Let all your Thoughts Revolve around the Divine

What keeps you away from the Divine? All the thoughts, feelings and experiences that are not related to the Divine. As long as you exist as an individual there are two things: God, and that which is not God. And what is it that keeps you from the experience of the Divine? Your obsessed occupation with that which is not God.

Whenever your consciousness does not rest in God, but is occupied with all kinds of other things and cultivates all kinds of desires, then you are cut off from the Divine, then you are only human.

Remember this central factor. God is present everywhere - more real than the walls that surround you, more real than the light you see, more real than your body, more real than your breath, infinitely more real than the person next to you with whom you are absorbed in talk. But as long as you are not conscious of this God, you are cut off from Him.

Therefore again and again examine what your inner heart is occupied with. If it dwells with the things around you, with people, or the events of the day, if it weaves future plans or gives itself to worries and problems, then be sure you are cut off from God. If your heart at least with a quarter or a tenth of its attention constantly dwells in the Divine, be it through mantra repetition or in form of an unbroken remembrance in the background of your consciousness of God's omnipresence, omnipotence and omniscience, then you are truly blessed, then you will progress on the spiritual path, and the day will come when you dwell in God with all your consciousness, and are inwardly established in the infinite Truth, while the outer life goes on mechanically. The people around you do not know what goes on in your heart; they are unable to understand your double life.

See nothing but God. Feel nothing but God. Think of nothing but the Eternal, the all-compassionate Father, the all-loving Mother. Feel the Divine, dwell in the Divine - in the Divine alone. Inside, outside, above, below, all around you perceive, touch and experience the Divine! God is everywhere. Everywhere is unending peace, infinite beauty, boundless light. This is the truth. This you can experience. And from this experience you have to lead your daily life.

Without a knowledge of this truth life is imperfect and burdened with problems, disease and death. And the problems do not cease after death! It is a path of darkness.

The path of light consists in the intimate relationship of the heart and consciousness with the Divine.

- Swami Omkarananda