Kingdom of heaven is within you
How can the heaven be within you? You are such a small frail personality, a little body, occupying one or two feet of width of the earth. How can the kingdom of heaven be contained inside you?
The statement of our blessed Lord is significant of something what the human mind has not been habituated to think or understand. Have you ever seen a kingdom being contained within the personality of a human being?
It is something like saying that the ocean is in a drop, which is unthinkable. All these inscrutable statements of the Christ appear to be inscrutable, because we cannot understand what the Spirit is, from the point of view of which he spoke always.
The Kingdom of heaven is not a country. It is not a physical empire. It is significance, a meaning, a connotation and a value. We call it the Spirit, and the Spirit can be contained everywhere. It does not require space to exist. Therefore, it can be wholly present even in the smallest of atoms. Thus, is the kingdom of heaven within you.
So, from this point of view of the capacity of the Spirit to be contained even within a cell of the body, what would it be to empty oneself and to be filled by It.
Give and it shall be given’ says the Lord
How can it be possible?
Have you ever seen somebody giving you merely because you give. He takes away everything you give and goes away. But, what the Christ says is that you will not merely be given back what you give, but overflowing, pressed and shaken will it be given back to you. If you give one, you will get back hundreds, thousands and millions, says the Christ. This, again, is a non-mathematical calculation. How can you get hundreds and thousands, if you give only one?
The Spirit says that by giving we gain. So, everywhere you find that the law of the Spirit is different from the law of matter. The law of the Christ is different from the law of Caesar. The law of God is different from the law of man.
Now, to empty oneself, therefore, would be the tendency to stand by the Spirit, and this tendency to stand by the Spirit is to recognize the character of the Spirit in the world of matter. We have lost consciousness of the Spirit itself. We are conscious only of matter. To be aware of the Spirit is to be aware of its characteristics simultaneously. You cannot think of fire without thinking of light and heat. The idea of fire is automatically associated with the idea of heat and light. Likewise, the idea of the Spirit is automatically associated with Omnipresence and a capacity to permeate and penetrate through everything.
It is because of this fact that the Christ was not understood by the people. How can matter understand the Spirit! And so He was crucified. We are crucifying God everyday in our life, in some form or the other.
But God is great, and everything shall be well in the realm of God whose Omniscient eyes see everything. The recognition of the Spirit is, therefore, the recognition of God’s omnipresent existence. And to be filled with God, is the same as to be filled with the Spirit., Christ-Consciousness or God-realization.