My relationship with God

"Does God exist?". Someone recently started a discussion this 'Times Of India' site called www.speakingree.in

Just reading the question angered me and amused me. In this quest of God and his existence, a common man became Buddha, years of hunger and meditation, people became mystics and took upto the Himalayas never to come back again. Someone out there hopes to find God/ ascertain his existence by an internet discussion!!!!! It is a silly question and deserves not to be talked about. It is like asking me, does your mother exist? How could I have possibly come into this world without my mother giving birth to me. How can mankind/all beings on this earth take birth and come into existence without our supreme mother/father-God.

More important than discussing "Does god exist?", it is important to introspect and ask yourself. "What does god mean to me?". And the answer lies in that. Each of our experience of god varies. It is as unique as a finger print. Just as no 2 human beings carry the same design of a finger print, so is the case with our belief of god. If I believe in God truly and devoutly, than it just does not matter to me whether rest of the world does or not. From my belief perspective this discussion is not worth of an involvement. Now coming to the question of his existence, if someone (who does not believe in God/or a divine power beyond human comprehension) can answer my few simple questions, I too will agree and start believing that god does not exist.

1) How and when was the universe created?
2) What is the dimension of this universe? You know the length, depth etc.
3) How many celestial bodies are there in the universe?
4) How do these celestial bodies (which are actually huge and weigh many many trillions of tons) remain freely suspended in the universal vacuum or space as we call it?

If someone can answer all these questions for me, I salute his/belief and agree there is no god and all this is just plain western science.

But if no one on this earth can answer my questions, than kindly retract the question. GOD IS THE SUPREME POWER/AUTHORITY/Beyond our limited human acquired knowledge. You man choose to call this authority by any name/gender/ alpha/beta.It does not matter! Don't debate his existence and ruin your chances of finding true divine happiness. Believe and let him guide you towards him.

God is my silent friend and well wisher. I speak to him about everything that is there inside me, I seek his guidance when I am at crossroads in life, I ask him for his for help when everything else fails, I ask him for his love and solace when unhappy and sad and so much more. My relationship with God is very special and unique. It defines me the person.

Further, people often engage God and his existence in trivia. My sorrow, my karma, my happiness or sadness, my plight or success...and as a result start thinking of/ about God in a human context, at a human scale and in the known human dimensions.

Only a soul in the dark, unawakened can ask this question, "Does God exist?". For the light of God has not yet touched his soul. In a dark room, when we light a candle, initially nothing is visible. But as the light increases all the objects become clearer. The light is self knowledge and awareness is required for God to be visible.

Living in the present.

It is sad to see that our approach towards life is becoming so tactical. We live from one day to another day. Forget thinking about doing good work, earning good karma for the betterment of next birth/life. We don't want to spend time thinking about this life! It's all right here, right now approach.

Life is about living in the present moment. Because there is nothing else to life other than the present. The spiritual context of living life in the present means, drop all your karma at this minute and move on. I had attended a corporate workshop conducted by the Isha Yoga Foundation (Coimbatore, India) few years back. Our spiritual teacher taught us that the only way to happiness is to live in the present moment and drop all your karma at this moment and move on.

But what do we do instead? We carry this baggage of karma with us all our life. And like the bag that Santa Claus carries with him, we keep filling the bag with life's experiences!!! The good and the bad. Happy moments and sad moments. Love, hatred, likes, dislikes, attachments, anger, and many more mixed bag of thoughts, memories and feelings. With passing age, the bag only but becomes heavy. And we carry this weight with us. Remember, had we dropped all the little and big karma on the way and moved on, life would have been so light. So carefree. So happy. Living in the present means moving on without the karma.

Coming back to where I started from, the definition of living in the present has taken a dangerous meaning today. For most, living in the present means shrugging off their responsibility towards a better future. "Why should I worry about the future? I am not going to be here when the glaciers melt. I am living in the present. Let those who come in the future worry about their present."

It is right here, right now. This attitude is creating a recklessness in all of us. We have become careless about our actions and their consequences. Because, we may not live to see the consequences of our reckless actions. The future feels somewhere far away and distant. It is not the next second which has to come after the present moment has gone in the past. The glaciers will take a long time to melt, the last tiger will take a long time to disappear from the earth, it will be long time before humanity is wiped off from the surface of this earth. That is what everyone is thinking. There is 3 kinds of visible life on the earth and we have started a war against all of them, to DESTROY THEM!

Why else are we destroying nature by cutting forests and trees?
Why else are we destroying rare species of birds and animals?
Why else are we destroying humanity by planting bombs and killing each other so mercilessly?

Because we are all living in the present. Right here, right now. We know that the future of our planet is very bleak and scary. But who cares. We will not be here to see our planet gradually die away. Whose planet is it anyways?