Where is God?

This is a very complex question, and everyone might have different opinions about it. I am sharing my perspective, you are free to challenge it and question it. Everyone will agree that it's a difficult subject to handle and I don't think I can cover it in one post but still, I am going to try. 

It is believed that God is omnipresent (present everywhere), omnipotent (unlimited power), omniscient (infinite knowledge), omnibenevolence (perfect goodness), and eternal. If it's true, then why do we look for that power in Temples, Mosques, Churches, or any other places?  

I remember a very interesting story that I want to share here, many thousands of years ago; it was believed that every person on this planet was a God. But humankind abused their powers (as usual), so God decided to take it all away. The problem was where to hide the godhead-the source of our talent, potential, glory, and power (our consciousness). The first adviser of God said, ‘Why don’t we dig a hole deep in the ground and hide the godhead in there?’ ‘No,’ replied God, ‘eventually someone will dig deep enough and find it.’ The second adviser said. ‘Why not put this power on the top of the highest mountain?’ Again God refused. ‘No, someone will eventually scale that mighty mountain and find it.’ Finally, the third adviser said, ‘How about hiding the godhead at the bottom of the world’s deepest ocean?’ God replied, ‘No, someone will dive down deep into the ocean and discover it.’ They thought about it a lot. After some serious thinking, they found the solution and decided to place this source of extraordinary power, magnificence, and glory inside the heart (or mind) of every man, woman, and child on the planet, because they’ll never think to look there. They were so right. We don’t even try to look inside ourselves but search all over the world for God. 

Every religion gives a different picture or description of God and gives different explanations about its powers and ways to please that power. If you read then you might get an impression that God is some superpower who wants you to praise him/her all the time and behave in a certain way to please him/her, and if you don't, there are dire consequences for that. This description satisfied the curiosity of the human mind for a long time but doesn't sound very logical in today's era. Why God be a slave slave-loving entity wanting his/her subjects to please him/her? If he/she created the world then how come we are evolving? Was original creation faulty that we are evolving? If the human species was born in God God-created world why have we modified it so much that we are staying today in a totally human-made world? There are many questions like this which pop up in my mind.

I thought about it a lot, after all, what is God? I think Consciousness in us is nothing but God, it's a personal thing. This power is part of every living being on this planet and universe. Consciousness is omnipresent like God; whatever we experience our consciousness is there, it’s eternal. Whatever we create is from our consciousness, its source of all our knowledge (omniscient), it lies behind all our understanding, without that we are nothing. We don’t realize this and think that God is some separate entity that is somewhere outside us and try to search for it in different places.

The individual in us wants to know God or wants to be in God's consciousness because we have an illusion that there is an individual in us that is separate from our consciousness. This illusion or confusion was created by many theories/religions that describe God differently. Consciousness and God are two names of the same thing. The irony is that we search for that power externally in all human-made places but not where it truly resides. Even if we consider God as some external entity and assume we are its creations Then, God should be vast like the ocean (just for the sake of comparison), and we are like waves of that endless ocean, without ocean waves don’t exist. Wave and ocean are different forms of the same thing, they don't exist without each other, and we also don't exist without our consciousness. When we realize our true nature, then we meet our God there and then itself (I call it Self-realization). Waves don’t have to go anywhere to meet the ocean, similarly, a person with pure consciousness doesn’t have to go anywhere to meet God as he/she is always with God.

There are two types of distances in any relationship one is physical distance and the other one is spiritual distance. Often people concentrate only on physical distance as it’s easy to measure and easy to feel, if you hold somebody’s hand then you are physically close to that person but that doesn’t mean you are spiritually connected with each other. At the same time, people living thousands of miles from each other can feel that they are with each other but it’s not the physical intimacy that makes them feel together, it is the spiritual intimacy. Once you have that spiritual intimacy then all physical boundaries don’t matter. By going to temples and churches or by having idols people are trying to reduce the physical distance from God, but that’s not the case physically we are always close to God as that entity resides within ourselves, we can realize it only when we realize the true nature of ourselves. So, think about how to reduce spiritual distance then you will realize that physical distance doesn't matter anymore.

We worry so much about our future meeting with God and what will happen after death that we waste our lives just worrying about it. If we search within ourselves then only we can find our God otherwise we may wander many places, read many texts, and hear people’s opinions about God, its existence, and what they think about it, but will never be able to experience it ourselves.

Thanks for reading and please share your views and questions.

Related Links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God

(Copyright: Vinay Thakur. Please contact the author for re-posting or publishing)