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God, the Unknown and the Known
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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 the 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 fears 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 time-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 presupposes 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 ever 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 the Kingdom in you and assist you to 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 in us, and now, 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 has no consciousness in itself, and nothing that is has any supporting ground and any substantiating truth.
God is not only the Featureless Infinite,
but also the All-Loving Personality
The Divinity is not only an impersonal and featureless Absolute but also something that is 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 such 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, 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, higher stages of inner evolution.
Your body is not your highest or greatest thing. It is subject to limitations, ages and perishes. Your mind is greater, but 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, 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 being can be denied, as the minds dominated by a distinct type of ardent atheistic temper have always done. But, he 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 the 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 also the deepest Power in the inner law of man, in our own being, in the world, in all nature, in something that transcends nature, and also 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 Bible tells us that we are Images of God. Even if the Bible does not disclose this truth, our experience proclaims it.
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 it, illustrate it, 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 the world's most delicious cake. 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 supra-electromagnetism, 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 the 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 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 that is in 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 by 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 feelings, 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 is 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 torch. 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 scenery, human form, thought, actions, feeling, experience. 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 that beauty of the person. Though something of the Light of God dwells in the beautiful body of the most beautiful person, yet God does not reside in the heart of such a person if that person 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 the 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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