God-Knowledge in Daily Life
The
One and the Many
God is One: His creations and
creatures are many. Mind is one: the thoughts are many. Wood is one: the
wooden articles are many. The sky is one: the clouds are many. The sea is
one: the waves are many. He is most intelligent, truly wise and blessed
who beholds the One in the many, and the many in One, knows the One to be
more than the many, and experiences, amidst the many that perish, the One
that remains imperishable.
Sources
of God-Knowledge
The truly great in mind perceive
God. The pure in heart, feel Him. The souls of saintliness experience Him.
The ennobled natures receive Him as an answer to their earnest prayers.
The mystics find in their inner being an identity with God.
In exalted conditions of our
inner consciousness, the Presence of God is fully illuminated for us. Our
higher Self sees Him. Our love of the Beautiful recognizes Him as the
Beauty of all beauties. Our search for Truth discovers Him as the Truth of
all truths. The highest flights in our contemplative consciousness enable
our inner being to gain a conscious communion with Him.
Know God, the supreme Reality of
all existence, in whatsoever way your inner endowment permits. Such a
knowledge alone can release you from the anxieties and gears that
characterize the human mind. It will pour into your mortal life the
Essences of the Immortal Being and invest you with a rare grace, power,
light, peace, joy and a prosperity that persists and grows.
God,
the Unknown and the Known
God we have not seen; but Love we
see in all its self-expressions. Since God is Love, we have seen God.
Develop Love more and more and you will see Him. God we do not know; but
Truth we understand. Since God is Truth, we understand God. Adhere to
Truth more and more and you will know God. God we have not experienced,
but we daily experience Goodness. Since God is Goodness we have
experienced God. Develop goodness more and more, and you will experience
God. God is invisible, but Beauty is visible. Since God is Beauty, God is
visible. Love Beauty more and more, and you will perceive God.
God we can deny, but the
Consciousness which is the basis of our intelligence, awareness and
knowledge, and with the help of which we deny God, is, and cannot be
denied. Since God is Consciousness, we cannot deny God, for He is the very
denying Consciousness.
Evolve and expand in
Consciousness, by growth in Love and Goodness, or by growth in Knowledge
and Wisdom, or by the pursuit of Beauty and Truth, or by service of
Humanity, or by any of the hundred other time-tried ways. Then, God will
be, for you, a matter of living experience and the source of your
imperishable Life, Joy, Peace, Perfection.
Everything
Real in Life Is Invisible - God Is Invisible,
yet We See Him
The Invisible is the parent of
the visible. The strength and power of the visible rests upon the inner
contact with the Invisible. The Unseen is the real. The seen is the effect
of the Unseen and is real only to the extent it retains its relations with
the Unseen. The Absolute is the ground of all that is manifest. The
manifest subsists and endures as long as it is connected with the
Absolute.
The Infinite is resident in all
forms of the finite. The finite suffers when it claims an independent
existence for itself, and thinks that it is something other than
everything else. The finite is infinitely happy and is filled with
omnipotence and a sense of the omnipresence, the moment it grows conscious
that its real being is from the Infinite, is in the Infinite, and is being
sustained by the Infinite.
The timeless Reality is the soul
of all time-processes. The endless tome-moments are threaded upon the
Being of the Timeless. We would never know the time-process, if we did not
carry in ourselves the sense of the Timeless. We would never distinguish
the red colour, if we did not know the blue colour. We understand and
distinguish feminine nature from ourselves, because we are masculine. With
the help of the Timeless, and against its background, we understand time.
The sense of time pre-supposes the implicit awareness of the Timeless.
The Spaceless is the substance of
all space. In the cinema hall, without that white screen, there would be
no possibility of projecting, or unrolling the whole epic. The moving, and
always different, pictures are made possible and supported by the pure
white, non-moving, ever the same, screen. Upon the unchanging screen of
the spaceless Reality, the changing scenes of the manifest universe of
space are projected and sustained.
The imperishable Essence in
perishing things is the parent of all creation. Therefore nothing is lost
when the perishing things are lost: for, more perishable things are formed
by that which is Imperishable. To be entrapped purely in the experience of
the perishable, is to be bound to the human condition, unhappiness,
impurity, weakness, ugliness, death. To be aware of the Imperishable,
while dealing with things perishable, is to rise above the human
condition, gain happiness, power, beauty and immortal life.
