Everyone is a philosopher in the sense that everyone recognises the indistinct presence and beckoning of 'a something.' That something is felt as a presence by a faculty that is not the eyes nor the ears nor any other sense organ, but a superior principle present in everyone. That superior light is the faculty of supernormal recognition.
Existence, which is Consciousness, is of the character of Bliss. Why is it Bliss? Because all suffering and finitude, every difficulty and penury of any kind is the result of the finitude of one's nature. When one has become the infinite, all desires are fulfilled. The desires are not abolished or destroyed in the infinite, as people may imagine. All wishes are totally fulfilled in their reality.
If consciousness is infinite, outside it nothing can be, and this implies that externality is anomalous. No object can exist outside consciousness. Thus, what is called an object turns out to be a phase of consciousness. The Self, then, collides with the Self; the Atman comes in contact with the Atman.
The process of knowledge has led to a grand discovery that there is One Being in the Universe. From philosophy one turns to religion, and the human being manifests his aspiration in the basic urge to seek communion with that which is everywhere.
The deity, as far as anyone is concerned, is the highest possibility of mind or understanding in its grasp of the totality of the religious ideal. Thus, outside it nothing can be. The deity is not a person. It is a force; it is an urge; it is an impulse; it is a necessity; it is an aspiration. It is impossible to define, and that impossible Something is working in everyone. It is impossible to conceive it, because it is not confined to any particular individual's localised body or individuality.
The universality of God is the reason behind the need to implement a law of harmony among the individualities in the world. Law exists because God exists, and law is the way in which God's indivisible being manifests itself through space and time. It is the cementing factor in life, bringing together isolated forms into an integral whole.
God is transcendent, because He is above space and time. But He is also immanent, because the call of God, the presence of the Absolute, is reverberating through the medium of space and time. God is not merely outside man; He is also within.
The fact that one is aware that someone or something is in front of oneself, proves that God exists. This is because the awareness of the presence of an object by a subject is made possible by the functioning of a principle that operates beyond the limitations of the subject and the object.
When God is, man ceases to be. God is the Supreme Subject that contemplates Itself as the All.
There is no actual movement towards God, because existence and God are identical. How can you move towards existence, when you are included within it? Inasmuch as knowledge of the Purusha (the Supreme Being) does not mean movement physically or spatially towards it, it has to be regarded as an illumination rather than an acquisition. Knowledge of God is not a future event but an eternal fact of being.
The force exerted by the gravitational pull of the Universal is much more than any power that one can think of in this world. Not all the powers put together in the world can equal a jot of that Force. It is the Force that attracts the Universe towards itself.
Eternity working is unthinkable and inconceivable because, according to us, all working is temporal movement; but there is a kind of action which is Eternity becoming Self-conscious.
How can one attain the Universal except by accepting that it simply is? It was St. Augustine who said that it could only be called "That Which Is."
In the grandest stage of contemplation, the Universe is not anymore a field where one lives as part of the content. It becomes a part of one's nature, a part of one's very skin itself. In this exalted state, when one thinks, everything will begin to think, when one breathes, everything will start breathing.
As we advance in the path of devotion, the concept of God enlarges itself to encompass a Being that is like a vast individual pervading the whole universe as the creator, preserver and destroyer.
It is the infinitude of the Purusha that everyone is asking for, not the objects of the world. But, because infinitude is imperceptible and the world alone is perceptible, people run to that which is visible to the senses.
It is God's force or shakti which manifests itself as desire. Who can stand before it? The only way out for the spiritual seeker is to surrender himself to Him, and say, "O God, help me, I am helpless," and He will take care of the seeker.
If God is everywhere, He is also in everything. Therefore, we can take anything as a symbol of His omnipresence. That which is everything is also in every particular thing. If it is in every particular thing, anything is good enough for our concentration.
We love God for a purpose, which is connected with this world; social values, psychological and bodily values become the conditioning factors of even the idea of God-realisation. We seem to love God for the sake of people, for the sake of the world of Nature, for the sake of our egoistic satisfactions. We justify our own way of thinking in the name of philosophy, and we try to bring God Himself down to this world of our personal egoistic relationships and compel Him to answer to our needs that are psychological, empirical and relational.
There should be a harmony between our way of thinking today and the essential nature of the internal relationship of God, world and soul, as it is essentially.
The universal has to be implanted in the particular. God has to descend into the heart of man. The true God is inside us. Our own higher level wants us to rise up, to wake up and enter into it.
Our search for God has to be a function of our soul within, rather than an activity of the intellect or the empirical understanding.
What we are required to do is only to accept the Presence, ask for God, seek Him from the recesses of our being, and we shall find Him.
The Cosmic Reality beyond the elements can only be an object of direct realisation and experience, and it can never become a spatial-temporal object.
The movement of the soul towards God is not a covering of distance as on a road; it is rather an ascent from the lower degrees of conception and being to the higher ones.
You and I and everything imaginable put together do not make God, because these visible things are all shadows and unrealities in the end, and a multitude of unrealities does not go to constitute one reality.
What happens to all individuals when they reach ultimate Being? It can be compared to bees making honey. Honey includes the essences of various flowers, hundreds and hundreds of them that have been collected. The honey is an amalgam of all these essences, but in this body of the honey one cannot distinguish the essence of one flower from that of another flower. This is what happens to all people when they merge into pure Being.
We may say in a sense, the ocean is the self of the rivers towards which they go and get absorbed, which they become in the end. So is the case with all individuals that tend towards the ocean of the ultimate Being.
Though we cannot see a thing, it can exist. Because the salt is dissolved in water, it cannot be seen through the eyes. But through some other means-the organ of taste-we can discover it is there. Similar is the case with the Being that has entered into the substance of all this creation. In the same way as we cannot see the salt in water, we cannot see this Being in the particulars. But, by employing other means we can find out that this Being is in every particular.
Where one sees nothing except one's own Self, where one hears nothing except one's own Self, where one understands nothing except one's own Self, that is the Absolute.
As an intelligent person, you must appreciate even now that nobody really wants you in this world. None is your friend here. When everything goes, God comes; when something is there, He is a little far away.
Consciousness is aware of itself, and in being aware of itself, it is aware of all things, and to be aware of all things is to be aware of itself. (Tat tvam asi.)
