We all pray to God. You may pray to Krishna, and I may pray to Shiva and somebody else may pray to Jesus. There are hundreds of Gods and dozens of religions. And we all go in search of our God, whether to a temple, church, monastery or gurdwara. But in reality, who is God, where is God, what is God? There is no doubt that a Creator exists. Just because some people are atheists and don’t believe in a God, and some others are agnostics, it doesn’t deny the presence of the existence of a Creator whom we call God.
Some people believe in the Big Bang theory, that everything came out of a chemical explosion, but then, who caused that explosion and how did a unique being like a human with 30 trillion cells, with an intelligent brain and a heart come into existence? Who created the sun, the moon, the stars, the birds, the animals and the flowers? There is no doubt that there is a Creator whom we call God. But who is this God?
Because we have grown up thinking that God is a man, a woman, we believe that God is made of bone and skin, God has a name, God has a form. We do not realise the truth that God is a Power. God is not Hindu or Christian. God doesn't belong to any religion. God is the Supreme Immortal Power. Nobody created God. God is birthless, God is deathless. God is beginning less and God is endless. God has no name. God does not live in a temple or a church. That’s why the scriptures say, ‘The kingdom of God is within,’ and ‘God lives in the temple of our heart.’ Although ancient scriptures tell us that God is a Power, we have been taught otherwise by our religion, our parents, and our teachers.
The end result is that we pray to a God in the form of a statue, an idol. As long as we do not realise the truth about God, we will continue to go round and round in circles. We cannot find God. God is the Supreme Immortal Power. That Power is in you and that Power is in me. We have to realise God and the only way to God-Realisation is through Self-Realisation. When we realise, ‘I am not the body, I am not the mind, I am the Divine Soul’, we realise that the Supreme Immortal Power is the Soul in one and all.
In the Upanishads, it is known as ‘Neti Neti, Tat Twam Asi’—Not this, not this, Thou Art That. When we realise who we are, then we realise that we are none other than the energy, the Supreme Divine Energy. We realise that God is a Power that is everywhere. Everything in this universe is a manifestation of God, whether it is a butterfly or a bee, a bird or a tree, everything that has a Soul is God. Science, through an experiment called the Wave-particle Duality, has discovered that the smallest particle of the human cell, the ‘quark’ is nothing but energy, transformed to matter.
When will we realise that everything in this world is a manifestation of God? Even every molecule of matter that constitutes the mountains, the oceans, the clouds and the skies is energy. Even science agrees that everything is energy. But science does not know that this is Divine energy. It is this energy that makes the heart beat within. God is everywhere, God is in everything. God is not God, God is SIP, the Supreme Immortal Power.
There is no place where God is not. God is Omnipresent (present everywhere), Omnipotent (a Power that can do anything) and Omniscient (the Power that knows everything). That Power, SIP, is in each one of us, within our heart. When will we realise that God is SIP—the Supreme Immortal Power? Everything in this world is a manifestation of the Divine. The Divine is the cause, we are just effects. The Divine is the one reality!
The author is a spiritual leader and the founder of AiR Institute of Realization and AiR Center of Enlightenment