In plain words
“This is my body.” The body is different, I am different. “This is my cloth.” The cloth is different. I am different. “This is my chair”: the chair is different, I am different. So my Manas, my Buddhi, my citta, my senses, my antaḥkaraṇa: all these are different, and I am different. So you must go on enquiring, to some extent, “None of these am I.” In this way you must go on enquiring. Someone abused you. Someone praised you. For whom is the praise? For the body. For whom is that abuse? For the body. So you are neither. In that way too you must go with the feeling of tyāga. What right has a body to abuse a body? That is inert, this is inert. How can the inert abuse the inert? How can it worship it? No, no. If they abuse the Ātma as the Ātma, there it is the Ātma and here it is the Ātma. What is in both is the one Ātma. Who abuses whom?
In the same way, one man says, “God exists.” Another says, “He does not.” The one who says He does not has seen God. The one who says God exists has seen God. Without having seen God, he has no right at all to say He does not exist. Here is a small example. They said, “This is a Kerchief.” Or they gave this man the name Nanjundayya. One who has seen this Nanjundayya says firmly, “This is Nanjundayya.” One who has seen someone else may say, “This is not Nanjundayya.” If you call Chakravarthi and say, “This is Nanjundayya,” he says, “He is not Nanjundayya, he is Chakravarthi.” So both the one who says he is not Nanjundayya and the one who says he is Nanjundayya must have seen Nanjundayya. One who has not seen Nanjundayya at all has no right to say “not Nanjundayya”. He has no right to say “yes, Nanjundayya”. In the same way, only one who has seen God gets the right to say, “This is not God.” That is why every man is falling into a foolishness that half knows and half does not. So this “yes” and “no” is a magic of words. Waves of words. Beyond that there is no truth at all in it. Whether one says “yes” or another says “no”, those words are only their feelings; no one has the right to say “yes” or “no” to the thing itself. So God is there for both of them. What exists is One alone. “Ekaṃ yeva advitīyaṃ Brahma.” Such Brahman itself is the Ātma. Many people: “We want grace. We want Bhakti. We want Prema,” they hope. Prema, Bhakti, humility, faith: all these are forms of the Ātma. Faith and God are not different. God and faith, the two are one. Prema and Bhakti are not different; Prema itself is God. Bhakti itself is God. What does Bhakti mean? Because it is what we use to make the unmanifest principle manifest, they called it Bhakti. All things belong to divinity. There is nothing other than God. When we go on doing our karmas with that faith, we become able to recognise the eternal principle. Keeping that eternal one as our aim, we must go on relying on some sādhanas that are not eternal. What do we do when we want to cross the endless, fathomless ocean?