us to transcend the ME (Mind + Ego) and body.
We need to contemplate that these are not what they appear to be. The body is constantly changing, it is not permanent. Finally, it will die. The mind is an illusion, where is the mind we cannot find. The ego that says, “It’s me” is someone we cannot see. We need to break this barrier of body, mind, and ego to go beyond to discover God.
We are not the body
Sure, we have a body, there is no doubt. But why do we say this is my hand, my head, my heart? Because the one who is saying it is not the body. If we were the body, we would not say it. Now, let us recall the virtual experiment in a room that is airtight and sealed. We remove each of the body parts, the eyes, the nose, the ears, the teeth, the hands, the legs and even the kidneys. The body is now connected to a machine but is still alive. We go one step further and we remove the blood, the muscle, the tissue, and the skin and we are just left with the skeleton. Every cell of the body is on the table. But where is the person who was alive?
What does this show? Every part of the body in this virtual experiment is on the table, but where am I? Where did I go? This is my body but this is not me and further, the room that is used for the experiment is an airtight room. So, where did I escape? If I am not in the body anymore, even if we stitch back the body, I don’t reappear. Then where did I go? This is a point to ponder on. So, I have a body, but I am not the body. I am the Life Energy that lives in the body that gives life to the body, but I am not the body. This is very important to understand before we can discover God.
Where is the mind you cannot find!
Just like we did a virtual experiment to find me and we found that we were not the body, now let us try to find the mind. If I ask you to identify your eyes, your nose, ears, hands, legs, you can. Even if I ask you to identify your brain, heart, stomach, lungs, kidney with the help of an X-ray or MRI, you can. But can you identify the mind? Have you ever seen the picture of the mind? Where is the mind? You cannot find! Because the truth is that mind actually does not exist. It is a subtle part of the body, that is an illusion. Unless we go beyond Religion, we will not realize this Truth because Religion talks so much of the mind and makes us believe that we are the body, we are the mind, which in reality we are not. Unless we cross these wrong beliefs, we cannot discover God.
Now that we know we are not the body and we are sure we are not the mind then who are we? We are none else than the Life Energy, the Divine Soul, Atman or Spirit. We are that energy that is not the ME - Mind and Ego that we thought nor the body that we are not sure about. We are none other than Divinity.
The Energy within is God
For someone to believe that the energy within us is God is very challenging. Immediately, the mind questions, “How can the energy within be God?” All the Religions of the world tell us that God is a power that lives in heaven, far away on a distant planet. How can we accept this theory that God is within? Can we see God? If we tear open the body, can we find God? No! Then how can we believe that God is within?
The first point to note is that in life, there are some things that can be proved and some things that can’t. They can be inferred. What does this mean? You can prove this is your mobile phone by using your fingerprint to unlock it. It proves it's yours. I can’t unlock it with my fingerprint. So, there is proof. However, there are some things that cannot be proved. For example, can we prove that gravity exists? We cannot prove but we can infer. How? If we throw the very same mobile up in the sky, will it fly away into the sky? No, it won’t. Why? Because of gravity. The law of gravity exists in the universe and this law infers that because the mobile phone is drawn back to the centre of the earth, gravity exists. We infer that gravity exists though there is no proof. So also, we have to infer that since we are not the body and we are not the ego or mind, but we exist, then who are we? We are that Divine Life Energy that arrives at birth and departs at death.
What happens at death? Our body is intact but the Life Energy that was in the body disappears. Thus, it is said that we departed, expired or passed away. This is just our dead body. If we are not the body at death, then we were never the body. We are alive in a body but we are the Divine Soul, the Spirit or the Atman, not the body. We realize this through inference.
This very power that is called Life Energy is the God Power within us. This is to be realized. The power in me and the power in you at death merges to become one power. It is just like air in two balloons. As long as the balloons are inflated, they seem to be two balloons, but on deflating the balloons, the air in both the balloons merges to become one. So does our Soul. It is the Life Energy in us that is actually the Divine Life Energy we call God.
All this seems to be a Spiritual jigsaw puzzle. Yes, sure but we need to put the various parts of the puzzle together to see the full picture. We are not the body, we are not the mind or ego. We are a Power, the Soul.
God is not a statue, nor is God a saint. God is also a power. So, if everything is nothing but a power then it seems obvious that it is one Power, God-Power, that is everywhere. We cannot presume that there are different power centres because that will put us in another circle that goes nowhere.
Is our source of energy one source? It is the Divine source, it is divinity itself. But we are unable to realize this Truth because we are so programmed by our Religions that we continue to be in the kindergarten all our life, not transcending ego, mind, and body to discover God within the temple of our heart. This is our biggest challenge of life.
God is everywhere, in everything
When one goes on a passionate quest, one discovers that God is everywhere, in everything. Only this discovery is intuitive and internal, so it is not called discovery. It is called realization. It cannot be proved but it can be inferred by those who graduate in Spirituality.
If one probes where this earth, this universe, this cosmos came from, who created you, me and everything on the planet, who manages the show called life with 8 billion people, who made the mountains, the seas, the rivers and the trees, who created all the animals, the birds, the fish and the insects, it must be a humungous Power, a Power unknown to man and beyond man’s comprehension.
