Finding the Living God of Love, Light, Truth, Beauty, Goodness, Kindness, Fullness and Bliss!

In sharing spiritual awareness with so many wonderful people over the last 35+ years since my own lucky, Grace-filled gift of suddenly one day realizing in my 16th year that we are literally made out of God’s Love and Light and Peace and Joy (an entirely unexpected event that instantly changed my life forever), I have time and time again noticed that a remarkably large segment of our population has a very negative sense of this powerful little word “God.”

In my many talks and classes over the last 25 years I have actually had some people ask me (usually in private) if it would be possible for me not to use this three-letter G-word, because “I really don’t like it,” or “it gives me the creeps.”

Early on, I realized that far, far too many people have beenreligiously abused in the name of “God,” and my use of the word God, interspersed with frequent reference to Spirit, Awareness, the Absolute, Divine Reality, Brahman, Tao, Buddha-nature, the Self, and so forth, is a red flag for these abused people. Indeed, the apparently innocuous word “God” actually triggers stress and emotional pain for them—in severe cases, a full-blown syndrome of PTSD or Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder.

This brings up the entire issue of communication itself: what we mean by a word is not necessarily what other people think or feel it means when they hear it.

The plain fact is that, in the name of “God,” multitudes of people have been disturbed, frightened and in more serious ways abused by well-meaning—let alone really abusive—parents, grandparents, older siblings, aunts, uncles, teachers, ministers, priests, nuns, televangelists, rabbis, mullahs, et al.

It can start innocently enough: a little child’s goldfish dies and s/he is told, “God took your little fish up to heaven.” When another pet or a grandparent or friend dies and the child is similarly told, “God ended their life here and took them away to be with Him up there in heaven,” the child begins to get the disturbing impression that “God” is the invisible bogeyman who suddenly and arbitrarily cheats us out of the precious company of our beloved kin and friends.

When terrible things happen locally or on the world-stage, a child eventually hears from religious-minded persons that this is “God’s will.” In the impressionable minds of young persons, “God’s will” usually soon takes on the quality of being an unpredictable, frightening, fickle force, a big “Somebody” or “Something” that feels adversarial, oppositional and destructive, rather than being Someone infinitely near and dear. With such conditioning, it’s not evident that God and I are teammates on the same side. On some level, the youngster sooner or later begins to think: “God’s interests and my interests are not aligned.”

It gets much more complicated and perverse: at a certain age, the young person in our western monotheistic culture starts hearing and being psychologically conditioned by the notion that God is watching you, meticulously and obsessively examining everything you do and think, “writing down black marks in His big heavenly book concerning your sins and demerits.” For this “God” is quite intent on eventually judging you to be a good person or a bad person, a person destined (even predestined!!) to go either to heaven or to hell after you die and pass into your “eternal reward.”

Some 20-30 million Americans alone have evidently bought into—and, alas, are now subjecting their hapless children to—the really barbaric and quite aberrant “rapture theology” of rightwing, rigid forms of evangelical Christianity. Based on that horrible mistake appended to the New Testament—the dementedly dualistic, even diabolical Book of Revelation or Apocalypse—rapture theology holds that our evidently not-so-“loving” but all-knowing, almighty, and quite vindictive Lord has created every soul already knowing that likely well over 80% or even 90% of them (for various reasons foreseen by God) won’t exclusively accept Jesus the Christ “as their personal Lord and Savior” in the prescribed way. And therefore all these souls not partisan enough to join in God’s exclusivist game are going to be damned to eternal hell.

No wonder that so many people reject their religious upbringing and God—and everything having to do with religion—and, from their felt-sense of emptiness, “act out” their deep disappointment, rage and/or ennui through sex, drugs and rock’n’roll partying. Or even worse forms of acting out.

