Finding God

In the Philosophy of Religion class I teach a couple times a year, I usually assign, as a final project, for students to “Go Find God.” Their challenge is to articulate a clear conception of what they mean by a Supreme Being and then undertake some activity to connect with that Being, whatever it may be.

Of course, there’s no requirement that they are successful in their search; what I expect them to do is to take the assignment seriously, do some creative and analytical thinking and writing, and to be able to clearly articulate to their classmates and me what they did and what they learned from the effort.

In years past, students have engaged in any number of different activities, from taking nature walks in the woods, to visiting houses of worship different than their own, to ingesting ecstasy in Las Vegas (this before I included a caveat on the assignment rubric that they couldn’t do anything illegal), to attending a rave (without taking drugs, the student assured me, in keeping with my revised assignment guidelines.)

Each year, in hopes of modeling what I’m looking for, I try to do the assignment myself, and I’ve done a bunch of different things, too, including taking a long bike ride, to attending Sunday service at an evangelical church, to performing 108 sun salutations.

In spite of my own reasonably serious efforts, though, I’ve never succeeded in finding God. I’ve generally had a meaningful experience, but it’s never gone beyond the material world; I’ve never inferred something behind or beyond the Universe as we know it.

This year, as I prepared to come to India, I told my students that my trip here would be my this year’s “Go Find God” project. And although more than a few chuckled, I meant it sincerely.

So far, in spite of serious yoga practice, regular (albeit somewhat disjoined) study of Indian philosophy, and a general immersion in this world where God is everywhere, I haven’t really succeeded in locating the divine.

However.

In today’s Yoga Sutra Chanting and Philosophy of Yoga class at the Anatha Research Foundation, Professor Narasimhan made a point—in response to a student’s question about whether, essentially, one can be a serious student of yoga without buying the underlying Hindu religious dogma—that may be moving me in the direction of something akin to success.

First, he explained that yoga is better understood as psychology than religion. It’s a technology, if you will, that, if followed completely—all 8 limbs—enables anyone who does so to, in time, find God.

God, however, is not to be understood as an external objective, nor as an externally objective Being. Rather, (and here I may be misrepresenting what he actually said, but this is how I understood it), God is the state of being you achieve when you employ the yoga “technology” successfully. To achieve Samadhi, in other words, is to find God.

Nevertheless, God remains indefinable by definition, distinctly beyond distinctions, and unknowable by any of our standard knowledge-acquisition methodologies.

Less esoterically, “God,” said Dr. N., “is a state of equanimity or contentment”; “the innermost sustaining force in your life;” he also suggested that whenever you achieve true satisfaction in your life, you have touched God.

So what does this suggest for finding God?

Well, if I’m satisfied that I haven’t, then have I?