Spirituality is not a journey – its an Awakening, a Realization of the Higher Self that will ultimately lead us to this conclusion :
“ We are in God. We are into God, that which we are trying to seek. Within the human body is hidden the Unborn and the Eternal.”
A fish in the sea remains a stranger to the sea, not because the sea is far away from the fish but because the sea is too close. What is near is missed; what is nearest of all is not possible to be known. This is why the fish is not able to know the sea.
A fish is born in the sea, it lives in the sea, the sea is its food, the sea is its drink, the sea is its life, the sea is its everything. Then it dies and dissolves into the sea, but it never gets the opportunity to know the sea because it does not have any distance from the sea.
A fish, however, comes to know what the sea is if someone comes and lifts it out of the sea. This is a very contradictory thing: the fish comes to know the sea when it is away from the sea – only when it is struggling for its life on the sand under the hot sun, then it knows what the sea is.
For knowing, this much distance is necessary.
How can we know the One – the Divine Creator, that existed even before we were born and that will remain existing eternally even after we are dead ?
How can we know the One in which we are born and in which we shall disappear?
For knowing, some separation is a must. That is why the fish does not know the sea; only when someone throws it out onto the shore does it come to know.
Man is in a greater difficulty. The Divine is the Ocean that surrounds us.
It has no shores to it where Man can be thrown out, where he may start writhing with pain like a fish. It would have been very easy if there was such a shore.; but there is no such shore; God is the Ocean.
This is why those who look for God as a shore are never able to find Him. He is available only to those who are ready to “drown in the Ocean of the Divine”.
Everything else can have a shore; the whole (Divine / God) cannot have a shore – because something else is needed to form the shore. The bank of a river is formed of something other than the river. The shore of the sea is formed of something other than the sea.
However there is nothing other than God which can form the shore. The very meaning of God is that there exists Nothing other than God.
God does not mean someone sitting somewhere up in the sky and administering the world from there. No, these are stories for children.
What is meant by God is that element other than which Nothing exists. This is the scientific definition of God. God means the whole, the Totality, everything – whatever is.
Therefore God is everywhere - We Are In It. We Are Into It, That Which We Are Trying To Seek.
In the animated Disney movie ‘Soul’, towards the end of the movie one of the characters narrates the following tale:
“I heard this story about a fish, he swims up to an older fish and says: ‘I’m trying to find this thing they call the ocean.’
‘The ocean?’ the older fish says, ‘that’s what you’re in right now.’ ‘This’, says the young fish, ‘this is water. What I want is the ocean!”