Do you aspire for God Realization?

A talk by Swami Krishnananda

This article is from What is Enlightenment? magazine (vol. 4, no.2, 1995).

Do you aspire for God realization? What is your aim? Do you aspire for God realization? Do you want to enter into the bosom of the creator of the cosmos? What is it that you are thinking? What are you keeping in your mind? Suppose the Absolute calls you, saying, “Come on, I want you.” Will you go?

And will you leave this gentleman or this lady here who is with you? You don’t care for them, hmm? Or will you take them also?

The Absolute calls every atom of the universe. This is what you call evolution, as scientists would say. Every atom is moving in some direction. This is the evolutionary process. It is a call from the almighty supreme that the world has refused.

We are restless; nobody has peace of mind. This restlessness is caused by the finitude of the personality. You feel limited. You are limited physically, intellectually, emotionally, socially, politically, and finally your span of life is also limited. So there is nothing unlimited in this world.

But there is a longing from inside to break this limitation, to break the limitation of space and time itself. You do not like to be confined to a little space. You would like to conquer the whole of space. You want to go to the sun and the moon and the stars and beyond even the limits of space itself. And you would like to defy time by trying to be immortal. This is the urge for expansion in man, due to which he wrongly tries to grab things and become the emperor of the whole world. He would like to conquer everything and make it his own. Even space and time he won’t leave alone. That also must be his because space and time limit him.

Spatial delimitations cause a sense of location in our personality. You locate yourself someplace because of spatial delimitation. And you don’t live eternally because of temporal limitation. So the whole effort of man is to defy spatial limitation and temporal limitation. When you defy space and overcome it, you become infinite. When you defy time, you become immortal. So the whole search of the universe seems to be only to bring you over the brink of infinity and eternity, endless existence and infinite existence.

Existence should not be finite; it should be infinite. And not just for a few minutes; endlessly. Suppose you are the king of the whole world for one second. Would that be all right? Everybody wants to be king of the world, so okay, you are king of the whole world–but for only one second! Or suppose you could live for endless years, but like a pig–would you like that?

So what do you want? You want neither short life nor long life. What do you say? I will give you the longest life, but like a pig or a tree; or a short life like a king. Do you want a long life or a short life? See, actually you have some difficulty expressing your requirements.

What you really want is to have the longest duration of existence, endless permission to live, together with the greatest of intelligence, not like a tree or a stone or a pig. And the greatest of intelligence implies the highest power also. The greater the knowledge, the greater the power. So omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence is what you want. Here is the essence of the whole matter. You are searching finally for that peculiar, intriguing something called omnipresence, omniscience and omnipotence, which includes infinity and eternity. And when you get it, the mind cannot conceive what will be your destiny.

Suppose this state is at hand. Christ said, “The kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Suppose this little thing that I told you is immediately practicable; what will you do? You will burst into the substance of the cosmos and the bliss of it and the glory of it, the grandeur of it, the majesty of it, which no human mind can conceive.

Now, briefly, they say this is God. One word. It is impossible to describe what it means. It is a word connoting something which is indescribable and yet impossible to avoid. You are searching for that. In that you will never be cut off by the time process and you will not be limited to a little space. There will be all space and all time and all knowledge. This is attributed to what people generally call the Supreme Absolute. That Supreme Absolute is hearing what we are saying right now. We are not talking in a corner of which it has no knowledge. It has got all eyes. Everywhere are its eyes, everywhere its hands and feet, everywhere its legs, everywhere its everything. Our eyes are only in one place. Where the eyes are, the nose cannot be; where the nose is, the hands cannot be; where the hands are the legs cannot be; where the heart is the brain is not-and so on and so forth. This is limitation. That is not like that. Everywhere is its brain, everywhere its heart, everywhere its hands, everywhere its eyes, everywhere everything. It is all everywhere everything, at all times.

What do you call this condition? At all times everywhere everything. Can you contain this thought? If you can contain this you are a super-person, you are not a human being. And you will not be a human being after all. You are something different. The whole world will be reflected in you.

We can call this cosmic man, superman, divine incarnation, God-man–there are all sorts of names for this person. When he moves, when he walks on the road, he will feel the whole universe is moving with him. And it is not a joke.

There is a connection between a flower in the garden and the stars in heaven. Where are the stars? Where is your garden? Oh, what a wonder! Actually there is no distance between the stars and the place where we are sitting.

There is a universal electromagnetic force operating everywhere. An electromagnetic field has no distance. Everywhere it operates equally. The universe can be compared with an infinitely large electromagnetic field. And therefore there is no distance between the sun and us also. And it is a wonder, to think like that.

The power of the universe is vibrating through every cell of our bodies. But through egoism, self-assertiveness, pride, foolishness, idiocy–whatever you call it–we repel the entry of the cosmic force into us. We have closed the windows of our house, and therefore the breeze of the cosmos does not enter. We are very selfish. “I, I, I”–everything is “I” only. There is no “I” in this world speaking. There is only one “I”–a big, capital “I.” In that “I” all the little “I’s” are merged. And the ocean has all the drops.

Actually, the scriptures say there’s only one man in the universe. There are not many people. Only one person exists. In the words of the Rig-Veda, that one person is Mahapurusha, which means “Great View.” An intelligence pervades throughout your body. There is an intelligence pervading the entire cosmos. That is what you call God, actually. Of it, your intelligence is a little drop. The Supreme Intelligence pervading all things and the whole universe can be translated into the body of one person.

We’re an organism. So there is some sense in people saying, “God only is.” Many people say, “God only is; nothing else is.” What does this mean actually? This whole universe is animated by one consciousness in which you are also included because you are not outside the universe. What exists finally? Neither I, nor you, nor anybody. But everybody still is.

Millions of cells are operating in this body and many cells put together make one human being. But when I say, “Who is coming?” you don’t say, “Many bundles of cells are coming.” You don’t say that. So likewise the multitudes of the universe, the trees and mountains and rivers, the sun, moon, stars, galaxies, whatever you can think of, are only part and parcel of the limbs of this cosmic organism which is animated by a supreme intelligence. That alone is, that’s all. And nothing else can be, because everything is a part of the universal process. You cannot stand outside the cosmos. And that whole cosmic intelligence includes your intelligence, and your destiny is in its hands. And the more you love it, the more blessed you are. Here is the whole of religion, all philosophy, all bhakti [devotion], all yoga, or whatever you call it. Without using words like that, in simple language I told you what the truth of the matter is.

Your heart will throb by hearing all this.

God bless you.