What is the key to truly experiencing God?

Do you know that experiencing God means experiencing your own Self, because God is what we really are? The Pure Soul residing within our body is our real Self. And when we experience this Pure Soul, it means we have experienced God.

How do we experience the Pure Soul?

We said the Soul resides in our body. And our goal is to experience it.

But we can neither see the Soul nor can we feel it; our Soul is in absolute darkness. So how do we find it?

Who can guide us and get us to our destination?

We can definitely take the help of books, scriptures and spiritual literature to get a rough theoretical understanding of what the Soul is, what its properties are, how important it is to experience the Soul and what does this experience lead to. We can also read about the life-experiences of the enlightened beings, who have walked the path and have actually experienced the Soul, as this helps us draw a great amount of inspiration to keep our selves motivated to pursue our goal.

But can these mediums give us the actual experience of the Soul?

No, because an image of a lit candle can never remove the darkness within a room, only a lit candle can.

Similarly, only an enlightened person can enlighten our Soul.

Say we give a child a notebook, a pencil and a textbook to use. Now, will he be able to learn the alphabet on his own? No. He needs someone who can make him realize that this is A and this is B. Just as a small child needs a teacher to teach him the alphabet, we need a Self-Realized person to attain Self Realization. Such a person, who is an enlightened being himself, and can enlighten others as well, is a Gnani Purush. With the grace of such a realized person, we too can realize our Soul.

And this is the easiest way to attain Self Realization; the easiest way to experiencing God and feeling the presence of God.

The real Soul can be found only from a Gnani - the living Gnani!

All along, we have always believed ‘I am the body, I am the name.’ However, when the living Gnani bestows upon us the knowledge of the Self, we realize that “I am Pure Soul.” We realize that the Pure Soul is the real Self; and the body, the name, everything that we consider as our self, is actually the non-self.

And just as the goldsmith has the technical expertise to recognize and separate pure gold from other metals, the Gnani has the divine spiritual expertise to separate our Pure Soul from the non-self.

Step-less path for liberation, the elevator path means Akram Vignan:

1. The Gnani does this separation in just an hour, and makes us realize that ‘I am Pure Soul’ (Self Realization). With this awakening of the Soul, we begin to experience God.
2. After Self Realization, our mind, intellect, ego, our karmas continue to exist, but they now remain surrendered to the Gnani.
3. The Gnani gives us 5 cardinal principles, which when followed, makes us progress towards the absolute experience of God.

When we come under the shelter of the Gnani, things change.

Total surrender (aadhinta); and absolute humility (param vinay) towards the Gnani are needed. Total surrender means that we follow what the Gnani says, without letting our intellect get in the way. Absolute humility wherein there is sincerity and morality at a special, extra level, and there is oneness with the Gnani, there is no separation that is perceived with the Gnani.

Under the shelter and guidance of the living Gnani, our awareness of the nature of our Self increases and we progress on the path of salvation.

1. the inner weaknesses of anger, greed, pride and deceit gradually start reducing,
2. the ego and intellect keep waning off,
3. the mind, body and speech become more and more natural,
4. day after day, our experience of the Self keeps increasing.

And ultimately a stage presents itself where:

1. the ego and the intellect within have totally perished;
2. on the outside the mind, speech and body function naturally according to the unfolding karmas, and
3. our awakened Self gets free from all attachments and comes to the natural form of its blissful state.

This is when we are said to have experienced God completely.

When we realize our Self, we know by experience that we ourselves are God.

So, come to the living Gnani, the enlightened One, and with his divine grace, realize your Self and experience God!

To learn about a Self Realization Ceremony near you, click here.