Finding God

There hasn't been a single person who can truly say that they have found God outside their own or in some strange places looking down at them.

Take the case of Moses in the Bible, he found a burning bush and sounds or voices which commanded him. Take the case of the prophet and you will find that he too had visions or dreams. Take the case of Ramakrishna or Vivekananda too, they only experienced the divine and never met this God!

Today when we are celebrating a religious festival called MahaShivaratri and everyone throngs to the Shiv mandir, you really wonder whom they are propitiating or praying to.

So what is this God we seek and where do we find Him?

The ones we pray to are called deities or manifestations of that divine in some form.

We look at the stone lingam, black stone idol or the one on the cross and wonder whether that one will grant us our wishes and we pray fervently to that. Fortunately our wishes are granted most of the time and then our journey starts towards this manifest form. We really do not understand that what we seek is not in that stone.

Similarly when we meet our Guru, we fall in love with that form and sometimes we forget that the truth is far beyond the form. The true guide will then take you through the manifest to the unmanifest. That which is only an essence of the one we see or feel. The path to the unmanifest is very tedious and difficult since we are so used to cling to the manifest that we do not know where to latch on to!

But once we get the hang of it all we then pray to this unmanifest.

The God or deity or the form of Guru disappears and we then experience the unmanifest. But know this is the second step only.

The last step is to discard this too and experience the manifest and the unmanifest at the same time but not in some stone or man of flesh but straight in our heart.

We can then know this divinity does not lie outside our own but right within us.

We then become fulfilled and know that this God that we were seeking has never been outside of us ever. He has been there even before we could know anything.

But never discount the form or the formless or the Guru since they have their own places too.

They are the latitudes and longitudes of our own planet called You(Self)!

They just are spaces, paths or lines which are as imaginary but actually point the truth to us.

So let us just follow the compass called deity or the Guru and know the true location of this God within us!