Belief in God – 10.14.10

“Despite the fact that the lights can get very bright sometimes, and the darkness can get very dark in one’s life, reality is not black or white, and that’s one of the difficulties that people have in handling reality, they want things to be clear: this or that. And it’s not that way,” maintains Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. One striking example is the belief in God. On the one hand, someone who has an imaginarized belief in God as a person or entity is unlikely to drop that belief of God as Divine Object (or Subject) in favor of the realization of Emptiness. On the other hand, you have people in a very dense egoic consciousness who can’t believe in a spiritual reality of being, or a higher dimensional intelligence, or anything of the sort, at all—let alone God. “And I’ve worked with many people over the years who can’t, although they say they don’t, they actually can’t. And when you analyze more deeply what the issue is, you find out that not only can’t the person believe in God, but the person cannot believe in love. And that’s really the issue.”

And at the center of one’s self is a sense of lack of love that he or she has repressed. So one will try to project love outwards and implement various strategies to allay this sense of lack by seeking love in an external form. But, alas, this is a fruitless feat of exhaustion as love does not exist outside of one’s Self, and all this aversion to confronting the sense of lack within one’s self will keep one on the constant treadmill of fear and desire. “And so, we’re in a time in which there is an eclipse, and an exile, from the real of love—and the real of everything that God symbolizes ‘out there,’ but that we cannot find ‘in here,’ and we must learn to integrate it by finding it within.”

So one needs to establish a point of reference, in which to be able to realize the real of love, that is not outside of oneself in the world, or within the narcissistic, fragmented ego. And, “this third point, that has to be at right angles to both the world and the ego, has been traditionally referred to as ‘God.’ But what we mean by that is a higher level of being than the ego represents; It is the supreme level of being.” And it doesn’t matter if the signifier “God” is anathema to one because “it is that level of consciousness that’s not localizable as a person in an organism; it’s not in time or space.” And until one reaches that point of reference, “which is the Heart, Sri Ramana used to call it the Heart, you are in a state of a search that cannot be understood; it’s a nameless search. But it’s a search for the Self. And everyone’s in the search for the Self, even though they don’t know it, until they have found this point of the Heart. And that’s what we’re doing in meditation.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 14, 2010.