IS THERE REALLY A GOD?
What caused man to be separated from God in the first place is a total misconception fostered by so-called church organisations. There has never been any separation between man and God. If God is regarded to be omnipresent, then where is the separation? It is He who is present within you all the time.
Man feels that he is separated because of an undeveloped consciousness or an undeveloped awareness in which he does not seem to realise his real Self. He finds himself separated because of all the problems he experiences, all the anxieties he has, and all the troubles he might suffer.
Then he says, “Is there a God?” He questions that. If there was a God, which is usually what the theologians call a kind and passionate Father, why should he be so unkind to people and make them suffer? Yet, they do not seem to realise that Divinity is a neutral energy, an all-pervading, all-permeating neutral energy, and you, yourself, bring suffering upon yourself. The suffering comes about by the various mental conflicts you have created, so Divinity is not to be blamed.
How many times a day do you ever think of Divinity? You do not. You would believe that instead of dinner, you will cook the clothes you wear or the work you do at your workplace. You do not think of Divinity at all. The only time you think of God is when you are in trouble. You say, “Oh, God, please help me.” He will not, that is for sure! He will tell you, “Help yourself.”
Therefore, the old saying we know so well, “God only helps those who help themselves.” This means that you are activating that divine energy to help yourself to bring the calmness into your mind. And, by bringing calmness into your mind, your anxieties disappear. People have analytical minds but do not analyse their thought processes properly. They always negatively analyse them, and 99.9 percent of the world’s people still like to think of the dark side of things and never about the silver lining behind every cloud. People do not see the opportunity that lies in every adversity, and this very adversity that you are going through makes you feel that you are separate from God, where, in reality, no separation has ever occurred.
Divinity is said to be infinite and eternal, and so are you, infinite and eternal.
BE STILL AND KNOW THAT I AM GOD
Dropping one body and picking up the next body is like changing from one suit to the other. Yet, that inner Self forever remains in its stillness. It is said in theology, “Be still and know that I am God.” Who is to be still? You are to be still and know that you are God within yourself. God does not need to be still; He is stillness. The cognition must come from you; a systematic meditation process can quickly achieve this. You lead the conscious mind through the subconscious layers and then to the Superconscious mind, where you contact Divinity.
I have said this before, somewhere, talking around the world: I do not believe in God. I do not. I know God! And that is what everyone must strive for to know God. By knowing God, you will find the living God and not an abstract conception of some old man sitting on his throne somewhere up there.
The separation is not a separation, but it is based upon our ignorance. Through evolution, from the primal atom I spoke about, one goes through so many different experiences, and all these experiences go into the memory bank of your mind.
Unpleasant experiences have a habit of clinging more and more to you than good experiences. When these unpleasant experiences cling to you, your faith in Divinity diminishes. It clouds up everything. The sun is always shining up there but is covered by clouds. Who created the clouds? The sun itself. It drew up the water vapour, which condensed itself to become a cloud and obscured the sun, and yet, the sun is untouched. So, we live in obscurity and ignorance by denying the universality and eternity of that which Is.
Through spiritual practices, you develop a sense of Is-ness. I am That I am: Yahweh. You develop the sense of Is-ness, and the more you create the feeling of Is-ness, the more you will live a life of here and now and not a life in the past or projected into the future.
DEVELOPING THE SENSE OF IS-NESS
How does one develop a sense of Is-ness? Is-ness is a consciousness of the highest level. There are many, many levels of consciousness. You have gross consciousness that works on stimuli and sensual inputs, and it is just floundering around there on the senses. Only when you flounder in the senses, do you feel separate from God because the stimuli you receive are forever changing. It is changing, changing, changing. One day, you might eat one particular dish and like it very much, and the next time, the same dish would seem tasteless to you, yet it is the same dish of food.
This means mental conditioning. If your mind is continuously conditioned to separation, you can also recondition or repattern the mind to non-separation. The most significant trouble in the world has been caused by duality, the separation between you and Divinity. That is the most essential cause of all problems: duality. When you have two, there is friction, but when there is one, there is no friction. With what can it have friction? There is no second factor or object with which it can have friction.
To the ignorant people, Jesus would say, “Pray to thy Father in Heaven,” because that is what the peasants would understand. He would say to the others a little more advanced, “You are a part of God.” But to those who knew the teachings and could understand Jesus, you would say, “I and my Father are one.” That shows unity consciousness.
