29 April 2013 QA - 1

Dear Gurudev, can you tell us about God’s mother and father? And how many brothers and sisters does God have?
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar: My goodness! I will tell you who God’s mother and father are, if you tell me where a tennis ball begins.
My dear, you don’t call God something that is born or that dies. God is the Light, the Consciousness, which has no birth.

Three things in the universe are eternal.
One is the universe which has always been there. Second is the soul; the individual soul is eternal. Third, the Big Mind, or God, is always there, otherwise it won’t be called God.
If God was there only 2,000 years ago and it is not there now, then it is no God. Or if God is going to come in the future, it is no God. God is something which was there, is there, and will be there; that which is omnipresent. God is not a person. It is energy, it is the space.

In the Upanishads, there is a beautiful story.
A young boy of eight years asks his father, ‘Dad, what is God like?’
So, the father takes the boy by the hand outside the home, and he asks, ‘What was there in this place before the building was built?’
The boy said, ‘Empty space.’
The father asks, ‘And where does this building stand?’
The boy says, ‘In the space.’
‘And when the building is demolished, what will be here?’
The boy said, ‘Space'.
The father said, ‘So, space is something which is always there, right?’
The boy said, ‘Yes.’
The father said, ‘That is what God is like.’
God is like the space in which everything comes, in which everything stays, into which everything dissolves. That can never be destroyed. And it is always there. You have no escape. You cannot go away from God at all. Impossible!

The question then comes, ‘How can bad people be God, if God is all good? There are good people, and there are bad people, how can you call them all God?’
I want to give you another example, of a movie. How is a movie played?
It is played by a ray of light from behind the film, yes? Have you seen on the projector, how the reel is going on and there is light behind it? It is because of this light that the movie gets projected on the screen. So, it doesn’t matter what film it is, whether the hero comes or the villain comes, the light will be the same, isn’t it? The light is God, and the hero, villain, and whatever good or bad you see; all that is happening is just a phenomenon. It has nothing to do with the light. It is because of the light that you can even see them. Do you understand this?

So, if you really need to know what God and what nature is, you need to be a scientist. If you are a physicist, you can understand. If you understand Quantum Physics, you can understand spirituality, you can understand God better.

Now, if God is everywhere, is He here? Yes.
If God belongs to everyone, does He belong to you? Yes.
If God is everywhere, He is here also? He has always been there, so He is here now! He belongs to everybody, so He belongs to me.
He is the field of all possibilities; He is capable of everything, so He will fulfill whatever I need. If you know these four points, that is good enough. You don’t need anything else.

So what is it you need to remember?
God is omnipresent, so He is present here, now. He belongs to me, He is in me, and He is there to fulfill whatever I lack. That’s it!
In meditation, when the ‘I’ dissolves, knowledge dissolves. (Do you know whatever knowledge you are having is very limited? So, knowledge should dissolve. What happens in deep sleep? Knowledge dissolves.)
When knowledge dissolves, when the I consciousness dissolves, then what exists, only exists! That is what the real truth is, that is what Shiva is, and that is Bhairava.
Bhairava is where you become one with Shiva, with Shivoham, where I has dissolved, knowledge has dissolved, yet everything is there.
How do you get it? You can get it through passion, dispassion and compassion. Passion for sadhana, dispassion for everything else, and compassion towards yourself and others. Sometimes, we are compassionate to others and we are too hard on ourselves; that is also no good.