How to know God – The Economic Times

Self-realisation means self-discovery in the highest sense of the term. One realises one’s oneness with God – consciously. Now you have studied books and people have also told you that He is in everybody. But you have not realised the Divine in your conscious life. When one is self-realised, one consciously knows what God is, what He looks like, what He wills.

Those who have not realised God will say, “He may be like this, He may be like that” – it is all mental speculation. But when one achieves self-realisation, one remains in God’s Consciousness and one speaks to Him face-to-face. He sees the Divine both in the finite and in the infinite, as personal and impersonal. In this case, it is not mental hallucination or imagination; it is direct reality.

Wherever we are, God is. In order to realise this supreme truth, we have to return what we have borrowed from the world: darkness, ignorance, bondage, limitation, imperfection and death. We borrowed these things because we felt that they would help us considerably, but now we have come to realise that they are real obstructions. So these things we must return, and the things that we eternally have in the inmost recesses of our being – peace, light, bliss, truth – we have to increase. The things that we eternally are, we have to claim and offer to the world at large. If we do this, we shall know who God is and where God is.