The Truth is that God is everything and everywhere. He is all energy manifesting on different planes, all life and all beings. Where is He not? What is He not?
Once a sage was asked the question, ‘Sir, where is God?’ The sage replied, ‘Sir, tell me where God is not?’ He is everywhere and everything. It is our misfortune that we cannot see Him. Having eyes we do not see, because of the impurity of our mind. Every act and the result of every act and the instrument used in the performance of every act is God. Blessed is the sage who realizes it. His heart flows out in love towards everything. The wise and the ignorant, the cultured and the vulgar, the strong and the weak, the beautiful and the ugly, nay, animate and inanimate creation is enfolded in his love.
There was a saint in India who was so conscious of God’s presence everywhere that it hurt him to tread on the grass and little flowers. To him the grass was alive with God. For such jnanis there is no wicked and no virtuous, no good and no bad. Everything is covered with Bhagavan. All shines; all vibrates with divinity. The thief, the murderer, earthquake, cyclone, disease, famine—these are all God in His terrible aspect; just as the mother with her baby, the child playing in the sunshine, and the harvest and green fields, are God in His lovable aspect.
We cannot understand it now. But the sage who has seen beyond maya, he does. Our ignorance, our wickedness and our blindness, all is God. It is His maya, His power inseparable from Him, as heat is inseparable from fire. To us all this seems terrible; not so to the sage. The child sees a murder in the moving picture and it begins to cry. But we understand and smile. We also weep sometimes at the sadness of a tale, until we rouse ourselves and we smile. What was too terrible to us in the tale while we were under the author’s spell did not mean anything to us after we had shaken off the spell. What seems horrible to us in this world-plan does not seem horrible to the man of realization. But he cannot make us understand until we grow up spiritually.