Where is God?
It's the greatest irony that God is hidden in the one place where we would never think to look.
We look everywhere, outside and inside.
Outside we look for signs, gurus, a hint, a whisper, a word, something. We go to churches, synagogues, mosques, satsangs. We even worship statues sometimes in our earnestness.
Inside we look to mantras, the breath, remembered phrases, exalted feelings, fragments of songs, peak experiences, concepts about the "truth," anything.
And though we console ourselves with these things, in our heart of hearts we know that God is not there.
We know that because we keep looking. Where is He? Where is She? Where is It?
We cannot find God in the places we're looking because God cannot ever be an object. It cannot ever be something that the mind can point to, either internally or externally.
Where is God then?
We can find a clue in Meister Eckhart's phrase, "The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me."
What he means by that is that we cannot ever see God as an object because It is always the subject. It is That which—in us—is looking.
The very awareness with which we are looking is what we are looking for.
Another clue can be found in the phrase of Papaji (H.W.L. Poonja), "Put your awareness on awareness itself."
Now the interesting thing is that we can't ever see awareness directly because our awareness can't ever be an object. Nevertheless we can become aware of it, though not directly.
It can be perceived in daily life, but it's a lot easier to perceive it at first if we sit down and let ourselves be enveloped in silence for awhile.
And as that silence deepens, we become more aware of that which is always in the background as we're looking hither and yonder for God, the very consciousness with which we're perceiving everything else.
And as we continue to "perceive" it indirectly by means of itself, we become more aware of a presence in the middle of it, beyond it, of it, as it—and here words break down. But see for yourself.
In deepening silence, that presence "grows," as it were, though of course it has always been there. Rather, our awareness of that awareness grows. And then it becomes easier gradually to stay conscious of it while we're focused on the various objects, internal and external, of the process of daily life.
And gradually we perceive that that ungraspable non-locatable non-object is not distinguishable from love, and that all the "objects" in the universe are actually constructed of, composed of, swimming in, non-separate from, a love that doesn't distinguish between one "thing" and another, between one person and another, or even between the "virtuous" and the "sinful."
Because how can it distinguish among itself?
—jim sloman 3/2/01
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