Behold,
Here Is God
We do not see air, yet it
sustains us. We know the presence of air from the waving leaves, the
swinging branches, the resistance it offers while we run. Even so, we do
not see God, yet He sustains us. Himself unseen, He sees us. We discern
the Presence of God from the pure love that wells up in our hearts, from
the great thoughts that occur to us, from the faith that somehow forms
itself. It is the moving Grace or Presence of God in us that energizes our
life and love, stimulates our aspirations, ensouls our perception of
Beauty, activates our love of Truth, and impels our noblest actions. In
all these behold the Presence of God. Thereafter higher powers of
Consciousness will unfold themselves from within in you and assist you
behold God as He is in Himself!
How
Can We Know God?
God is unconditioned Love: we
will know Him when we grow in Love. God is infinite Knowledge: we will
know Him when we evolve in Knowledge. God is universal, cosmic and
infinite Life: we will know Him when we universalize our minds, render
cosmic our feelings, and become, in inner consciousness, one with all
Life. God is absolute Purity, Peace, Power, and Perfection: we will know
Him when we grow in purity, Peace, Power and Perfection.
The
Presence of God in the Operations of
Nobler Faculties in Man
In the operations of the
keen-eyed conscience within us, we have, here and now, an experience of
God. In each of us conscience is manifest. What is it but the Presence and
operative Light of God within us? Since we experience it here and now in
us, we have in it something of the experience of God.
We wish to do something that is
not quite right, but something else in us prevents us. What is that
something else but an agent of God in us, a factor or portion of God
Himself? In the workings of the better self, the better judgement, the
better choice in us, we have, here and now, something of the
God-experience. It needs a little calmness within and a keener spiritual
sensibility to recognize this fact.
God-experience
Now, in the Inspiring Moral Nature of the Greatest of Men
God can be immediately
experienced in the form of the grand moral phenomena that we observe in
exalted patterns of human life. In all that is noble, beautiful, splendid,
great, truthful and inspiring in thought, or in love, or in life, or in
word, or in song, or in colour, we obtain something of the experience of
God here and now. However, we have to sustain this understanding, this
inner sensibility and experience.
To
Them Who Have Eyes to See, God Is most Visible
through the Veils of Nature and World
Every speck of space in which we
draw our daily, hourly, every moment's breath, is rich with the
inexhaustible abundance of Goodness, of Godliness, of Beauty.
One has to widen one's
consciousness, and deepen one's spirit to be able to develop the vision
that sees God shining in and through all matter, and the divine Reality
revealing itself in and through the unreal phenomena.
God
- the Ground of All Existence
God is no product of poetic
fancy, no object of a visionary dream, no myth of human consciousness, but
the one Reality without which life has no subsistence, time has no
existence, movement has no motion, mind has no intelligence, matter has no
materiality, soul has no ethereality, consciousness is not conscious of
itself, and nothing that is has any supporting ground or substantiating
Truth.
Proofs
for the Existence of God
The Ontological Proof:
You always feel 'I exist'. One
can never deny one's existence: can one? So, denying one's existence is
quite absurd and illogical. In denying one's existence, one denies one's
own self. Existence is God or one's own inner immortal Self.
Though one is engaged in this
finite body, though one is imperfect and mortal on account of egoism, one
can think 'I am an infinite, perfect, immortal Being.'
Though one is finite, one is
capable of having an idea of the most perfect Being which fills all space,
which contains everything, beyond which nothing can be conceived of and
where all desires come to infinite fulfilment. This idea of Infinity can
arise only from an infinite Being. Hence the infinite Being or God exists.
The Subjective Proof:
One can deny one's own self; one
can deny the existence of God, doubt the existence of one's own self and
God. But the doubter or denyer always exists. The existence of the doubter
or denyer is God, Brahman or the Absolute.
The Teleological Proof:
Everything is changing in this
world. There must be a substratum that is unchanging. One cannot think of
a changing thing without thinking of something which is unchanging. Forms
are finite. One cannot think of a finite object without thinking of
something beyond, without thinking of the infinite.
