The Future Inside

God can neither be said to exist or not to exist, and I was wondering how this was possible. Is it because we could not look for Him in any space or in any time specifically? If you go into matter, we should be able to find God, ultimately, somewhere.

Philosophically speaking, since even God requires some space to occupy, space should be considered prior to God. "Could we call space as God?" If Space is not God, where should we look for Him? The problem seems to be insolvable if we look out - outwards. When we look out and up at the stars, we are looking into the past, because the nearest star is about four and a half light years away. We actually don't see any star. We only see the light, which left that star four and a half years back. For all we know, it may not exist today at all. That is the fate of the nearest star. The farthest galaxies, their distances are measured in billions of light years. Even the sun, its light takes about nine minutes to reach us. So, at no point can we say with authority that the sun exists, because what we see now as the sun is what was, nine minutes ago.

So I came to this conclusion, that astronomy, geology, are not going to give us any indication of divinity, because they only give us ideas of the past, knowledge of the past. If everything we do to look for God in the material world is only showing us the past, how can we ever see the future? The only way of seeing the future is to look inwards into yourself. So every time we sit to meditate, we look into ourselves. The self is non-material therefore you cannot say it had an origin in the past. That is the only way of looking into the future; in another sense we can also say God is in the future for us, because we are still trying to achieve Him, looking inwards!

This seems to make some sort of sense which even a person with a scientific education, scientific orientation, should accept at least as being logical. Whichever way you look at it, anything in the material plane has to do with the past: you listen to a gramophone record, it is music of the past, something which was recorded in the past, the voice of the past you hear in the present. Buildings of the past, we see in the present. Fossils, life forms of the past, we see in the present.

Similarly, we may be subconsciously trained to see the past human being in the present. For instance, a man may have been a drunkard, a drug addict, diseased, and they leave their impressions on him, in his face, in his behavior, but the inner person may have changed drastically into something approaching even a saint. But you look at him and you say "This fellow is useless," but inside is a new person, which you cannot see. And we are rejecting a good person, looking at the impressions of the past on his face, in his visage, in his behavior. This is the difficulty of judging a human being. When we look into the heart, and there you find what the person is at this moment in time. Everything else can mislead, because they are merely impressions, and nothing else. So, studying a person's exterior can only be as rewarding as studying the fossils of the past, or the gramophone records of the past, or the glaciers of the past. It can only tell us what was, not what is.

Even to understand what is, now, we have to develop a spiritual vision. That is why it is so difficult to know what is happening around us in this world. And unfortunately, our educational systems, instead of teaching us this vital science or vital art, keep pushing us further and further back in time. Astronomy wants to go further into space, that is more back in time. Psychology make you go back into yourself. They claim, rightly or wrongly, that you can even have your own birth trauma experiences, and perhaps penetrate into the previous life too. Again, what is the use? It is only going to tell you what was, not what is. Same thing with paleontology and geology, what was there in this period of time, what was there a thousand years or thousand million years before that time. At best, all that they can achieve is to form some sort of a sequence leading from the past into the present.

How to change ourselves? Start from now as you are, where you are, and look into the future of yourself. Look into yourself, look into your heart; that is where your future is. So, you see the importance of the heart. Not only do we search for ourselves, we are searching for ourselves as we are going to be. So, in a sense, you can say we are looking at ourselves as we "shall be" when this process is complete. And if you look at your heart and you find hatred in it, that will be your future, unless you remove it. Now if you clean a fossil of the past, you do not remove anything, you only have a clean fossil, it is still very much dead. But if you look into your heart and you find hatred there, and you know that if you leave it there, your future is going to be one of hatred and nothing else. So, there is a need for cleaning. You look into your heart and you find wrong tendencies, you know what your future is, wrong tendencies, wrong actions, and wrong results.

And if you look in your heart and find God, that too is your future, that is what I am going to become. So, the spiritual science says, "Look into the heart, meditate on the light in the heart which is eternally present there, do the cleaning, so that all unnecessary things are removed, which too are only impressions of the past. Because a 'samskara' is only a fossilized impression which does not fossilize in material form but in the heart, in a different way. You can say they are fossil forms deposited by ourselves in our hearts by our own past thoughts and actions and in that sense they are thought forms, action forms, of the past - fossils. The real fossils, material fossils in the geologic strata, help us only to know the past. What was, when it was. These fossils in our heart, our samskaras, tell us what to remove and what shall be the future.

So there is this enormous difference of looking into the past and looking into the future, looking into the material universe and looking into the inner universe of the heart. Therefore, when we find hatred, viciousness, corruption, disease forms, we know these are things which are going to govern our future, unless they are taken out. Spirituality is the science of wonder, science is the science of curiosity and wonder leads us forwards.

Taken and modified from a speech by Shri P. Rajagopalachari, President of Shri Ram Chandra Mission. Published in "Heart to Heart Vol. 2, pg 83-89". For more information of the mission and Sahaj Marg system of Raja Yoga meditation, please visit http://www.srcm.org/