I recall one night, as a little Catholic boy of about 9 years old, running downstairs from my bedroom into the arms of my loving parents who were watching TV in the family room. I was sobbing and crying, because there, in the darkness of my bedroom, rather than peacefully, contentedly falling asleep, I had been filled with horrific agitation, angst and fear over the not so unlikely prospect that one day I might commit a bad sin or two (or three, four or more!) and thereby be banished from God and heaven and all loved ones to burn in hell, forever and ever…. This thought was excruciating! Lying and squirming in my darkened bedroom, racked with emotional pain, I could tolerate only so much before in desperation I finally went running to my dear parents for some kind of relief. I don’t remember particularly what they said, but I think my caring mother responded to the effect that, if I had good intentions and tried my best, even if I failed, God and the saints (led by good ol’ all-forgiving Mother Mary) would still love me, save me from hell, and help me come into heaven. Whatever my mom and dad said, it sufficed to alleviate the existential fear so that I never had that overwhelming type of hellish “hell-dread” again.

Where exactly I had picked up such a disturbing notion of a wrathfully judging God and eternal hell in the first place, I don’t know. Perhaps it was from something on TV (e.g., one of those fire-and-brimstone preachers) that I might have heard while playing with my toy cars and trucks within earshot. Maybe it was something I heard in church or at school, though I was very fortunate to have been raised by the decidedly progressive Paulist priests in Westwood (West Los Angeles), and by the unexpectedly liberal Daughters of Mary and Joseph Catholic nuns who taught us at St. Paul the Apostle school right next-door to the church of the same name. Most of these nuns were recent arrivals from Ireland and one might expect them to be of the conservative type who beat disobedient children over the knuckles with their big wooden rulers. No—if anything, my buddies and I were much tougher on those darling nuns than they were on us, creating chronic disciplinary problems with our relentless joking, teasing and horsing around.

The bottom line for me is that I was very fortunate to be around people who lived their religion and spirituality in a relatively healthy manner. I don’t recall being subject to any “serial abuse” in the name of religion.

But listening to or reading about so many people over the decades who have experienced significant and even severe forms of religious abuse, threatened with eternal damnation by a judging, petty, punitive “God-the-father” critical parent run amok, I can easily see why many persons would like never ever to hear the word “God” again. A dear friend of mine, deeply spiritual in her own way, when reading through most of the books and articles in her collection has actually blackened out the word “God” with her marking-pen wherever she finds it. She just doesn’t like to see a word that, to her psyche from childhood, is a signifier loaded with pain.

Given that the term “God” can be so negatively-loaded for numerous people, at one point 20 years ago I briefly wondered if it might not be better to drop it altogether from my vocabulary. But in the next instant I realized that this would be a silly thing to do, forGod as a word and a notion is simply too widespread in our society and, for the majority of our population, still has an overall positive connotation and meaningful content.

Instead, over the years, as part of the multi-faceted “ministry” I’ve been graced and privileged to enjoy, in my conversations and classes I have opted to help heal participants of any negative connotations or content around this potent term God.

While in undergraduate study of psychology at UCSC and UCLA and then in graduate school at CIIS in San Francisco, I realized long ago how powerful the subconscious mind can be—and how easily the subconscious can be rendered full of “glitches” due to “bad programming.”

It is obvious that many, many people have been conditioned and programmed by an unwholesome, petty, threatening, punitive—in short, toxic notion of “God.” This unholy, bullying image of “God” sits in people’s subconscious mind, literally haunting anddisturbing them. Even atheists and agnostics who have long agoconsciously rejected and renounced the idea of God can still be affected subconsciously by an insidiously subtle, inner “God-program” deep within their psyche.

A disturbing, unsafe sense of God (or whatever you regard as the Source or Power behind our life and the manifestation of this universe) will almost invariably lead to feeling that our cosmic situation is disturbed and unsafe, and that we can’t trust the Source of the universe. How can we have faith in a Divine Being who, our subconscious mind intimates to us, is not faithful to our best interests and eternal well-being?

All such “bad religious programming” characterizing our deepest-rooted impression about the nature of God or the Universal Power or Fate is enervating. It is guaranteed to render us restless, fearful, unhappy, imbalanced human beings. We will feel “at odds” with life, the cosmos and its Source at the most basic level of our being.

Hence, we do well to investigate—through an inner psychological inventory—any unhealed, unwholesome, unholy notions of “God” floating around in our conscious, pre-conscious, or subconscious minds.

