The moment we utter the word “divine”, most people will look up, because the divine is supposed to be up. But in human perception, there is no way to know which is up. You are sitting on a round planet and you are not on the North Pole, you are at a certain latitude. And the planet is spinning. If you look up, invariably you will look up in the wrong direction. Does someone know which is up or down in this cosmos? Is it marked somewhere?
In the very nature of things, you cannot know which is up and down. For convenience, in our daily lives, we may set one direction as up and another as down, but when we talk about the divine, if we talk about “up,” we will only multiply illusions within our minds.
What is this “divine” anyway? In Indian culture, we do not believe in a god somewhere. We learned the technologies of god-making. We created over 33 million gods and goddesses. These were tools to give you access to something beyond the limitations of your own senses. There are many incredible examples of this. One example you would definitely have heard of is Ramanujam, the mathematician.
Over a century ago, Ramanujam poured out Mathematics, a lot of which no one could decipher. It was only many decades after his work that people realised that some of these formulas were actually describing black holes—and they were written when there was no concept of black holes. People asked him, “Where are you getting this from?” He said it was from his Devi Namagiri, “It’s my Devi! Mathematics just flows out of me. I don’t know where it’s coming from.”
Every deity that we created is a tool to access a certain dimension of the cosmos. Looking at phenomenal aspects of nature, to empower ourselves to access each one of them, we created these tools. Do not underestimate the power of a tool. For example, let’s say I give you a plumbing job for three days. No spanners, wrench, nothing—but you can use your teeth and fingers. Three days later, when half your teeth are gone and your fingers are ripped apart, if I give you a spanner, you will worship the spanner. As human beings, it is only because we can use tools that we are the most dominant life on this planet right now.
Tools can either be objective or subjective in nature. We created subjective tools—energy forms with which we can have a very profound relationship. This culture has seen the phenomenal technology of making the entire geography of the land into a divine process.
The 54 Devisthalas, the Pancha Bhutasthalas, and the Jyotirlingas were an effort to consecrate the entire geography so that people can benefit from the process whether they know about it or not. But slowly, over a period of time, people think they just have to believe these things.
This is not about belief. With belief you will not know the true power of what it is. You do not have to believe all this; you must learn to access them. If you have access, there is tremendous benefit and limitless possibilities open up. Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic, a bestselling author and poet. He was conferred the Padma Vibhushan in 2017. Isha.sadhguru.org