What is God, and what is our relationship with God?
No metaphor is perfect when it is God you’re speaking about. Words, which are finite, are incapable of aptly describing that which is infinite. Words are two-dimensional and cannot do justice to something that defies dimension. By using words, we sort of run circles around the Truth, inching closer to it bit by bit.
One way of thinking about God is akin to the way we perceive the sun. Though the sun is not infinite, it is a useful analogy here. Trying to talk about God is like placing many different containers on the ground, each of which will give us a different reflection of the sun.
A blue container shaped like a bowl will reflect it differently from the way a glass container that is vertical and translucent will. It’s the same sun, but there are different images of it because the containers are different.
So, too, God is one. There really is nothing but God; however, that God is manifest, seen and perceived in an infinite number of ways due to infinitely differing containers.
There is a teaching in the Upanishads: ‘Isavasyamidam sarvam yatkinca jagatyam jagat.’ It means that everything in the universe is pervaded by the Divine. There is nothing and no one that is not pervaded by the Divine.
If there is nothing but God, that doesn’t mean that God is everything but your boss, or God is present in everyone except your mother-in-law, or everything is God except you. No scripture would allow that. If everything is God, then everything is God.
In our lives, what we tend to do is identify with the container. We see the bowl instead of the reflection of the sun. When people ask, ‘Who are you?’ I say, ‘I’m female, I’m white, I’m forty-eight, I’m American, I’m a sanyasi, I’m a PhD, these are my parents, this is my life, this is how much I weigh, this is how tall I am, this is what I’m allergic to, this is what I like and don’t like.’ But just as the bowl is a vessel for the sun, all we are and all we have is a vessel for the presence of God.
We can’t see the sun’s reflection until and unless we have a vessel. Similarly, with our two eyes, we are only able to see God in form. This is why we emphasize the opening of our third eye. So many people ask, ‘Why do we put this tilak here between the eyes? What does it mean?’ Well, one significant aspect of the tilak is that it tells us: When I use these two physical eyes, I’m able to only see form. I can see hair colour, skin, weight, height, gender, beauty and clothes, but all this is illusion. The third eye chakra is actually the energy centre of the power of discrimination, the power to discriminate Truth from untruth. The Truth, that capital-T eternal Truth, is that we’re divine. So when we wear the tilak or meditate on the third eye, what we are actually telling God is: Oh God, let me see from this eye rather than using these two physical eyes which keep seeing falsehood after falsehood, separation after separation, form after form, instead of essence. Oh God, I want to see content, not form, I want to see essence, not form. I want to see the Truth.
The third eye sees that there is no separation between you and me. If we perceive using only our physical eyes and thereby see only false separation, then I see you as an object. I may love you, I may hate you, I may want to bring you into my life, I may want to push you out of my life, but either way you are a separate object. When I am able to use my third eye, when I’m really living with the awareness that there’s nothing but God, there is no separation and there’s no place I end and you begin. It’s all God.
There’s a great story of what happens to so many of us when we embark on the spiritual path and gain some of this knowledge.
A Guru was teaching his disciples that everything is Brahma and there is nothing but Brahma. One day, two of his disciples went into the city and heard a loud shout that there was an elephant coming their way. The man who was atop the elephant shouted, ‘Get out of the way!’ But the disciple thought, ‘Well, my Guru says everything is God, so I’m going to stay here because this elephant is just an illusion. It’s really Brahma, it’s God, and I’m really Brahma, I’m not this weak guy, so why do I have to get out of the way?’
The elephant handler was screaming at this point, ‘Get out of the way, get out of the way!’ But the disciple said to himself, ‘No, no, it’s all good, it’s all God, no problem!’ The elephant, of course, scooped him up with his trunk and tossed him hundreds of yards away. He lay there, broken. Finally, his fellow disciples came to where he lay bleeding and in pain. He cried out to them, ‘I hate our Guru! He gave us this false piece of information. That was a horrible elephant; that was not God. I’m never going back to the ashram!’
The disciples went back and relayed everything to the Guru. The Guru went to the man and asked him what had happened. The disciple, in a fit of ego, replied, ‘I was just trying to implement your teaching, you are the one who said everything is God. Look what the elephant did to me.’
And the Guru replied, ‘Ah, but you really didn’t implement the teaching.’
Perturbed, the man said that he saw the elephant as Brahma.
The Guru explained, ‘But what about the elephant handler who told you to get out of the way? What about all of the people who tried to grab you and pull you out of the way? I told you everything is Brahma, but in your ego, you decided it was just going to be you and the elephant. You left out the elephant handler, all the people and all your fellow disciples who tried to help you.’
