When I first heard Ramesh Balsekar saying, “Everything happens because of God’s Will.” It was an instant lightning-strike revelation. The message cut through the hard ego exterior and went deep way beyond my imagination. It felt as if the seed of this understanding was already there, all it needed was some gentle watering from a realized master.
This message was a validation of my life’s experience. I had to hear it from the master’s mouth and so it happened according to God’s Will. It is one of the hardest concepts to understand intellectually because a majority of us live with a sense of personal identification where we believe ourselves to be the “doers” with complete volition. Doership pulls us deep into the affairs of the world, while Non-Doership frees us. The ego mind identified with worldly things does not like that.
I’ve heard many people say, “Not even a leaf moves without the Will of God.” However, when life throws challenges these very people are the first to condemn others for their actions. When they have no one to blame, shame, or condemn, they point fingers at God. When everything is God’s Will how can there be another doer? What is happening is happening according to God’s Will. But wait. What is God?
The above contradiction comes about because of the “false” belief that God is also a created object – an all-powerful entity in manifestation that keeps a watch on its creation and pronounces judgments, punishments, and rewards based on our (the insignificant created objects) behavior. This separation between “me” and God is the main confusion.
According to the concept, God is only a concept to satisfy the intellectual and emotional curiosity of human beings who find themselves alone in this gigantic universe with apparently no other sign of life except on this planet (there may be other forms of life but as of now we don’t know for sure).
The apparent uncertainty and meaninglessness of life is painful for the created objects (humans) whose whole life has been based on ideas of self-fulfillment, growth, progress, and personal enlightenment. We are on a big rotating ball of metal that is circling a star. While it seems big, compared to the size of the universe, it is nothing.
Therefore, to calm the brain from the anxiety of existential crisis and insignificance, the introduction of an all-powerful and all-knower God-entity helps sometimes. That is what religion, philosophy, cultures, and traditions have been doing all through. They say you are Brahman, Consciousness, Supreme, and the Absolute. However, such objectivization only has temporary effects.
When people without this understanding say that everything is God’s Will, they are referring to an entity separate from themselves. This God is their own projection on What-Is. Such people do not really have faith in their creation for they know it’s unreliable. So when circumstances happen according to their preferences, they praise this objectivised God; Otherwise, they are quick to blame and condemn.
The Sage (one with the understanding) does not blame, shame, or condemn anything or anyone because he (or she) sees things as they are. In other words, for him (or her) God is what is apparently happening. He lives without a sense of personal volition. Being a created object, the Sage does not question God’s Will or cosmic law, for he knows that what happens is beyond what his limited mind can make sense of. He accepts God’s Will and puts no effort to change what is happening.
Therefore, the easy part of this concept is that God’s Will is everything, but the hard part is accepting that “I am nothing.”
