• Table of Contents
  • Seeking God by Swami Veda Bharati
  • You Are the Architect of Your Life by Swami Rama
  • A Willful Event of Purification by Swami Ritavan Bharati
  • SRSG during Lock-down by Rabindra Sahu
  • Karuna – Compassion by Lalita Arya (Ammaji)
  • Choosing Tranquility by Randall Krause (Mokshadeva)
  • Concern for Humanity by Swami Nityamuktananda Saraswati
  • The Burden of I by Shirin Venkat
  • Dear Yoga Mentor, My Question Is
  • 2020 Events and Beyond
  • Full Moon Meditation Dates
  • Location of our SRSG ashram
• AHYMSIN Newsletter Archive

Seeking God

by Swami Veda

[This is an excerpt from God by Pandit Usharbudh Arya, 1979, Chapter "Seeking God," pages 3 - 5. Pandit Usharbudh Arya became Swami Veda Bharati, and the author of the book is sometimes listed as Swami Veda Bharati.]

The God of the atheist is one for whom the atheist does not know he is searching, though he is indeed searching. When you take to a bottle of alcohol, you are searching for God. When you are angry and frustrated, you are worshipping God. When you buy a Superman comic, you are looking for someone who is greater than you – which is God. When you go into a brooding silence alone to nurse your suffering and self-pity, there is something within you that is calling you to your God. When you go out looking for a dancing crowd in whose collective movement you can merge the movement of your body, you are looking for that collective spirit that is God. When you merge the sound of your flute into the entire orchestra around you, you are merging your individual consciousness into the total consciousness, the superconsciousness that is God. That is the God of the atheist who has not yet acknowledged his search for God.

There is the God of the agnostic who does not know if there is a God or not, but who acknowledges a search because he is searching for truth. And before you search for God, you search for the truth as to whether or not He exists. That too is a search for God.

There is the God of the man of intellect, the God of the theologian, of the philosopher who speaks in carefully selected words, in very clear terms which later on, when he becomes a man of devotion, he realizes were not really quite as clear as they seemed to him when he was a mere theologian or philosopher.

There is the God of the bhakta, the devotee. Someone very near and dear recently said to me, “If I feel sad and have an urge to cry, what should I do with it?” I replied, “Can you think of a saint in the history of mankind or of one great soul in the East or West, who fulfilled his aspiration, without crying vehemently before coming to any realization of God? A civilization or a family in which tears are suppressed is an enemy of God. If you have an urge to cry, let it become bhakti, an emotion directed to the sublime. Why cry before a man? Why cry to a pillow? When all your emotion becomes directed to the One being, it becomes bhakti – your joy, your suffering, your pain, your pleasure, your longing, your fulfillment.” The God of early Christianity is the God of the bhakta, the God of devotion directed to the One. Bhaktas understand God as their personal Someone.

Now we come to the view held by the Vedanta philosophy. Beyond the God of the atheist and of the agnostic, beyond the God of the man of knowledge and the man of devotion there is a transpersonal God – not an impersonal God, a transpersonal God. We must understand God the transpersonal, the transcendental. We must also understand God whose emanation is the universe – God the immanent. We must understand God as the collective (but more than the collective) consciousness of all the universe.

Every person has a feeling of unreality in relation to God. It is a very strange feeling. There is a part of our being that is always in search for something else; we ask ourselves if there will ever be a time when we are no longer searching, and we give up in hopeless despair, all of us, because we are always searching for something way, way over there.

In yoga the search ceases. The follower of the yoga path states no credo. Instead, he purifies his mind and sees the presence of God within. Of the three stages of prayer – stuti (praise), prarthana (petition), and upasana (the practice of the presence), his is the last stage. Whatever he says about God’s nature is from his personal experience of such a presence. “I have seen It. You can, too,” he says confidently.