Sadly, this is what happens to us. We tend to develop these very narrow views about what being spiritual means. We think, I am God, therefore you should do the dishes tonight. Therefore, you should take care of me. Well, if I am God, then so are you, because God doesn’t play favourites, there is no God that says, ‘I will be one with you but not with them.’ When there is nothing but God, there is nothing but God .
How can we implement, practically, the idea that there is nothing but God?
It is not easy to move through the world remembering there is nothing but God. We have to remember that yes, this is the ultimate truth, and yet there is the Creator and there is creation, and that’s us. Yes, at our core, we’re God. There is nothing but God. But as the creation in this leela, this beautiful divine drama that God has created, we have hearts that love and minds that think, we have the ability to have compassion and the ability to lend a helping hand.
One of the tragic pitfalls of a superficial understanding of these truths is that we tend to blindly use them to our benefit. We tell ourselves, well, everything is God, so why do I have to do my homework? Everything is God, so why give charity, why pay my taxes, why do anything? If it’s all perfect, if there’s nothing but God, why do I have to wake up in the morning and meditate and pray?
Such thinking lends itself to very challenging games of the ego. So, what I have found, personally, is that it’s beautiful to hold that Truth, to remember it, to know that it is the highest level of Truth, but when I can’t live that Truth every moment of every day, I can at least live my humanity, rather than push my humanity away. That’s a trap we don’t want to fall into.
One way to think about existence is to imagine the old TV sets that had dials to switch from one channel to another. On the highest channel is the all-encompassing Truth in which it’s all God. But on another channel, we’re here in this human form, wherein we have the ability to smile at each other, hug each other, help each other, feed each other and use our talents and abilities to serve each other.
We don’t want to dismiss that, because if God had wanted us to just disconnect entirely from the world and to let people suffer and die, I do not believe we would’ve been born with the ability to experience empathy and compassion, and to cry at the plight of one another. If someone falls down in front of us, we don’t take a moment to process in our brains: Is it God? Is it not God? No. We just reach out and help. If we refuse to embrace our humanity, then we would be throwing away a gift that God has given us. God is perfect, and God gave us a human birth on purpose. We could have been a leaf or an earthworm. Why did God make us human, give us the capacity for consciousness, love and intuition?
So, we use those gifts, with an awareness that the perfect, all-knowing God gave them to us for a reason. We hold in our awareness that the highest, deepest, truest Truth is that it’s all perfect, and we reach out and help the person who tripped in front of us, because that channel of love and compassion also exists, connecting us to one another, as long as we are tapping into the best of being human.
How do we connect with our Divine Self, and then stay connected?
First, I’m going to change the phrase to ‘True Self,’ because if we say ‘Divine Self’, it implies that there is a ‘non-divine self’; that is to say, this part of me is my Divine Self, and this part of me is my non-divine self. What we have is a True Self and a non-true self. The non-true self is the stuff that most of us actually identify as: our name, our age, where we’re from, the colour of our skin, our bank account, our career, our titles, all that stuff we associate our lives with, but which actually isn’t us. The reason we know all that isn’t truly Self is because it keeps changing.
If you’re driving down the freeway and someone calls you on the phone and asks, ‘Who are you?’ and you say, ‘I’m Exit 30,’ they will say, ‘No, I didn’t ask where you are, I asked who are you.’ Then if you say, ‘I told you, I’m Exit 30, but actually now I’m almost Exit 31,’ they would think that either you couldn’t hear them or that you had gone crazy. We understand that Exit 30 or 31 is simply the intersection of time and space that our vehicle has reached. That’s where we are, but it’s not who we are.
If I say to you that I am forty-eight, female, white, American and a sanyasi, all of that is true, none of it is a lie, and yet, it’s what we’ll call the lowercase-t truth. It’s true at this exact intersection of time and space. It’s my where , not my who . It’s not the capital-T Truth; it’s just telling you the story of my vehicle and where it happens to be at this exact intersection of time and space. But our True Self is the Divine, the essence. This body is just the container. When we connect with our True Self, what we have to do is sink beneath the container. If we remain stuck on the container, we won’t get to the essence.
