Understanding ‘God’

Photo Credit: The Mindful Word

Understanding ‘God’

The greatest misunderstanding is that God is a person, a supra-natural being, and it has prevailed for such a long time that it has become more or less a fact in the minds of people. When a lie is repeated continuously over centuries it is bound to appear as if it is a truth. The Sanatan Dharma does not subscribe to this concept, according to the sanatan dharma God is omniscient, omnipresent and exists in every being.

God is a presence, not a person. Hence all worshipping is meaningless. Prayerfulness is needed, not prayer. There is nobody to pray to; there is no possibility of any dialogue between you and God. Dialogue is possible only between two persons, and God is not a person but a presence – like beauty, like joy.

God simply means godliness. It is because of this fact that Buddha denied the existence of God. He wanted to emphasise that God is a quality, an experience – like love. You cannot talk to love; you can live it. You need not create temples of love, you need not make statues of love, and bowing down to those statues will be just nonsense. And that’s what has been happening in the churches, in the temples, in the mosques.

Man has lived under this impression of God as a person, giving result to two concepts. One is the so-called religious man, who thinks God is somewhere above in the sky and you have to praise him to persuade him to confer favours on you, to help you to fulfill your desires, to make your ambitions succeed, to give you the wealth of this world and of the other world. And this is sheer wastage of time and energy. And on the opposite pole the people who saw the stupidity of it all became atheists; they started denying the existence of God. They were right in a sense, but they were also wrong. They started denying not only the personality of God, they started to deny even the experience of God. Both these views are wrong.

God is the ultimate experience of silence, of beauty, of bliss, a state of inner celebration. Once you start looking at God as godliness there will be a radical change in your approach. Then prayer is no more valid; meditation becomes valid.

Buddha is far closer to the truth: you simply drop all chattering of the mind, you slip out of the mind like a snake slipping out of the old skin. You become profoundly silent. There is no question of any dialogue, no question of any monologue either. Words have disappeared from your consciousness. There is no desire for which favours have to be asked, no ambition to be fulfilled.

One is now and here. In that tranquillity, in that calmness, you become aware of a radiant quality to existence. Then the trees and the mountains and the rivers and the people are all surrounded with a subtle aura. They are all radiating life, and it is one life in different forms. The flowering of one existence in millions of forms, in millions of flowers.

This experience is God. And it is everybody’s birthright, because whether you know it or not you are already part of it. The only possibility is you may not recognise it or you may recognise it. The difference between the enlightened person and the unenlightened person is not of quality – they both are absolutely alike. There is only one small difference: that the enlightened person is aware; he recognises the ultimate pervading the whole, permeating the whole, vibrating, pulsating. He recognises the heartbeat of the universe. He recognises that the universe is not dead, it is alive. This aliveness is God!