A seeker once came to a spiritual Master, eager to ask one burning question: “Who is God?”
The Master smilingly responded: “Who is not God?”
Throughout the history of human existence, nothing and no-one has been the subject of more speculation, discussion, dispute, reverence and antagonism, than God.
Is God personal or impersonal? One, two or many? With or without form? With or without attributes? Masculine, feminine, neither or both? Does God even exist?
How can we possibly know? And why should we care?
Swami Vivekananda concluded that the search for God was the only quest worth pursuing, so he traveled from place to place asking wise and learned people: “Have you seen God?” If the answer was “No”, he moved on. Only the mighty spiritual Master, Sri Ramakrishna, was able to reply: “Yes, I see God more clearly than I see you standing before me.” So he stayed with Sri Ramakrishna.
Whoever or whatever God is, one thing which all who speculate on God’s existence agree upon, is that God must be everywhere and in everything.
If God is indeed “omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient,” God must not only be all around us, but also within us. There can not be any part of our being which is not God. Mathematically speaking, our existence is a sub-set of God’s existence, our consciousness a portion of God’s consciousness.
The most obvious, and ultimately the only reliable place to seek God therefore, must be within ourselves – not through outer learning, but through direct inner experience.
This is meditation’s ultimate purpose and promise.
Anyone who claims: “I am God”, will likely be viewed as supremely egotistical or profoundly disturbed. Yet perhaps it is we who fail to declare: “I am God”, who are the truly ignorant and crazy ones.