If I pick up a glass of water and spend all my time marvelling at how beautiful or ugly or solid or soft it is, it’s not going to quench my thirst. In order to do that, I actually have to drink what’s inside. There’s nothing wrong with admiring the beauty of the glass; it just doesn’t do anything for my thirst. Similarly, there’s nothing wrong with paying attention to our body vehicles—we’ve only got one, and it’s a temple. If who we are is the Divine and the Divine lives in this body vehicle, it means the vehicle is a temple. We have to take as much care of it as we take care of our temples, our churches, our synagogues, our mosques and wherever the Divine resides. However, we shouldn’t confuse form for content, packaging for essence.
Our True Self is the essence, the spirit. There are so many ways to connect with it. One simple and easy way is through a meditation practice called ‘neti, neti ’, which means, ‘not this, not this’. We begin literally by saying, ‘I am not my orange saree, I am not my skin, I am not my bones . . .’ Should anyone doubt this, we know it is true because the skin keeps sloughing off but ‘I’ am still here. My bones break, but I’m still here. Similarly, I’m not my blood—I could get a blood transfusion, donate blood, but I’d still be here. I’m not my organs—I could get a transplant, but I’d still be here. We then go deeper and deeper, recognizing that all of the parts of our body actually slough off or regenerate over a period of time. After every eight or nine years, I am brand new! If there is any grudge that I am holding on to over something that happened eight or nine years ago, it did not happen to the I who exists today!
Then we go a little bit deeper, and we say, ‘Well, I’m also not my emotions. I’m not my anger.’ The reason I know this is because I’m not always angry. I may be angry way too frequently but I’m not always angry. When I’m not angry, I don’t cease to exist. If I am my anger, I would cease to exist when I’m not angry. I’m not even my thoughts, because there’s a very small space in between my thoughts, and in that space, I don’t evaporate. If I did, if I were my thoughts and I ceased to exist even momentarily in between my thoughts, who would think the next thought?
After a while, maybe something else will come to us. ‘I’m the child of an alcoholic.’ No, because that child is not who I am any more. My body has literally completely regenerated its cells since I was that child, and if I believe in past lives, it wasn’t true in my last birth.
This way, we slowly go as deep as we can until there’s really nothing else to remove. If we do this in a quiet, meditative place and we allow ourselves to just sit there, peeling layer after layer, what we find is this beautiful stillness, this beautiful experience.
So, we can discard everything that we identify with until we get to what the Buddhists speak of as nothingness and the Hindus speak of as everythingness, but which is the same experience of infinity. Imagine, if I’ve got a glass jar of air and the jar breaks, what do I have? On the one hand, you could say I have nothing as I no longer have my jar of air. It broke, so I have nothing now. On the other hand, you could say that the only thing that happened was I lost that dividing line between my jar of air and all of the air, so now actually I have all of the air instead of just one jar of the air. Neither is right, neither is wrong; they are just two ways of looking at it, but you’ll recognize that they actually take us to exactly the same place. We all agree that we’re left with just air. And that’s the truth of who you are. When the border and boundary dissolve, when the walls of the container shatter, you realize you have always been the infinite, you have always been consciousness, you have always been divine.
The last aspect of how we can stay connected to that Divine is just in remembrance. There’s no magic formula, unfortunately. It would be convenient if every time we forgot, we received this infusion of remembrance and awakening. But we don’t have that. What we have is just practice.
When you start meditating, you find that your mind wanders more than its still, and your meditation feels like a process of doing nothing but bringing your mind back. But then, slowly, the spaces in between having to bring the mind back lengthen, and the mind stays. You’re able to catch it faster and bring it back faster, and slowly you’re able to accumulate lots of consecutive moments of being there. This is what it’s like living within our True Self. It’s about remembrance, about coming back. A mantra is a great life raft to bring us back. Our breath is a great life raft to bring us back. They’re techniques to bring us out of where we’ve gone and back into who we are. And gradually, we keep living as that.
An integral aspect of staying connected is to remember not to berate ourselves, because in this consciousness and acceptance of the invitation to live with love and connection, it’s very important not to leave ourselves out of the equation. Many of us are very comfortable with connection, compassion, love, forgiveness and seeing the Divine in all as a practice, as long as it relates to everyone other than ourselves. It becomes very difficult when we have to turn it back inward. And ironically, we further berate ourselves for that: Oh my God, you are so stupid, look at that, you forgot to be compassionate again. Here I am, criticizing myself for not being compassionate to another. But where’s my compassion for myself? We have to remember that as we work on staying connected, it’s not just about being connected to God outside of us and in those around us, but about being connected to God within us. When we lose it, when we find ourselves disconnected, we have to have that same compassion, love, understanding and presence for our lowercase-s self that wandered off that we have for the world around us.