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 that is present within you all the time.
Man feels that he is separated because of an undeveloped consciousness or an undeveloped awareness where he does not seem to realise his real Self. He finds himself separated because of all the problems he goes through, 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 to be kind and a 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 it is you, yourself, that brings 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 there is Divinity? You do not. You would rather think of the dinner you are going to cook or the clothes you are going to wear or the work you are going to do on the job at your work. 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 really 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 an analytical mind, but they 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, wherein 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, and a systematic process of meditation can very easily 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 that I do not believe in God. I do not. I know God! And that is what everyone must strive for, it is to know God, and 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 in 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 shining up there all the time but is covered by the clouds and 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 develop the sense 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. Because you flounder around in the senses only then you feel you are separate from God because the stimuli you receive is forever changing all the time. 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, and yet it is the same dish of food.
This means mental conditioning. If your mind has continuously been 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 that occurs between you and Divinity. That is the most significant 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. To the others a little more advanced, he would say, “You are a part of God.” But to those who knew the teachings and that 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 to be 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, pleasure the next day, pain the following day. You are fluctuation 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, and 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 of this is Thee and Thine, including me. This is the way where one could alleviate all the sorrows of life.
People are always seeking happiness, but that is the wrong thing to seek 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 the 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, always with the end of the stick. He holds one end, and he spanks the child with the other end. 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 nothing else but the rediscovery of pure consciousness within you all of 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 of its full glory. And you are glorious. If you believe Divinity is glorious and omnipresent, how can you say that 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, that consciousness, pure consciousness or unity consciousness, can only come about if you recognise the Divinity within yourself first. Like the saying about love; if you cannot love yourself, you cannot love others. It is the same principle.
Through these spiritual practices we discover that inner force, we reach that reservoir of energy, for Divinity is energy. You can put on any label that you like. It still 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, and yet you have the thought that 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 that is flowing out to you, and because it strikes a chord, it flows into your Heart, through your mind to the Heart.
It is the oneness that people call “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 just 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. And when you see the Divinity in others, you cannot hate others because it is the same Divinity. This is what is meant in the Bible, “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, and this misconception has come about since childhood, where the parents, the schools, the teachers put this thought on you. It has served a purpose, to make you worshipful, to develop faith in you. 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 a friend of his 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 and 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 of 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 would find the entire patterns of your thought changing by itself because of uncovering consciousness or developing greater awareness. You are aware. Your eyes might be pointed at this camera standing over there, yet you are aware of the entire periphery. That is called awareness. Having awareness, you can concentrate it on a particular object and yet at the same time you cognise and recognise all of that which is around you. There is no separation at all.
… Gururaj Ananda Yogi: Satsang US 1984 – 36