It is the nearness of God to our own being that makes it impossible for us to rest and be in peace. And our asking for Him is resistless. If God has been a distant object, we would have taken time to think of Him. We would have told: ‘let us see tomorrow.’ But it is such a pressing necessity that we cannot leave it until tomorrow! It is nearer to you than your own throat, and you cannot say ‘tomorrow’ to it: It is so immediate, an urgent concern of life that your concern with it is first and your concern with anything else is afterwards.

But in this concern of ours with the Spirit of all things, we confuse it with objectivity, and we run after the objects rather than the Spirit behind it. While our asking is genuine, our running after things is foolish. The intention is good, but the activity is deluded. This is samsara, and the spiritual seeker has to exert his viveka-sakti, with a tremendous power of will to distinguish between the Spirit and the forms of life. The forms tempt us because we are wedded to a sensory way of thinking. Unfortunately, we are born into a world of sense, which knows only how to look outward and not inward. The senses cannot see their own cause, they can only see what is external to them, in space and in time.

When the mind subsides into its own bottom, and ceases from this running through space and time, and settles down to itself, like troubled water that is allowed to settle down, then the dirt that is part of its activity will also settle down and it will become capable of reflecting what is behind it. It is as if we are so busy with things that we do not know that we have eyes. We are so engaged with seeing things that we do not know that we have eyes! What is this seeing that you are engaged in? If you have no eyes, how can you see? But can any, one see his eyes and think that he has eyes? Unless, perhaps, you have some pain in the eyes, do you ever imagine that you have a set of eyes? You are so busy with seeing through the eyes that you get no time to think that you have the eyes. You want to exploit them fully. So is God, so is Spirit! It is through the Spirit that you do all that you are doing; it is through It that everything is seen and heard and done and, therefore, it cannot be seen and heard.

It is difficult to give a comparison of what Spirit is. Just as, without eyes, we do not see, and yet in the act of seeing we do not stop to think that we have eyes, without the Spirit behind, we cannot see anything, or even exist at all. Just as we cannot see our own back, we cannot see God’s existence. There are no eyes which can look at the back. The eyes that are projected in one direction only cannot look at that which is behind them. The Spirit or the God of the Universe is so near that to see It would not take the split of a second. But you have to open your eyes to It and not look beyond It or away from It. The eyes which see in one direction have to be taught not to see in any particular direction of space but to see what is behind them, the cause that is transcendent to them. There is a light that passes through the eyes, and the eyes get so identified with the rays of light that they cannot know that it is behind them, as it happens when sunlight falls on a mirror, which reflects the objects in front of it. The mind and the senses receive the light of the Self, the Spirit, and with the help of that light they behold the objects of the world. Yet, they do not know that there is this light. When you look at an object in daylight, you know that the object is different from the light. You see the object because of the light that is shed on the object. You see the object there because of the light, and yet you cannot make a distinction between the object and the light. The light so shines upon the object, is identified with the object in such a way, that you confuse between the object and the light and no one ever says that the light-aspect is different from the object.

So are our perceptions of things. The light of the Atman, the Spirit, is what acts upon the objects of the world and makes us feel their presence. The intelligibility of anything is due to the light of the Self that emanates through the mind and the senses. But we mix up that light with the objectivity of what we see; and just as we do not make a distinction between sunlight and the object upon which it shines, so also we do not make a distinction between the world and the light due to which we are able to cognise it. To extract this light from objectivity, to differentiate the Spirit from the letter or the externality of perception, would be to understand the essence behind the chaff.

When you try to understand things in terms of the Spirit, you will realise that all things assume a uniform meaning, even as the sunlight is equal to all objects. The sunlight makes no distinction—‘I am shining on a temple,’ or ‘I am shining on a latrine.’ The sun will shine upon anything. Likewise is the Spirit behind things. The distinction that we make is due to an incapacity to distinguish between light and shade. But when we start thinking in terms of this generality behind objects, we will realise that objects themselves assume a uniformity of structure and meaning, and our liking or not liking a particular thing or a set of things gets diminished in intensity; we begin to enter into the Spirit of things. It is then that we realise the meaning of objects and life as a whole. And in this realisation of the kinship of our own Spirit with the objects outside, we become so enlarged in our consciousness that the only test for this enlargement is our experience of an intense satisfaction within us.