It is a process of reaching that level, and the process goes on depending on how long you want to let it go on. When the realisation dawns that I am not separate from anything else in our relative field of life, you will have no friction. The lover will not find himself separate from his beloved. He finds himself one with the beloved, so how can there be friction? How can there ever be any form of unhappiness? The sense of separation creates all the anxieties and unhappiness within yourself, and separation causes all of the conflicts.
REACH THE CENTRE OF YOURSELF
What does one do with these conflicts? You reach the centre. You are on the see-saw going up and down all the time: pleasure today, pain tomorrow, the next day, pain the following day. You are fluctuating because you are fluctuating at either end. But realise that either ends are but ends of the same one stick. Stand in the centre, reach the centre of yourself. Seek ye first the Kingdom of Heaven within; that is the centre, and your entire universe radiates from that centre. So, we are living in the form of illusion. We find the separation also through attachment. We are too attached to things. This is my city. This is my house. This is my video. This is my this, my that, me and mine, and forgetting that all this is Thee and Thine, including me. This is the way one can alleviate all the sorrows of life.
People always seek happiness, but that is the wrong thing because happiness is pleasure; it is the other side of the coin of pain. Pain and pleasure go together. But when you rise beyond that, you land up in the field of joy where there is neither pleasure nor pain but beautiful, joyous equilibrium. When you reach the equilibrium, then all separation ceases. But we only use the ends of the stick. The schoolmaster whacks the child, never with the centre of the stick but always with the end of the stick. He holds one end and spanks the child with the other. That is what is happening to us; the stick of our little minds is spanking us because we lack awareness.
RECOGNISE DIVINITY WITHIN YOURSELF
As you go deeper and deeper into spiritual practices, you will find your awareness expanding and expanding and expanding until you embrace the entire universe in your arms. The expansion of awareness is the rediscovery of pure consciousness within you all the time, but just veiled. We can use the analogy of a light bulb. You wrap pieces of cloth around the bulb and do not see the light, but slowly, as you remove the coverings one by one, you come to the naked bulb with all of its light, with all its full glory. And you are glorious. If you believe Divinity is glorious and omnipresent, how can you say you are not glorious? Why can you not say, “I too am divine, for everyone is divine”? But we fail to see that because of separation. That oneness, pure or unity consciousness, can only come about if you first recognise the Divinity within yourself. Like the saying about love, you cannot love others if you cannot love yourself. It is the same principle.
Through these spiritual practices, we discover that inner force and reach that reservoir of energy, for Divinity is energy. You can put it on any label that you like. It remains energy. You cannot lift your hand without that energy. You cannot walk two steps without that energy. The energy is functioning to make you walk, yet you think I am walking. Who are you to be able to walk? The energy is moving you. You are not walking, I am not talking, it is the inner energy flowing out to you, and because it strikes a chord, it flows into your Heart, through your mind to the Heart.
People call the oneness “monism”, or the Sanskritists would call it advait: oneness. The goal and purpose in life are to discover that oneness, and when you find that reservoir of energy within you, you will bubble over. You become dynamic. You become vital and emanate from you and capture the hearts and souls of others around you. When you see that Divinity within you, you will automatically and spontaneously see the Divinity in others. When you see the Divinity in others, you cannot hate others because they are the same. This is what the Bible means, “Love thy neighbour as thyself” because your neighbour is not separate from yourself. In this relative world, even if your neighbour is not separate from yourself, how can God be separate from you?
WHAT I CAN DO, YOU CAN DO TOO
As I said in the beginning, it is a misconception which has come about since childhood, where the parents, the schools, and the teachers put this thought on you. It has served a purpose: to make you worshipful and develop faith. It has served its purpose, but that is not where it ends. Self-realisation begins where religions end. Religions put you into a groove of thought, and you abide by that, but when you go beyond the groove, you see how vast you are, how vast Divinity is. It is like the little frog in the well who thought that was the whole world until his friend came along and took him to the ocean, and he says, “Oh, look at the vastness of the ocean.”
We are like little frogs in the little well; being in that little well, we are unwell! That is where all the trouble lies. No person needs to feel any tension whatsoever. No person needs to go through the stresses and strains of life. They are mentally created. Once you are established in meditation, all your mountains could crash down, and I would not bat an eyelid. What I can do, you can do as well. It depends on how nearer you are to the purity of consciousness. Gradually, as you proceed, you will find the entire patterns of your thoughts changing because of uncovering consciousness or developing greater awareness. You are aware. Your eyes might be pointed at this camera standing over there, yet you know the entire periphery. That is called awareness. With awareness, you can concentrate on a particular object, yet simultaneously, you can cognise and recognise all of that around you. There is no separation at all.
… Gururaj Ananda Yogi: Satsang US 1984 – 36