The Cosmological Proof:
In this world of phenomena, there
is a cause for everything. The law of cause and effect operates. There is
the cause, father, for the effect, child. There is the cause, seed, for
the effect, tree. There is the cause, potter, for the effect, pot. A
branch of a tree moves. The blowing of the wind, or the sitting of a bird,
is the cause for the movement of a branch of a tree. One sees this world.
There must be a cause for this world, the effect. But you cannot stretch
this kind of argument without ending it in infinite regress. A causeless
ultimate Cause must be admitted in order to avoid logical fallacy. That
causeless Cause is God or the Creator.
The Theological Proof:
There are beauty, intelligence,
luminosity, law, order and harmony in spite of apparent disorder and
disharmony, so there must be an omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent
Being who governs and controls this vast universe.
Proof by the Appeal of Reason to Faith:
There is a display of
intelligence in every inch of creation. The divine Hand is operating
everywhere. Can my brother the psychologist manufacture a mind? Can the
scientists explain whence the laws of nature are? It is obvious that ever
since the beginning of creation some miraculous and mysterious power has
been at work. One may call it 'Mysterious Power', or 'Father in Heaven',
'Jehovah', 'Allah', Substance', 'Essence', 'Brahman', 'Ahura-Mazda' or by
any name.
God
in the Philosophy of Aristotle
In the philosophical system of
Aristotle God is not an anthropological Being seated in Heaven as the King
of the universe. God, for Aristotle, is primum mobile immotum, a prime
mover unmoved, the One, the source of the unity of the world-process.
God is not the Maker, but the
Mover of the world. Everything in the world is a moved mover, and God,
being perfect and eternal, is the unmoved mover. Nothing moves Him, for
nothing is superior to Him. He is indivisible, spaceless, sexless,
passionless, immortal Existence. God neither creates the world, nor is He
interested in the world, for He is not imperfect, He has no desires, no
will, no purpose. He is the essence of all things, the source of all
action, the instigator of all thought.
God, according to Aristotle, is
the First Cause, the eternal unmoved first mover. Everything in the
universe is caused by something. In the world, one moves the other. The
brain moves the hand and the hand moves the pen, that is to say, the cause
of every motion is the result of some other motion. But motion must have
its source; someone or something must have created it. That something or
someone is God, and God, if we are to avoid an infinite regress, must be
treated as an unmoved Mover. God is the final cause of all activity. He
influences the world and sets it in motion, not by mechanical impulse, but
by virtue of the perfection of His being. God's static perfection moves
the world.
A great saint is passing by us.
His gaze is fixed upon the ground. He does not talk, does not see, is not
excited. But, we see him; his very presence has turned our eyes towards
him, inspires awe in us, sets our hearts in convulsions of emotion,
excites our love and admiration, moves our natures. Such is the nature of
God, the causeless Cause, the unmoved Mover, the Being whose perfect
Beauty, without being moved itself, produces motion within all of us
through Love.
God
is not only the Featureless Infinite but also an
All-Loving Personality
The Divinity is not only an
impersonal and featureless Absolute, but an all-loving and all-lovable
Personality, a close and all fulfilling Form, an all-beautiful Person of
all-protecting Power. He is not merely that abstract and distant Infinity
of Existence or Consciousness, but also our intimate friend, our beloved
Mother, our gracious Father. We can establish with God every form of
intimate relation, experience Him in all manner of ways, attain His
Perfection integrally, and in a way that even our empirical consciousness
begins to find that there is no experience more real, more solid, more
complete than God-experience.
God
- Neither an Object of Philosophical Speculation
nor an Article of Faith, but a Reality which
Can Be
Experienced Here and Now
The materiality of matter may be
the sole experience of the physical man; but the spirituality of matter is
the living experience of a Sage. Though to the seeking intelligence of a
philosopher God is an ideal, He is an actuality to the enlightened Sage.
The Divine presents itself as a
vision, not a conceptional notion, but a vision that is a living Reality,
a Reality that is a matter of immediate, concrete, continuous experience.
What
Is God?
That which is the highest in you
is God. Whatever is excellent, grand, noble, true, valuable within you, is
God. God is that in you which, while sustaining your consciousness and its
attributes, your life and its expressions, is yet infinitely superior to
them.
That in you from which your love
arises, from which your sense of the beautiful and the great springs up,
from which your desire for perfection takes its rise, is God.
