Best Way to Know God is to Know Your Inner-Self

When the headline proclaimed to offer “a new definition of ‘god’ that will change how you think about religion” on Elephant Journal’s homepage, I found myself immediately intrigued! It was a powerful statement, because for such a long time, I’ve found the idea of god, to be so complex and abstract that it has been difficult for me to put into words my stand in this. I was instantly drawn to the article and wanted to find out if the writer can indeed verbalise what ‘god’ stood for in modern context.

To put it succinctly, the writer defined god as “the guiding principle of our lives – the force that gives life meaning”, which would suggest that everyone’s god is different since we all have a different principle that’s valued above all else. To this writer, his ‘god’ is to “transform suffering into love” as it is what gives his life the most purpose.

But it was this statement that really etched in my mind – that “we can have a ‘god’ without religious dogma, but the replacement must be pretty damn good”.

It really started me thinking how important it is for ‘god’ to be anchored in history, authority and philosophy. Growing up as an incredibly timid child, full of self-doubt and uncertainty, I sought solace in religion and hoped to find a connection to ‘god’ just like the believers I met with each faith. I was a committed Buddhist early on and then a Christian convert for the next few years, but I just didn’t have the same, powerful, emotional link as the followers I met along the way. Despite of this, I didn’t identify as atheist or agnostic, and certainly acknowledge the presence of a godly existence. The struggle was to explain how I felt and my view on this.

It wasn’t until I started training to be a yoga teacher that I had to face up and really define what my beliefs in god are. In our training curriculum, we were required to get through several yogic texts and there were constant references to ‘god’ in the reading. To progress in my personal practice, I felt it was important that I understood what ‘god’ meant in yoga and what it meant to me, which ultimately led me to research further into the yogic definition of god.

Historically, the teachings of yoga were passed down from guru to disciple through word of mouth in Sanskrit, an extremely complex language where individual words would hold several meanings, ishvara, brahman and purusha are just some of the terms that imply god but what they represent are so much bigger and wider – god as a religious figure, as supreme consciousness, as omnipresence, as cosmic knowledge; yoga recognises god as all those things and more. So much more that it’s infinite and therefore beyond our ability to comprehend or to describe which makes it impossible to limit within our capability to understand.

Unlike religions I looked to in the past, there aren’t authoritative, divine figures in yoga, nor can it be represented in any form of matter. God is consciousness and is present in everything – life, living, the cosmic, the environment, the individual – it exists outside of and within us.

But the real revelation that emerges in yoga, is whether it’s even crucial or necessary to define what god is. This is best summed up in Chapter 13:12-30 of The Living Gita, that really, the best way to understand god is to experience it. Guru Sri Swami Satchiananda illustrates this point further through a fable about a drop of water that wants to fathom the sea and how deep it is. The drop cannot understand while it’s outside but knows instantly, the moment it jumps into the sea because it’s now one with the sea.

In yogic terms, we are already a part of god because we exist in its consciousness and its consciousness inside of us. God is like the spiritual teacher within and by tapping into our purest, innermost self, we sought to know ‘our god’. With all the efforts trying to define what ‘god’ is, perhaps it’s best left to the individual to become sensitive and experience what ‘god’ means to them. Instead, we should be focused on nurturing this quality and through yoga, not just the physical but the spiritual practices of meditation, focus and sense control, we can learn to cultivate this awareness; harmonise body, breath and mind with the inner consciousness to draw us closer to god and ultimately leads to a cosmic connection with the universe, which in turn, brings a sense of inner peace, tranquillity and bliss to the individual.

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