Lately I have been praying deeply to God, asking Him to speak to me, to show me a sign. I begin connecting the dots of thoughts, like I'll see a sticker on a car or a license plate, and then there will be a coincidence, like the sticker is of my birth place, then I'll see something else and go down this hellish path of thinking that God is telling me that I am worthless and have done too much harm to hear Him. Is this my conscience or God? I have foolishly broken hearts.
—MIchael, United States
Dear Michael,
What you are thinking is coming from neither your conscience nor God. It comes from your ego, which tends to switch into high resistance mode when we get serious about God; it tries to throw up a smokescreen so we can’t think clearly. And it can do a very good job of that.
Your dilemma is a fine example: The part of you that resists God is poisoning your thoughts and tempting you to think irrationally. Unfortunately, this happens in one way or another to everyone. If you have read the Bhagavad Gita, you know that it happened even to Arjuna, who was a highly advanced seeker of God.
What is the solution? To begin with, keep praying to God, but let your prayers be a self-offering to Him/Her, that’s all. Give everything, with no expectation of getting anything back. Spend time in nature, breathing deeply to help blow out the knots in your thinking and create space for a different level of consciousness to enter. Certainly don’t ask for the sort of sign you have been seeking. What do you need a sign for, anyway? It doesn’t sound as though you have a specific problem you’re trying to solve. It sounds rather like you’re just fishing for divine favors. Tell God that if He or She wants to give you a sign about something, it needs to be very obvious, not subject to misinterpretation, because you’re not looking for signs just now. Looking too much for signs just stirs up the imagination, and we begin to believe that everything we see is a divine sign. Well, it isn’t. Ask instead for the grace to be more open to His/Her love.
The great masters say that God loves each one of us equally and totally, and that any thought of being worthless or unworthy in God’s eyes is simply wrong. Give yourself a vacation from that kind of thinking, and get into your heart.
Blessings,
Gyandev