That in you from which your
conscience operates, your faith works, your capacity to understand
spiritual truths emerges, is God. God is all that in you without which you
cannot live, breathe, move, think, feel, appreciate and pursue values,
ideals or higher stages of inner evolution.
Your body is not your highest or
greatest thing. It is subject to limitations, it ages and perishes. Your
mind is greater, but it is not that which is the highest in you. Nor is
your unconscious being the greatest in you. Only the superconscious, that
which is the observer and witness in all your mental states, even of the
observing consciousness in you, is God.
God is all-perfect. Silence the
restlessness of your mind and heart, and know this Godhead in stillness,
in love, with the light of the divine Wisdom.
God
Is the Highest and All-Sustaining Reality in Man
God is no mere hypothesis, not
someone whose very existence can be denied, as minds, dominated by a
distinct type of ardent atheistic temper, have always done. God is that
all-pervading spiritual Presence which subsists as the force of faith in
the devout, and as the power of denial in the atheist, which pulsates
within, and broods over, the passing flux of immediate environs and
circumstances and events of experience.
Our experience discloses to us
that God is not only the distant supracosmic Reality and a Spinozistic,
pantheistic, all-pervading Divinity, but the deepest Power in the inner
law of man, in our own being, in the world, in all nature, in that which
transcends nature. He is that which is wholly the transcendent Other.
God is no mere assumption in the
mind of man, no mere notion proffering itself as the ping-pong ball to the
dialectical powers of the self-constituted rational individuals, but the
Reality founded on the fact of our inner spiritual experience, the
ineffable transcendent Divinity felt here in life, experienced even as the
immanent Deity, the Delight of all life, the Joy of all existence, the
Essence of all beings.
Through all individual minds and
lives, the one infinite Being is working and expressing itself. And
therefore, ultimately, all beings must return to the essential and
unlimited condition and perfection of the one supreme Reality. The ways to
reach unity with that one Truth and Being differ in accordance with the
inner equipment, the cultural and other characteristics of the individual.
God
in Man
The divine thoughts that occur to
us, our readiness to lay down our very lives for a noble cause, our
inability to hide our ardent love for Truth, our heroic efforts to pursue,
create immortal forms of Beauty, and such other higher tendencies in us, -
prove, illustrate, bear witness to the fact that we are made in the Image
of God.
Again, not only man is made in
the Image of God, but the whole Universe, the entire creation, is
fashioned in the Image, the Being, the Substance of God, by the
Existence-Knowledge-Delight of God.
The outward appearances of men
and things do not affect the inner all-sustaining Image of God. They are
external, temporary, subject to change and death. The inner Image is
eternal, pure, perfect, and shall find its own ways of expressing itself,
abolishing the outer appearances and manifesting its own reign of Peace,
Joy, Perfection.
Here
and Now You Can Partake of the Perfections of God
There are millions of copper
plates. On each of them, there is one of the world's most delicious cakes.
None of the plates enjoy the cake they hold. Even so, though there is God
in each of the millions of beings, they do not partake of His infinite
Joy, Peace, and Perfection. Supposing, by some strange device, the copper
plates are completely charged with some kind of supraelectromagnetism and
are endowed with consciousness and the sense of taste; at once each of
them would begin to enjoy the cake. Even so, if man is charged with the
fires of aspiration, illuminated with divine Knowledge, endowed with
divine Love, he experiences the perfections of God, here and now.
God-Knowledge
Here and Now
Ours is an intuitive way of life
which holds in itself an intimate spiritual experience of the divine
Reality. God is an absolutely indispensable immediacy of Consciousness, a
Consciousness which is not only the ultimate basis of all states and modes
of individual awareness, but which is itself the pure and simple absolute
Consciousness, ideally rapt in its own Self-Light, and yet expressing
itself, in sport, as the active Continuum that creates and sustains, in a
secret infinity of delight, all phenomena.
Experience
God Here and Now
God is now here. He is within you
as the highest inner divine Consciousness. He is all-around you as a
living all-sustaining Presence. Contact Him in contemplation. Feel Him by
faith. Know Him by divine Knowledge. Adore Him in spirit. Gain communion
with Him through divine Love. Manifest His Peace. Distribute His Light.
Express His perfection in the field of daily life.
The
Drop and the Sea
You are a drop. Why stand alone?
