Let’s stop seeking God, searching
for God, hoping, in vain, to find God, outside of us. Know that we won’t find
God there. Because the God we are looking for is within us__in you and in me.
There’s this parable of God calling his or
her council of advisors, after creating humankind, and conferring with them on
where God should be based, so that human beings may reach out in times of
distress and need. There was a pre-condition that God stipulated though. That
God must be within immediate reach and yet not so overtly visible. The first
wise advisor said, “God, you must be behind the farthest star. There humankind
will not find you.” “Not so,” said the second wise advisor, “One day human
beings will learn to fly and then they will find you God. Hide yourself God, I
say, on the floor of the sea and they will never find you.” “Not so,” said the
third wise advisor, “One day the people will learn to swim and they will swim
to the bottom of the ocean and then they will find you God. Rather, hide
yourself God in the everyday lives of the people. No one will immediately know
you are there. And yet, when they do need you, they can always find you within
them, among them.” And so, God did precisely this. God hid among the people.
This is not so much a parable as it is a truth.
But we don’t and won’t believe in this too easily. Because we have been fed an
overdose of evidence of God being an external source of energy and creation, of
God being an “outside presence” in our lives. We have been brought up to
believe that God must be feared. And so we fear an external retribution rather
than feel conscientiously the energy of all creation within us. God must not be
feared. God must be understood as being you, as your true Self. It was the
famous Polish-French physicist-chemist known for her pioneering work on
radioactivity, Marie Curie (1867 ~ 1934) who said, “Nothing in Life is to be
feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so
that we may fear less.” So it is true too about God. To know God, fear less and
understand more.
Kamal Haasan, renowned Indian actor and a
genius in thought and expression, captured his philosophy of the God in us, in
his beautiful 2003 movie ‘Anbe Sivam’
(meaning ‘Love is God’). In the movie, Kamal Haasan, tells co-actor Madhavan,
that the seed of compassion that intrinsically remains embedded in each of us,
gets activated when we feel compassionate towards any form of creation. That
sense of compassion, boundless love, which flows unhindered, even if it is for
a brief while, makes each of us godly! Say, when you feel for a hungry child on
the street, or when you say a silent prayer when an ambulance passes you by, or
when you read of a natural disaster or accident that has claimed several lives
in another part of the world and you feel the urge to reach out and help, these
are the times, when you experience your own godliness. If you pay attention to
it, if you give that feeling of compassion for another human being more energy,
it will stay with you longer. Which is, if you let
go of desires pertaining to yourself, and let your entire being relate to
serving another form of creation__even if it is immediately unconnected to
you__you will know, feel and find the God in you!
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