Batteries are Included

The concept of GOD as a Person who is different, distant, detached and dominant is so entrenched in our consciousness. Therefore, it is so hard for us to think of God as part of us. Until that awareness becomes part of our everyday consciousness, our lives won’t change significantly.

An experience that helped me to claim my share of divinity and to experience a divine-DNA-driven life happened in 1981 when I lived in Canada. I was an innocent and unsophisticated young priest who had recently landed in the West. I needed a calculator and so I went to the store and bought one and brought it to the rectory. I took it out of the box and pushed the ON button, but the digital screen didn’t display anything. I turned it up and down, looked around it, pushed all the buttons and still there was nothing!

Frustrated, I went back to the store, stood in line again, and brought it to the counter and told the clerk that the calculator seemed to be defective. The clerk took it from me, and he had a smirky smile on his face which translated into, you stupid man, which cave did you come out of? He showed me the two AA batteries on the side of the package with a message in small print: Batteries are Included!

I didn’t see them because I didn’t look.

I didn’t look for them because I didn’t expect them.

In India, nothing was sold with batteries included. I never have had such a purchasing experience of anything in India. I had never heard that expression before coming to North America. Also, I did not pay attention.

The battery in this context refers to your soul, spirit, image of God, or spark of divinity, which are usually understood as separate from the body. But in the context of my deeper understanding of Earth and the Universe, I no longer put body and soul in separate boxes anymore. Both are continuous and contiguous aspects of the same divine reality. According to Deepak Chopra:

“My body and the universe come from the same source, obey the same rhythms, flash with the same storms of electromagnetic activity. My body cannot afford to argue over who created the universe. Every cell would disappear the second it stopped creating itself. So it must be that the universe is living and breathing through me. I am an expression of everything in existence.”

Think of the breakfast you had today. I ate an apple in the morning. By noon, through an intricate and mysterious process, that apple has become me. The awareness that the very source of creation is happening within me helps me live magically, not miserably.

“Why has your body, this miraculous instrument, become such a misery-manufacturing machine?” asks Sadguru.

Change your understanding of God as a Being separate from you, but as the Ground of your very being, and your life will instantly change!

Remember and meditate on these powerful words of Rumi:

We are not a mere drop in the ocean, we are the ocean in a drop!

(from Cosmic Kindergarten: Earthly Lessons for a Heavenly Life)