Furthermore, having uncovered such pseudo-God notions masquerading as the Real God within our hearts, we can inwardly, meditatively invoke the actual Infinite Divine Being (Absolute Spirit-Love-Light-Truth-Beauty-Goodness-Kindness-Fullness) to purely affirm this God-Self within every aspect of our being. In other words, we can let the Real God, the God before/beyond our dysfunctional human notions and projections about “God,” spontaneously blossom forth within our body-mind-soul-consciousness. We can let God, the authentic living God, be fully and truly God in us.

* * * * * * * * *

When I first began conducting these healing visualizations and “energetic attunements” concerning the idea and image or intuitive impression of God, I heard many testimonials on how this was so very helpful to people. Therefore, I began to include this type of healing session more and more with new and old groups of students.

Here, finally, I have written up this “God-clearing” exercise as something to explore whenever you wish to turn to it for inner Divine healing.

This exercise, I find, is very helpful for people not only of a devotional religious temperament but also for those who are involved in “nondual” or “mystical” spirituality and the path of formless, imageless self-inquiry into the real nature of the transpersonal Self. Such self-inquiry will not proceed very deeply if somewhere in the subconscious mind there is a lurking sense of arival power contaminating our being with toxic energy. To paraphrase and “heal” the old Biblical commandment: “I am the Lord your God-Self; you need not have any other ‘strange gods’ within you.”

Some of you may wish to record onto tape/CD a meditatively-soothing, reading of the following visualization, so that you can subsequently listen to it while in a more meditative state with eyes closed and body fully relaxed. Alternatively, you can have a gentle companion read this aloud to you from the computer screen while you sit nearby in a relaxed, inwardly focused state. And then you can both trade places—you read the text while your companion meditatively listens. (At some point in the not so distant future, I’ll try to upload a streaming-audio recording of the text for this exercise, so that you can listen to it by yourself as a guided healing meditation while sitting quietly and receptively.)

I call this experiential process: letting God be fully, truly God in your heart. Try it—you’ll like it!

* * * * * * * * * *

Meditation Exercise:
Healing Our Model of God

Letting God be fully, truly God in your heart

[Note: italicized words can be read with somewhat greater emphasis. Ellipses (…) indicate pauses for contemplative silence.]

* * * * * * * *

Alright. As we’re gathered here together, we can allow ourselves to become naturally and fully relaxed….

We can easily maintain a gentle, inward focus as, with each breath, rising and falling, breathing in and out, we allow ourselves tounwind and relax and open up more and more.

There’s no need to grasp or hold onto anything. We’re simplyallowing the breathing to happen and feeling the wonderful and interesting sensations and energies that arise and pass away, moment by moment… It’s so very easy to relax and let go and open up fully and completely….

Now: let us check to see or feel if there are any old, unneeded images or tensions in any part of us around the idea of “God.” When we hear the word “God,” is there any feeling of discomfort in any part of the heart or mind or body?…

If anything unpleasant arises, let us fully feel the sensation or the energy and then utterly let it go. Just like letting go the string on a helium balloon, we just let go any threatening images or toxic notions of God that might be cluttering our being, and they just fly away and disappear….

Completely letting go, we find ourselves feeling wonderfully clear and clean and fresh and new…. So much more present and vitaland alive….

Now: right here within our heart, emptied out of the old, unneeded images or feelings about the Divine One, we can allow the REAL GOD, the LIVING GOD of healing Love … and beautifully luminous Light… and clarifying Truth… and enchanting Beauty… and blissful Sweetness… and dazzling Goodness…—we can allow this glorious Divine One to affirm this Divine Love, Light and Truth, this Divine Beauty, Sweetness, and Goodness fully within us…. It feels so good to have this God of healing Love in us and around us.

Right now and right here we fully feel the wonderfully dear anddelightful Presence of the True God gently yet powerfully filling our heart to overflowing with all wonderful qualities and virtues… so that now we feel tremendously well and happy, majesticallypeaceful and content, and perfectly nurtured and loved. We feel filled up with so much power to love and serve and be helpful andcreative… God is expressing through us such a wonderful power, a blessed power that fills us up ever more completely so that we can receive and give so, so much…

Again: we can check to see if any aspect of our being, any part of our heart or corner of our mind is disturbed by any old falsemessages or unnecessary feelings about the human-projected “God”-idea lurking inside us….