How do you know that your consciousness has expanded? When consciousness expands, the sense of freedom also gets expanded, and simultaneously your joy is enhanced. The wider is the ken of the activity of Spirit, the deeper is the sense of freedom in your life, and the more intense is the joy that you experience. How do you know that you are growing in spirituality? The test is only in terms of the freedom that you feel within, freedom from the shackles of other objective existences and a lone joy that you feel in your heart. That can only be the test of your progress in your spiritual life. When you are absolutely alone, when there are no things to contact you, no persons to see you, when you are in the solitude of your own room, if your happiness is the most intense, that would perhaps indicate your progress along the spiritual path, your inner growth. But on the other hand, if your joy seems to enhance only by contacts, by seeing people and persons, if your joy expands the more you run about, the more you see things, the more you go about here and there, that will not be the indication of your growth in the spiritual field.

The more you are alone, the more are you near to your Spirit. This loneness of your life promises you greater satisfaction than all the contacts that you can make in your social life. The Spirit does not come in contact with anything, and its joy cannot be enhanced by contacts; on the other hand, all contacts are a restriction on its expression. Joys of the Spirit get diminished by sensory contacts; that is why we are unhappy in this world. We think that we are: going to become more happy through contact by the senses; no; we are going to become more wretched, because we are restricting the expression of the Spirit by contact with things. The Spirit is universal; do you want to tie it down to particulars? But all our attempt to come in contact with persons and things is the attempt at tying the Universal to the particular, which the Spirit would resent vehemently.

So, all people in the world are unhappy for obvious reasons. The reason is that they would like to bottle the Universal Spirit in the small objects of the world. The retreat into the Spirit is the withdrawal into the All-pervading Universal. The Spirit of life is the Universal present in all the objects of the world. This is what they call God. This is the Supreme Absolute behind things; and when we tread the path of the Spirit, therefore, we have to be cautious in seeing that we are not treading the path of the senses, while for all outward purposes it may look that we are moving towards the Spirit. Public acclamation is not the test of progress. The whole world may proclaim you as the saviour of mankind—that would not be the test of your progress. People would not have understood you and they might be holding erroneous notions. There again is a contact that you take as a test of your achievements.

Contacts may be physical or psychic. All these are to be avoided in the search for the Spirit. As a matter of fact, psychological contacts are more dangerous than physical contacts. The mind it is that works havoc. The mind thinking a sense-object is more vicious than a physical contact of body with body. If the mind is not working, the physical contact means nothing. So, all psychic contacts with objects should be withdrawn, and in this withdrawal of the senses and the mind, if you can feel a release of all your tensions, if, in going to the bottom of your own being in the solitude of your life, you can feel a freedom and a happiness which the world knows not, then you are really living a spiritual life. If nobody sees you, and you are happy, then that would be the test of your spirituality. And if you feel like fish out of water, because nobody sees you, then that would be the contrary of it.

Because the Spirit is alone, it wants nobody, and it wants nobody’s help in this world. It is so complete and full that you cannot add a cubit to its stature by multiplying the existence of the objects before it. The whole universe, before it, is zero. As, in arithmetic, you have a figure before a series of zeros, all zeros mean nothing without the figure preceding them, the figure here is the Spirit. It may be One, but if this figure One is absent, there are only zeros!

That would be this world without the Spirit. And that would also be the meaning that you assume in your life if you enter into the Spirit. So, let no spiritual seeker be despondent in his moods by the wrong notion that when he stands alone befriending the Spirit, he is perhaps losing the joys of the world. Not so. The joys of the world are again the joys of the Spirit scattered in a distorted manner. A little of the honey of the Spirit is sprinkled over the objects of sense, and then it is that we are trying to lick the objects. Even the objects look tasty because of the Spirit sprinkled there; but for that there would be nothing worthwhile in the objects—they would be corpses. When you stand alone by the Spirit, you stand by the Absolute, That which is universally present in all things, That which is the meaning behind the very objects after which you are running. You can imagine what God is, what Spirit is, and how reasonable it is that you should be happy when you are alone! This aloneness is not a physical aloneness, like one’s being in a jungle. It is the loneness of consciousness, where it can contemplate itself alone, independent of all things; and this would be true spiritual independence. It is towards this end that the seeker tends his mind and bends his efforts in yoga.