Burst Thirty Two (For the Young):
The God Factor
Someone wrote on the blackboard, “God is nowhere.” Another wrote a long vertical line in the middle of the word ‘nowhere’ so now it read, “God is now here.”
Play of words, exercises of logic and somersaults of conceptual or even creative thinking cannot help in understanding God, the ultimate mystery of our existence. God is beyond the mind’s ken. The one who seeks to know God should know, “God is where I am not.” Any seeking covers God and the cessation of seeking reveals God as the one who was always present.
There is order in this universe on the levels of the microcosm and the macrocosm. Atoms have their amazing arrangement and galaxies have their awesome organization. Nature’s laws govern all phenomena. Man’s discovery of those laws, of course, is an endless journey where the horizon goes on extending further and further. In our quiet, contemplative moments, we realize how magnificent this creation is. Einstein remarked, “How everything is comprehensible in this universe is most incomprehensible.”
God is the truth behind this order, these laws and this magnificence. He/she/it is that which words cannot describe. Thanks to God, words describe infinite number of things.
The state of no conflict, of complete harmony, of unconditional love is God. Appreciation of beauty where you forget yourself gives you a glimpse of God. When you work in such a way that you neither feel pressure nor laziness, you are in a state of ‘flow,’ God is smiling away. Such charity where you do not know you are giving brings God within the reach of your experience.
When you are conscious of your image, feeling either proud or inferior, your thinking introduces a division that hides the vision of God. Both the man who thinks he is a sinner and the man who thinks he is a saint miss God for such thoughts separate oneself from the reality.
No wonder a wise man remarked, “God defined is God defiled.” In the silence of utter humility, and not of stupidity, one has no stance or position and lo, God alone then is.
Swami Chidananda
October 21, 2004