And, again, we can this very instant allow the REAL GOD to powerfully and completely dissolve any such false notions about the Divine One, the Source or Power behind our life and world, so thathere and now the true God of pure, Self-shining Spirit and delightfully Divine Presence and Fullness and Goodness washes through and fills our being with only God….

…

“All is well, and all shall be well…” The true God of astonishingly beautiful LOVE and gloriously gorgeous LIGHT is radiantly shiningwithin every cell and fiber of our being, filling our body and mindand heart with so much wonderful healing and empoweringenergy….

…

Alright. You may slowly open your eyes …

… and see the One True God, Infinite, Vast and Formless,beautifully manifesting as everyone you see and meet!

© Copyright 2006 by Timothy Conway
www.Enlightened-Spirituality.org

Awaken, O God-Self!
(A message from Awareness to Itself)

Once upon a Timeless Now, in the Infinity of No-Space,
You emanated, for no reason other than pure Delight,
a fabulous dream-like universe of objects, a world of apparent “things.”
Having conjured some very interesting forms,
You thought (ha!) it might be rather entertaining to jump into Your dream,
and to seem to lose Yourself in it as one of the limited forms
—in this case, the human being You chronically think of as “myself.”

At any time You can awaken from the dream of “me” to realize that
You are not the body-mind persona, but are, in truth,
the Divine Dreamer, the Supreme Source of all,
the Absolute “No-thing” of Luminous Pure Spirit from which all “things” arise.
Divine Being is Your Truth.
You are This.

How do You awaken? Just notice:
You are already Awareness, not a “me” or a “thing.”
All sense of being “inside” a body or a mind drops away.
You float free as unbounded “no-body” and “no-mind”—Pure Awareness,
prior to and beyond intentional consciousness,
transcending all forms, yet immanently within all.
Body-mind spontaneously functions and lovingly serves all beings
according to Tao, the Divine Will, the Natural Way.
You are content, at peace, abandoning selfish fascination
for the various dream-objects (consciousness disguised).
All binding likes and dislikes that could have fixated attention have dissolved.




“Be still, and know that I am God.”
You remain as this pure, open I,
not narrowly identifying with “I am this” or “I am that.”
You abide here & now as simple, unbounded Infinity.

You are always already Free,
Pure Divine Spirit, Boundless Intelligent Space,
Absolute Being-Awareness-Bliss-Grace,
the Fullness and Ecstasy of Love.

Written by Timothy Conway
www.enlightened-spirituality.org

Question asked of Liz Cronkhite:

I get a lot of comfort from reading A Course in Miracles (ACIM) but I have to admit I have not had some of the spiritual experiences that others say they have. I feel guilty to say this, but I’m not sure I really believe everything I read and frankly I’m not always sure I believe in a God…

Liz’s answer:

First, I want to point out that the feeling of comfort that you have when you read A Course in Miracles is the Holy Spirit (Teacher of Truth) within you. So that is one spiritual experience that you do have. It’s important to recognize that you do feel the Holy Spirit when you read ACIM so that you can recognize the experience in other contexts as well.

There is never any reason to feel guilty for being honest. In fact, you cannot move forward without first acknowledging to yourself what you are truly experiencing. There are two lies that people commonly perpetrate against themselves on a spiritual path that are huge obstacles to peace. One is thinking that “belief” is all that is required. But “belief” is only a decision to intellectually accept something as true whether or not you have experienced it as true. It’s really a con that you play on yourself. You either experience God (Reality; True Being) as real or you do not. So “believing in” God means nothing. Experiencing God is the goal and leads to true peace.

The other lie that many perpetrate against themselves is blind “faith” in God. But you either trust God or you do not. Pretending to trust God when you do not really do so only increases your fear, stress, and guilt. Trust comes after many, many experiences of God because God is a wholly different experience from the one that you are used to in your identification with a limited body/self. You cannot force trust. You either feel it or you don’t.

Acknowledge your doubts to the Holy Spirit, even if you are not certain It exists. You have nothing to lose being open and willing to experience God. If God turns out not to exist then everything stays the same. You won’t gain anything, but you won’t lose anything, either. And if God turns out to be true then you gain Everything. Even after many experiences of God I often fell into doubt and I’d say, “I don’t know if You exist but I’m willing to experience You if You do.” More important than the words was a feeling of true openness. And always something occurred within me to show me that my True Being is beyond the limited experience of the self.