Why that pride? Why that exposure of yourself to weakness, sorrow,
suffering? Why that separation, that complaint, that tear? Why not sink
into the sea, and say, 'Lo, I am the sea, the wondrous blue sea. Mine is
the vastness, the peace, the joy, the power of the sea. Illimitable is my
freedom and imperishable am I'.
As a drop you carry in yourself
the constant fear of being dried up by the heat of the sun, but as the sea
not all the heat of the sun can have any power over you.
How can we, the drops of human
beings, become the sea? By sinking our thoughts, our feeling, our
awareness, in the illimitable Consciousness of God in the strong and
all-governing sense of our oneness with the Majesty and Perfection of the
infinite Reality of all-creative Consciousness!
God
Is Everywhere - Know Him!
If there were no God in the dirty
pond, no lotus would bloom on it. If there were no God in the human
individual, humanity would have borne no witness to saints. If there were
no God in the world, there would be no goodness and no joy, and none would
want to live even for a second. Life is dear because God is its sustaining
Essence and Joy. When we know God consciously life is infinitely fulfilled
and we obtain unlimited joy, power and delight.
God,
the Good and the Evil
God is all-loving. Infinite is
His Compassion. He loves every creature He created as if it was His only
child. Around the good He raises the fortresses of His protection. The bad
and the evil are not condemned or punished. Their own badness or evil
surrenders them to a little trouble and to the experience of sufficient
pain, in order that they may see their right path and recover their rights
to God's loving protection and inexhaustible treasures.
No loving mother punishes her
child for the sake of punishment, but only to persuade it to come to
bodily, mental, emotional, and moral health. The punishment from the
mother is ensouled by Love, governed by Wisdom, and executed with a view
to secure for the child the welfare, the glory and the abundance that the
mother wishes for it. To help the child gain these the mother is prepared
to take upon herself any pains, and make any sacrifices. How much more is
this not true of God, who is infinitely more loving than a mother?
The good too have their
difficulties in this world of limitations, but their difficulties conceal
beneath them the invincible strength of God. The darkness of millions of
years in the mountain cave hid in the bowels of the great mountains is
dispelled within a second by the flash of the touch. Even so, the million
years of man's blunders, errors, sins, are completely resolved by the
flash of God's Grace.
God
Is Beauty
Beauty is God, and God is Beauty.
It does not matter whether that Beauty is unmanifest and absolute in the
transcendent Reality, or expressive through literary forms, artistic
works, scientific insights, philosophic perceptions, natural sceneries,
human forms, actions, feelings, experiences. Beauty is the essential
nature of the inner divine Consciousness within you.
Ignorance and its dark
self-expressions are a negation of all beauty. Hatred and its destructive
works are ugliness of the worst type. Beauty is absent wherever there is
depression, despondency and unhappiness.
A person who is less evolved is
less beautiful than a person who is more evolved. A kind, loving and wise
person, however ugly in physical form, is beautiful. God dwells in the
beauty of a person. But though something of the Light of God dwells in the
body of the most beautiful person, yet God does not reside in the heart of
such a person, if she or he is mentally, emotionally, morally,
spiritually, bad.
Seek beauty in all its million
forms. Knowledge and its workings are Beauty. Love and its deeds are
Beauty. Goodness and its expressions are Beauty. Joy and peace and their
phenomena are Beauty.
Mental, moral, spiritual, and
even material illumination is Beauty. Beauty is Light, Love, Joy, Peace,
Perfection, and therefore God.
The
God-Man
In the dreadful tigress that
expresses tender affection for its baby, God is present as affection. In
the stupid ass that teaches us patience and forbearance, God is present as
patience and forbearance. In the mute dog that imparts to us lessons in
faithfulness, God is present as faithfulness. In the little child that
manifests purity and innocence, God is present as purity and innocence. He
is a God-man in whom we find great love, patience, forbearance,
faithfulness, purity, innocence.
Everywhere
I See God
When I open my eyes I see only
one thing: God. When I close my eyes I see only one thing: God. With this
pair of eyes I see always only one thing: God. While looking at many
people, yet I look at only one thing: God. While seeing many things I see
only one thing: God. Boundless is the Mercy and Grace of God. In Him alone
is my life completely fulfilled. My heart is knit into His Heart. He who
touches my Heart touches God, and he who touches God touches my Heart.
- Swami Omkarananda
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