What Is Not God?
by Baba Shuddhaanandaa Brahmachari
How can I believe in God when I don’t see any evidence of Him/Her? Who or what is God anyway? How can there be a God if there is so much suffering in this world? What if I don’t see or feel any blessings in my life?
These are enduring and difficult questions for humankind. My first response is: Who wants you to believe in God? Do you see butter in milk? No. Do you know that there is butter in the milk? Yes, but the butter is available evidentially only when you churn the milk. So also, when you work with your mind and allow the negativity to be purged, the dross and dirt settle to be removed as sediment. Then the intrinsic divinity manifests. It is there, waiting for manifestation.
You cannot see blessings until you have the desire to see them. You can only see that which your present state of consciousness allows you to see. One could be called a theist who considers every beat of the heart, the power of digestion, the waves of the brain, and the harmonious functioning of the 60 trillion cells of the human body to be Blessings. Whether you believe in God or disbelieve it makes no difference until the belief sinks into your consciousness to breathe and bask in the light of that Divine radiance and light.
Just as when you started your education you went to the kindergarten and then to the primary grades, high school, and finally to the college or university; in the same manner there are gradations of your rise in the world of Spirit. The temple, church or synagogue is the place where God resides for them who are still seeking God in the external world. The peace and tranquility of a house of worship always helps you to connect to the Divine energy, the God within. The spiritually charged environment of a temple, church or synagogue is a gift for those who can focus their mind on God. This is a place where you can begin to offer yourself to the Divine unconditionally if you are an elevated soul. Any place visited by thousands of people with similar mind set of prayerfulness would naturally generate a high degree of spiritual vibrations that can help any seeker of love and devotion to God.
But I would suggest to you that you have not yet truly realized the need of God in your life. You have too many other priorities that are more important at this junction of life, but as you go through it all, you will come to a space in life when you will see that your ego and vain pride of knowledge and power is completely useless in the context of the goal of life that is peace and happiness. You will realize that beyond your limited knowledge and power there is something in this Universe that defies your definition of God and its meaning. You will realize that the Universe has a Master and the Master is One without the second.
The more you will feel the unseen hands of the Higher Power the more you will long and yearn to realize the One who is the Doer of all. Then your visit to a house of worship would not just be one of the many dead unconscious acts but your true aspiration to be united with the Divine. Your deepest gratitude in life begins to blossom toward the One who is the Soul within you and the energy that vibrates in each of your trillions of cells.
Let the surrender to the Divine be for the purpose of making your ego supple and tender so that you could be a humbled soul on earth ready to acknowledge the innumerable gifts that keep pouring from all around you. And it comes from the Universe. Call that God or Universe or the Unified field of Consciousness, it is one and the same. ?This is the time to dive deep into your consciousness to find the true purpose of your visit to Mother Earth
Mind you God is the most misunderstood and misconceived word or notion in the world. As such there is no word in the dictionary that can ever unravel the mystery that surrounds this one word “God”. How can you define that which is unknowable? All religious conflicts all around the world are born from this basic flaw of trying to define or explain or talk about the One who is beyond definition, explanation, or any verbal words.
In order to define something you need the presumption of existence of the other. Science defines everything because it is essentially an objective study of the universe that is knowable, manifested.
You can define an onion, but once you start peeling the skin, the outer layers, you gradually reach a point where all the external parts peeled off and then a time comes, when you no longer see the onion but only empty space. How do you define the space?
You can realize God, as many great sages have done by utterly surrendering their ego and egocentric illusions of conditioned mind through practice of prayer, worship, or meditation. ?But you cannot know God, for God cannot be an object of knowledge. As such, the realized Masters of the world have said in one voice that to know God is to be God. You cannot be separate from God yet know God. It is an absolute impossibility, for God is inseparable from you and every minutest atom in the world. Through the grace of the Divine and the Master, if you attain divine vision, then you can see that the smallest little insect that is crawling under your feet is none other than God. ?I would suggest you spend your whole life in researching “What IS Not God?”
OM Times Magazine » syndicated
