What Is the Construct of the Relationship You Want With God?

Now, what is the construct of the relationship that you want with God? Do you just want Him to be—the kids use this term these days—the 4:00 a.m. friend? You just call at any time, "I have this problem, help me," like that. So do you want that kind of relationship, or you want divine union? You want to merge with Him, merge into Him. Because if it is the latter, then this has to be unceasing. Our life in God's presence has to be unceasing. And according to me, that is the only way to live. There's no point living in this boxing match with Maya and then going to God only when you get the knockout punch. And then once you feel better, back again. You see, then get beaten up again, get knocked out, and then go back to God. It's hell. But that is too much of a roller coaster. It doesn't lead to any depth or deepening of our insight, depth or deepening of our faith, of our love. It is just merely like a port of last call or something like that. "I try everything through my own means. When that doesn't work, I go to God." That's not how we are designed. The very design of the human life is to be lived in God's presence. But it's not a forced design, because then that love would not be of any value.

How do you know? How can you tell that our life is designed to be lived in God's presence? Can you tell? You must be able to tell with the evidence.

Because you see that living in the livingness is God itself.

God itself is living. Yes. But just to put it very practically and simply, we notice the difference in the texture of life also, lived in His presence, Her presence, or lived on our own terms. We are all in Satsang now. So, can we all tell what our life is designed for? You see, so let's take a simple example. If you make a software engineer do graphic design, they'll complain; it won't go so well. They'll be very troubled. All of these things, and somewhere they will start to say, "But I'm not meant for this." Still, take a very rudimentary example. In the same way, when are we troubled the most? When are we out of character, but just like struggling, restless, anxious? That itself should tell us that we've taken the wrong path. We are relying on that mean which doesn't have the capacity to run this life, and we lost touch with the one who can. Isn't it?

So, if we can take that as an indicator to bring us back to our center, to His presence, then we start to lead a life of unceasing prayer, of remaining in the sense "I am," or unceasing prayer, constant insight—whatever your contemplation, whatever word you want to use. So we must live a life that is our very design. It feels the most simple, organic, natural, and God's presence is with us. We are most insecure and struggling when we are just caught up in our mental narratives. Now, how many of us want both of these things to coexist? "I want to live with God, but can't I have my narratives also?" Would that be good? You see, when you look at it this way, you notice that no, that would not be good, and maybe it is not possible anyway. You see, but isn't our life a testimony to that? In the sense that being spiritual, isn't that what we are trying to do? Squeeze some narrative or the other into the picture. You see? Yeah. Can you all see it or not? It's very important to spot it. Otherwise, you will feel like, "The moment is... I'm very spiritual," while most of the time being preoccupied with our own mental narratives. That is not to be spiritual because we've all tried and we can't squeeze any story into His temple except as a form of surrender.