While that is true, one thing seems obvious - everything that we see comes about from energy. Even science agrees and it is based on the world-famous equation E=MC2. What does this equation state? This scientific theory states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, but can only be transformed from one form to another. It means that energy can become matter and matter can become energy.
Recently, in an experiment, scientists took the smallest particle of the cell, not just atom, but even smaller particles, smaller than electron, proton, and neutron - the Quark. They were studying this smallest particle under a sophisticated microscope and suddenly, the particle disappeared. The scientists were flabbergasted. Where did the particle go? As they were contemplating, the particle reappeared. They coined this to be a new discovery and named it “Wave-Particle Duality” based on E = MC2 .
What does this prove? It proves that everything in this world is nothing but energy, God-Energy. God is there, everywhere, in everything. In fact, there is only God, only divinity, nothing else!
It is like the waves, the bubbles, the froth in the ocean and the icebergs, they are all made of the one thing - water. The water may appear as different forms, but the cause is one.
God is the cause, we are just effects
Based on the Law of Causation, one realizes that a gold ring is actually not a ring. Why? Because if you remove the gold from the ring, nothing remains. There is no ring without the gold. It appears to be a ring but actually, it is gold. Gold is the cause – the ring is the effect. Similarly, mud is the cause. The pot, the plate, and the statue may appear to be so, but in reality, they are not. They are only effects of the cause - mud. If you remove the mud, there would be nothing. Without the mud, there would be no pot, no plate, and no statue.
God is the cause and we are just effects. If we remove the cause or God, nothing remains. Everything is God. We must realize this. This will make us discover God within. We are energy. God is energy. Our energy is God-Energy. This is the Truth and nothing but the Truth.
The Truth is ‘God is Beautiful’
Those who live in the kindergarten of Religion are amazed by the beauty of nature. They live and die thinking that God created nature. Those who evolve Spiritually go beyond to realize the Truth. They don’t experience God as the Creator of the beautiful nature. They realize that God is the beauty in the nature that they see. They don’t believe that God made the beautiful birds in the sky and the gorgeous fish in the water, just as he made you and me. They see God in the birds, in the fish and in you and me. They see all this as a manifestation of the Divine. They realize the Truth that God is beautiful and not that God has created the beauty by some raw material unknown to us or by the various chemicals or molecules of matter. Rather they realize that God exists in each molecule of matter, in each and everything that appears on planet earth. You and I look as two separate human beings, but the Truth is that we are manifestations of the Divine, so is everything beautiful. Everything beautiful is Divine. It is not created by the Divine, but it is the Divine itself, manifesting as nature that is beautiful.
99% of the world is blind
While less than one percent of the world is visually blind, it is sad to know that 99% of us are Spiritually blind. This is because we have tied the blindfold of Religion on top of our eyes. We blindly believe in Religion and remain in that kindergarten all through our life till we die.
When will we overcome this blindness, this ignorance and realize the Truth about God, that God is divinity that appears in all of nature, that God lives in the temple of our heart, that God is in you and me, just as God is everywhere, in everything? When will we realize this Truth?
Why is it so that 99% of us are Spiritually blind? Did God make us so? No, we did, by creating Religion that became not just a kindergarten, but also our university. We live from birth to death in the kindergarten of Religion thinking that this kindergarten is a university of God, of the Truth. This is a myth. We need to break this myth. We need to realize the Truth that God is within each one of us. God is the power that is everywhere in the universe. The sun is God, so is the wind, the water in the rains, the seas, the trees are God just as the birds and the fish. All these are God appearing as these beautiful creations of God. But as long as we believe that God is a statue, a saint that lives in the Temple or Church, we will never discover God in the temple of our heart. We will never discover the Truth about God and we will live and die in ignorance without discovering God.
God can’t be discovered, God must be realized
Finally, if you want to discover God, remember one thing. God cannot be discovered. God has to be realized. What does this mean? It means that just like gravity cannot be discovered but has to be inferred, so also God has to be inferred. God has to be realized intuitively. When we give up our blind faith that we grow up with, along with rituals and superstitions, and if we love God and seek God with devotion and dedication, then the Divine grace may fall upon us to realize this Truth.
We human beings live and die without realizing the presence of God. We don’t feel the power that is within all along. We are like the musk deer. All through life, the musk deer passionately seeks the fragrance of the musk, which actually lies in the receptacle of its own navel. It goes round and round in a frenzy searching for the perfume till it finally falls off a cliff and dies. The hunters tear open the navel and retrieve the musk. We are searching for God on the outside, whereas the power is all along inside. The moment we realize we are the Divine, we become realized Souls.
But remember, we have to realize God not discover God. God is not on a continent that an explorer can discover. God is not on a planet that astronauts can find. God is a Power, a Power that is everywhere, in everything.
But we need to discover this power through realization. We must realize God and if we have to realize God, first we must realize the self. We must realize who we are and then we will realize God within the temple of our heart. If we are passionate about God and truly love God, we can realize God.
It's foolish we look for God in the sky,
We don't ask questions; we don't ask, “Why?”
God lives within, in the temple of our heart,
But this Spiritual journey, we never start.