‘God is in everything, everything is God’ is the central alleged ‘truth’ in various teaching by Indian gurus, swamis and other self-styled divine beings. It underpins much of Hinduism and the ideas involve, when abstracted to a high degree, forms the backbone of Advaita Vedanta. It is at the core of the so-called ‘teachings’ of Sathya Sai Baba, who claims to have created the Universe and Hinduism as the purest and most encompassing religion.
If everything is God, and God is everything, then God cannot be localised by any means, neither as a separate entity nor in any other distinct way.
At the same time, Sathya Sai Baba has often said that everyone is God, or alternatively that God is in everyone. The similar assertion that God is in everyone as a divine spark, or resides in the inner heart as universal consciousness or love or whatever, is incompatible with the hugely ambiguous generality that ‘God is everyone’. Vagueness of meaning alone makes it possible for unsophisticated minds to accept these statements without differentiation or understanding anything really… They become tenets of faith in which one believes without knowing what they mean in practice. The slogans explain little or nothing about how these should apply to life – other than the interpretation that one should respect and love everyone as divinity. Yet that is an ideal which does not allow for the ways of the world – for it necessarily also involves the ultimate appeasement of the bad and wrong – a passivity before wrongdoing which fails to work as a social ideal other than perhaps as martyrdom.
Some variants of this pan-theism hold that God is only within you. But this contradicts the core idea, that God is everything. Other variants insist that God is both within you and outside you (Sathya Sai Baba uses both conflicting statements) The absence of any direct external evidence of God’s existence refutes the ‘outside you’ claim for a start. Worse, it means that one cannot locate the divine as anything distinct from everything, for it is supposedly therefore everywhere and there is nothing that is not God.
Paradoxically, this pan-theism makes for the most tolerant of religions, since every religion (everything) must be a divine manifestation, nothing less. At the same time, belief in the pan-theistic thesis means one is totally exclusive of all mainstream religions, which all reject precisely pantheistic theologies… and pan-theism therefore manifests as a most exclusive conception – one which must be intolerant of all religious beliefs which define or identify God or divinity as distinct from profane and material existence. It is a self-destructive idea which can bear no fruit other than delusion and confusion.
The standard response to this confusion by gurus (especially Sathya Sai Baba) is that you have not realised yourself, your ‘true nature’ as the Divine Being, the One Being of Bliss Consciousness . It is most easy to be misled by this, since the almost endless labyrinth of obscure scriptures and undoubtedly clever rationalizations take many years to study and absorb and – if one gives oneself to it fully – it is very demanding to test this in practice through meditation and other so-called ‘sadhanas’. However, it is possible to recover oneself from such a well-meant but futile project – t0 break the spell – and gradually realise the illusions which it has created and enforced in one’s mind. Then what is made to appear great wisdom and ‘spirituality’ is seen in wider and wider perspective for what a confusion it is when one explores it further. Such de-programming is liberating for oneself in many ways. I find that the best one can say about the entire process of ‘spiritual seeking’ is that – if one survives it with one’s sanity intact – it is a major learning process about the fallibility of the human mind and the many ways it is unavoidably manipulated by the agendas of others, whatever the sphere of activity.
See also other critical deconstructions of key doctrines promoted by Sathya Sai Baba:-
Sathya Sai Baba Deceptions Exposed 