Find God in the World all Around You

Modernity enriches man with such wealth, such progress that even the gods may be envious. But it also takes away beautiful qualities, which made man human…

In the past, when a villager met a passer-by, they would greet each other: “Ram Ram!” This sounds rather primitives to the modern man who has replaced this greeting of recognizing God in every human being with so-called sophisticated greetings of “good morning, good afternoon”. And these greetings are uttered so mechanically and without any meaning, while “Ram Ram” did have a lot of feeling. It signified that we recognized and appreciated the divinity in every human becoming we encountered in life.

There’s a Hasidic parable: A young man asked an old rabbi, “In the past, in the golden days, we have heard that people used to see God with their own eyes, people used to encounter God. God used to walk on earth. God used to call people by their names. God was very close to men. What has happened now? Why is God not so close? Why can we not see him directly? Why is he hiding? Where has he gone? Why has he forgotten earth? Why does he not hold the hands of people stumbling in darkness? He used to do that earlier.”

The old rabbi looked at the disciple and said, “My son, he is still there where he used to be, but man has forgotten how to stoop low enough to see him.”

Man has forgotten how to stoop. Man stands very haughtily, very proudly, very erect—separate from God. Man has become an island, no longer part of the universal, the whole. God is exactly where he used to be—he is still trying to hold your hand but you are not willing to let him. He is still confronting you but you look sideways. He is still there, calling you by your own name but you are full of your own noise, the inner talk, the continuous chattering….

Man has forgotten to stoop, to bow down. In the course of struggling for technological progress, man has forgotten even the language of the divine. He has all the wealth at his feet and all the comforts provided by technological advancement to make him feel that he is living in heaven. But does he really live in heaven? He is more miserable than earlier. Why?

Because he has become more egoistic, haughtier. He has forgotten to bow down to the divine in every being. Otherwise it is very easy to see God, feel God, encounter God. God throbs in the heartbeat of all humans, birds animals. He grows in the trees and plants. He flows in the waterfalls, rivers and oceans. He is spread over in the rainbows around dark clouds in the vast sky. He shines in the stars, sun and moon. One does not need to go to any temple to pray. One could sit anywhere in nature and bow down—look within and without.