In time, after many undeniable experiences of God, you will not give power to the doubts. The ego (personal thought system) will never accept that God is real, but it speaks only for itself, never for you. You will know that God is real and release the ego.

Liz’s Blog, ACIM Mentor

There is only AWARENESS.

Sages have called this by many names—God, Pure Spirit, I AM THAT AM, Absolute Reality, the Nondual Self, Brahman/Atman, Being-Awareness-Bliss, Tao, Unborn Buddha-nature, Dharmakaya, Zen Mind, Clear Light, the One, and so on.

Awareness, while being entirely open, transcendent, formless, changeless, timeless, spaceless, and world-less, is also THIS which is right now looking, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting, thinking, intuiting. Awareness has also manifested ItSelf as all these sensible/perceptible objects—namely, the various sights, sounds, textures, smells, tastes, thoughts, memories, emotions, psychic impulses and other momentary arising-vanishing formations or phenomena.

Awareness is thus WHO YOU REALLY ARE and EVERYTHING EXPERIENCED, that is to say, Awareness is WHAT EVERYTHING ESSENTIALLY IS. The phenomenal universe of minds and bodies (99.9999999999% empty space at the subatomic level, according to physics) is the marvelous, mysterious “dream-play” of Divine Awareness. In other words, all worlds of form(on physical and subtle levels) are the expression of formless Awareness. All changing “things” are manifestations of the unchanging NO-THING (the transcendent Awareness-Spirit-God-Self) that YOU ARE.

You cannot know, perceive, find or grasp Awareness as an object of experience, since Awareness is fundamentally not an object. Rather, Awareness is the eternal Subject (one might even say: Awareness is THIS which subsumes and transcends the subject-object split). Therefore, YOU can only BE Awareness, abide as THIS Awareness, remain as THIS, flourish as THIS, shine as THIS, and freely function from THIS Awareness. You cannot touch or look at formless Awareness, just as a fingertip cannot touch itself or the eye cannot directly see itself. In short,though Awareness is not knowable or perceivable as an object, Awareness is quite live-able and be-able, because YOU ARE THIS AWARENESS.

Everyone is always actually coming from or functioning from pure Awareness. But not everyone is conscious of This. A kind of Divine sport, mischief or play (Sanskrit: lila) is rampant, wherein beings (who are, after all, the God-Self in disguise) appear to have forgotten their real nature. They masquerade in various forms of egotism, not living in/as Divine Love. They appear to be caught in various states of greed, aversion, shame, anger, frustration, fear, euphoria, boredom, confusion, despair, and so on.

How, then, does it “feel” to be awake to one’s real identity as Divine Awareness? Direct experience along with the testimony of sages reveals that Divine Awareness is most authentically and gloriously being lived when the following enlightenment factors are present:

• A sense of utter freedom and simplicity, akin to “zero-gravity.” Behavior is spontaneous, free-flowing, unstuck, unfixated. One is simply available and motivated only to love and serve all beings as OneSelf.

• No more being trapped in narrow, exclusive identifications with a petty “me” (“my” needs, roles, opinions, abilities, emotions, possessions, etc.).

• No more felt-sense of separation between a “me over here” and a “you/it/them out there.” Rather, there is the nondual intuition of profound oneness with all beings as their very Heart. One “loves thy neighbor as thySelf,” and his or her true Self is right HERE, zero-distance from “my” true Self. There is just this Omnipresent Open Divine Reality, the Self in Whom all beings live, move and have their being.

• No manipulative pulling or pushing of experience with heavy, binding likes-dislikes, attachments-aversions, greed, lust, anger, fear, disgust, hate, and so on. (Various emotions may arise from time to time, but are immediately or fairly quickly recognized and “seen off” as not being one’s real nature but merely passing Divine dream-expressions, and so are dissolved in Clear-Light Awareness.)

• Whatever happens in the manifest world of forms (the phenomenal field of unmanifest Awareness) is not resisted or denigrated, but loved and appreciated as the poignant, playful expression of Spirit. And, most paradoxically, there is a strong but spontaneous Divine motivation within this non-resistance and sense of inherent perfection to remedy injustices, right wrongs, heal traumas, and help improve conditions for all sentient beings and the commonweal. The Self of all selves is in profound nondual empathy with all selves, who are the poignant personal play of THIS Supra-personal One Awareness-Isness-Aliveness.

