Infinite Consciousness
“I believe,” the television-evangelist intoned, his resonant voice rich with emotion, the lilting cadence of his speech pausing dramatically. “I believe that if you had a spaceship fast enough . . . and you traveled long enough . . . and you crossed the eternity of the universe that you would arrive in heaven.” The next dramatic pause featured a glimpse of the audience gazing raptly up at the speaker. “For heaven is a real place, but it can never be reached in that manner. For human beings will never make a spaceship fast enough to reach God’s home.”
From the point of view of yoga, God does exist but not as a giant man or woman with supernatural powers living beyond the clouds. Rather, God is infinite consciousness.
You cannot see consciousness, but not because it is far away in a distant heaven. In fact, this infinite consciousness is unimaginably close to you. However small a distance you can conceive, God is closer.
To understand this closeness, imagine if your reflection in a mirror could talk. “What is a mirror?” the reflection might inquire. “Where is it? Why can’t I see it?”
The existence of that reflection is entirely dependent on the existence of the mirror; the distance between them cannot be measured since the reflection exists as part of the mirror itself. In a similar way, your existence is part of the eternal infinite consciousness that is God, and God is just as close to you as that mirror is to that reflection.
An infinite object cannot be contained by the mind. Hence, God cannot be known in the usual sense of knowing something. To know God requires a special way of knowing. Just as a river can come to know the ocean only by merging with it and becoming one with the ocean, so also to know God one must merge with God. This merger of the individual consciousness with infinite consciousness is known in Sanskrit as yoga (literally meaning “unification”).