• One is quite content to just be, not driven by any restlessness or a sense of dilemma into the busy-ness of egocentric “having and doing.” One is deeply relaxed, living out of the peace of “deep sleep wakefulness” (as sages paradoxically call it), even in the midst of helpful actions.

• Genuine happiness prevails, not restless giddiness: a simple bliss, not dependent on circumstances or people for fulfillment. The essence here is being clear, not “getting high” through agitated euphoria or rushes of adrenaline.

• Though fallible aspects of the personality may still infrequently arise, their healing transformation happens lightly within an overall Taoist sense of “perfection perfecting itself perfectly.”

• One is in Love, radiant as Love, always dying into and reborn as Love in each timeless moment…. Love for and as the Self of all selves.

If there is somehow the feeling that “you” aren’t authentically living from True Nature, the Real Identity or Spiritual Awareness, there is nothing “you” as an ego-sense can really “do.” Spiritual realization occurs spontaneously via the Grace of Awareness, not as the result of causative ego-efforts.

Yet being in the presence of true sages is a big help. Enlightenment communicates itself—not as a dualistic “transmission” but as a profound type of “resonance” within the Self-same Self.

Sages have also given some classic counsel on ways for the ego-sense to subside, for the personal consciousness to open up to the clarity and emptiness-fullness of Supra-personal Consciousness. That is to say, for the spontaneous full awakening to THIS REALITY which is “always already the case”:

Just BE—and no need to get restless or make a big deal out of just being. Just deeply relax andlet go of all sense of being a thing-like “me.” Let selfish self dissolve (“die”) into Being. Detach and abide as the undisturbed Witness from all sensations, thoughts, memories, emotions, self-images, and whatever else may be fixating you. (Whenever formations arise in consciousness, there is just watching and letting go of them, moment by moment…) Empty out. Dwell as no-body, no-mind, no-thing. Remain as the pure Absence which manifests “the Presence” of consciousness, energy, experience, relationship, totality. Be quite simple and uncomplicated, without struggle or striving or posturing. Come from natural depth, not the surface mind, though in fact YOU, the real YOU, are the totality of surface and depth, inside and outside, everything and No-thing.

Remember that there is no need to become pure Awareness—YOU already are THIS in your original truth. Let body-mind function spontaneously, freely and lovingly according to the Divine Will, and simply stay or abide as what YOU always fun-damentally are: the vast, spacious, seamless, unlimited, radiant expanse of Clear Light-Awareness. Know that, amidst all the changing aspects of your world, YOU are the Changeless One that has been and will be unchangingly HERE throughout “your” lifetimes. Underlying all perceptible forms and persons, YOU are the formless Awareness that is miraculously “dreaming” these forms and persons. This Awareness is complete and unimprovable—the pristine openness/emptiness/fullness of Divinity.

Moreover, this Divine Self of Absolute Awareness, YOUR real identity, is not “in the world.” No, the world is in YOU, it floats in Awareness like an amazing dream. The world is the mysterious, poignant expression of this creative Awareness, which is eternally savoring all kinds of experiences of ItSelf while being utterly free of all experience.

Beyond/before/during all forms and experiences, AWARENESS ALONE IS … right HERE (closer than the body-mind-ego), the Groundless Ground of All, the Only Being, the Pure Experiencing of all experiences.

May all be awake as this Absolute Being, this Divine Love, this incomparable Bliss, this perfect Freedom.

The real Truth is that all are already AWAKE as this ONE REALITY.

© Copyright 1990 by Timothy Conway, Ph.D.
Posted with Permission from Enlightened Spirituality

Questioner: How, sir, may I fix my mind on God?

Sri Ramakrishna: Repeat God’s name and sing His glories, and now and then visit God’s devotees and holy men. The mind cannot dwell on God if it is immersed day and night in worldliness, in worldly duties and responsibilities; it is most necessary to go into solitude now and then and think of God. To fix the mind on God is very difficult, in the beginning, unless one practices meditation in solitude. When a tree is young it should be fenced all around; otherwise it may be destroyed by cattle.

There are three ways of meditating: think of God while doing your duties, or meditate on Him in a secluded corner of your house, or meditate on Him in a wood. And you should always discriminate between the Real and the unreal: God alone is real, the Eternal Substance; all else is unreal, that is, impermanent. By discriminating thus, one should shake off impermanent objects from the mind.

Questioner: How ought we to live in the world?

Sri Ramakrishna: Do all your duties, but keep your mind on God. Live with all — with wife and children, father and mother — and serve them. Treat them as if they were very dear to you, but know in your heart of hearts that they do not belong to you.

A maidservant in the house of a rich man performs all the household duties, but her thoughts are fixed on her own home in her native village. She brings up her master’s children as if they were her own. She even speaks of them as “my Rama” or “my Hari.” But in her own mind she knows very well that they do not belong to her at all.

The tortoise moves about in the water. But can you guess where her thoughts are? There on the bank, where her eggs are lying. Do all your duties in the world, but keep your mind on God.

If you enter the world without first cultivating love for God, you will be entangled more and more. You will be overwhelmed with its danger, its grief, its sorrows. And the more you think of worldly things, the more you will be attached to them.

First rub your hands with oil and then break open the jack-fruit; otherwise they will be smeared with its sticky milk. First secure the oil of divine love and then set your hands to the duties of the world.

But one must go into solitude to attain this divine love. To get butter from milk you must let it set into curd in a secluded spot: if it is too much disturbed, milk won’t turn into curd. Next, you must put aside all other duties, sit in a quiet spot, and churn the curd. Only then do you get butter.

Further, by meditating on God in solitude the mind acquires knowledge, dispassion, and devotion. But the very same mind goes downward if it dwells in the world. In the world one only thinks of “worries” and “gold.”

The world is water and the mind, milk. If you pour milk into water they become one; you cannot find the pure milk any more. But turn the milk into curd and churn it into butter. Then, when that butter is placed in water, it will float. So, practice spiritual discipline in solitude and obtain the butter of knowledge and love. Even if you keep that butter in the water of the world the two will not mix. The butter will float.

Together with this you must practice discrimination. “Woman” and “gold” are impermanent. God is the only Eternal Substance. What does a man get with money? Food, clothes, and a dwelling-place — nothing more. You cannot realize God with its help. Therefore money can never be the goal of life. That is the process of discrimination. Do you understand?

Questioner: Yes, sir.

Sri Ramakrishna: Consider: What is there in money or in a beautiful body? Discriminate and you will find that even the body of the most beautiful woman consists of bones, flesh, fat and other disagreeable things. Why should a man give up God and direct his attention to such things? Why should he forget God for their sake?

Questioner: Is it possible to see God?

Sri Ramakrishna: Yes, certainly. Living in solitude now and then, repeating God’s name and singing His glories, and discriminating between the Real and the unreal — these are the means to employ to see Him.

Questioner: Under what conditions does one see God?

Sri Ramakrishna: Cry to the Lord with an intensely yearning heart and you will certainly see Him. People shed a whole jug of tears for wife and children. They swim in tears for money. But who weeps for God? Cry to Him with a real cry.

Longing is like the rosy dawn. After the dawn out comes the sun. Longing is followed by the vision of God.

God reveals Himself to a devotee who feels drawn to Him by the combined fore of these three attractions: the attraction of worldly possessions for the worldly man, the child’s attraction for its mother, and the husband’s attraction for the chaste wife. If one feels drawn to Him by the combined force of these three attractions, then one can attain Him.

The point is, to love God even as the mother loves her child, the chaste wife her husband, and the worldly man his wealth. Join together these three forces of love, these three powers of attraction, and direct them all to God. Then you will certainly see Him.

It is necessary to pray to Him with a longing heart. The kitten knows only how to call its mother, crying, “Mew, mew!” It remains satisfied wherever its mother puts it. And the mother cat puts the kitten sometimes in the kitchen, sometimes on the floor, and sometimes on the bed. When it suffers it cries only, “Mew, mew!” That’s all it knows. But as soon as the mother hears this cry, wherever she may be, she comes to the kitten.”

~ From The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna