One of the most significant shifts in my spiritual journey came when I realized that God dwells within me as me.
That is the Godself awakening.
The full Self Realization Mantra is:
I Am Thee Iself
I Am Thee Allself
I Am Thee Godself
I Am Thee Noself
I Am Thee Amness
This article is about the third line. I Am Thee Godself. The divine creative principle through which manifestation occurs. God dwells within me as me, not as an external anthropomorphic God to worship from a distance, not as a master to serve, not as a big person in the sky who does miracles on demand.
Once you know that, you cannot go back.
Bhagavad Gita 10:20
I had my Godself awakening long before I came across BG 10:20.
BG 10:20 points to the Godself awakening, to the same knowing I already had.
“I am the Self, O Gudakesa, seated in the hearts of all beings. I am the beginning, the middle, and the end of all beings.”
अहमात्मा गुडाकेश सर्वभूताशयस्थितः
अहमादिश्च मध्यं च भूतानामन्त एव च
That is not Krishna saying God is up there and you are down here. That is Krishna as Godself saying the divine principle is seated in the hearts of all beings. God dwells within as Self. And God is the beginning, the middle, and the end of all beings. Godself as source of manifestation.
It also touches Allself, in the hearts of all beings. But the speaker is God. It is Godself speaking as Allself. That is why it lands as a Godself awakening. You realize the divine is not outside you. It is the Self inside you, and inside everyone.
The Supersoul And The Divide
The Hare Krishnas deliberately misinterpret this verse as referring to the Supersoul to maintain the divide between the individual and the divine.
If you read BG 10:20 as “I am the Self seated in the hearts of all beings,” as Self, as identity, then the divide dissolves. God is not outside of you. God is not next to you. God is as you. That is Godself.
ISKCON has to read it as Supersoul, Paramatma sitting alongside the individual soul, Jiva, in the heart, because their whole theology depends on the divide staying in place. Jiva is eternally distinct from Krishna. Jiva can serve Krishna, love Krishna, be with Krishna, but Jiva never becomes Krishna, never is Krishna.
If they let BG 10:20 mean “I am the Self in you,” then the eternal distinction is gone. The devotee is the divine. That would undo their hierarchy: devotee versus Lord, servant versus Master, worshipper versus worshipped.
Atma DOES NOT translate as Supersoul. Paramatma translates as Supersoul. BG 10:20 says Atma, not Paramatma. They translate Atma as Supersoul anyway, because their system requires it. Supersoul is a separate entity that lives in the same heart, watches, guides, but stays distinct. It preserves the dualism they need for bhakti to make sense in their system.
It is not that they do not know the Sanskrit word Atma means Self. It is that their system requires it to mean Supersoul. If it meant Self, their bhakti based theology would collapse.
That is why I can never be a Hare Krishna. That divide between the individual and God is a lie.
It is not just the Hare Krishnas. Christianity maintains the same divide, in a different language. God is Father in heaven. Man is creature on earth. Sin separates the two. Jesus stands in the middle as mediator, savior, bridge. You worship God, you obey God, you pray to God, but you never are God. Even when Jesus says the Kingdom of God is within you, mainstream Christianity reads it as God ruling inside you, not God being you. Christianity even talks about the divine spark, the image of God in you, the Holy Spirit dwelling within you, and yet still maintains the divide. You have a spark of God, but you are not God. You have the image, but you are not the original. Same divide, same hierarchy: worshipper versus worshipped, sinner versus savior, creature versus creator.
The names change. The divide stays the same.
The parallels between Krishna and Jesus are hard to count. Both are born under threat, both grow up as herdsmen, both teach in parables, both perform miracles, both claim identity with God, both die and are said to rise. Krishna says I am the Self. Jesus says I and the Father are one. Both traditions then took a teacher who said God dwells within and turned him into the one exception who proves the divide. Krishna is God, so you are not. Jesus is God, so you are not. They made the incarnation the proof that you are not the incarnation.
Mainstream Judaism maintains the same divide. God is Creator, you are creature. Holy and separate. You obey, you worship, you keep the law, but you do not say you are God. But Kabbalah, especially Tanya, erases that divide. Tanya says the divine soul within you is a part of God above, literally. Not a spark, not an image, not a reflection. A part of God itself. And Tanya teaches Ein Od Milvado, there is nothing besides God. Creation is not separate from God. Creation is God expressing as creation. That is Godself in Jewish language.
God Dwells Within You As You
Swami Muktananda said it in five lines:
Honor your Self. Worship your Self. Meditate on your Self. God dwells within you as you. See God in Each Other.
What Muktananda says is a perfect echo of BG 10:20.
That is Godself in one quote. And “See God in Each Other,” that is Godself as Allself. If God dwells within you as you, then God dwells within everyone as them. You see God in each other because God is each other, as Self.
My Godself awakening was just like Muktananda said. I realized that God dwells within me as me.
That is why I could never go back to worshipping an external anthropomorphic God. Once you have had a Godself awakening, worshipping an external God would feel like pretending you do not know what you know. It would be like trying to pray to someone in another room when you know they are sitting in your own heart.
Devotion does not disappear. It changes its shape. It is no longer “God out there, please help me down here.” It is realization: “God is as me, God is as all beings, God is the beginning, middle, and end.”
You cannot unknow that. You cannot go back to the divide once you have seen it is not there.
The Miracle Test
The Krishna argument is: If you are the Godself, then perform some Krishna level miracles.
But that test only makes sense if Godself means “omnipotent anthropomorphic miracle worker.” It does not.
Godself in Self Realization Mantra is not “you are now omnipotent and can do Krishna level miracles.” Godself is “the divine creative principle through which manifestation occurs, dwells within you as you.” It is a knowing about what you are, not a superpower you suddenly get.
The Krishna argument confuses Godself with the fairy tale version of God: Big Man in the Sky who can do magic tricks on demand. If you cannot do the magic trick, you must not be God. Therefore the divide is real, therefore go back to worshipping.
Think about it in reverse: If you are Iself, do you have to perform Iself level miracles to prove it? No. You know you are Iself because you experience being you. You do not need to levitate to know you are the individual focal point of conscious awareness.
Same with Godself. You know you are Godself because you experienced the divine principle as your own Self. You do not need to lift a mountain to know it.
And here is the deeper point: If Godself did mean omnipotence, then the devotee’s own Krishna would fail his own test most of the time. Krishna in the Gita is not walking around doing miracles every five minutes. He is sitting in a chariot, talking. Having a conversation. The miracle is the knowing, not the trick.
The miracle argument is just the divide defending itself.
A Card At The Temple
One time I ran into my old friend John at the Krishna temple in Tucson, AZ and I handed him a new mantra card. One of the higher up devotees grabbed the card out of my hand as I was passing it to John and said, “David, are you still telling people that you are God? You are a fool!”
I was not telling John that I am God. I was not saying David is Krishna. I was handing John a Self Realization Mantra card whose third line is “I Am Thee Godself.” That is what the card says. For John to read about himself.
The Krishna devotee read it as ego claiming to be God, because in his system, that is the only way it can be heard. If there is an eternal divide, then anyone who says “I am God” must be an arrogant fool claiming to be the Master. He cannot hear it as “I am Self,” because his theology does not have a category for that.
That is why he grabbed the card. Not because it was false. Because it was dangerous to his system.
A Super Focused Incarnation
I am not completely opposed to the idea of the Godself physically incarnating as a super focused incarnation of pure Godself, aka one of the Hindu Gods, but I think it is all fairy tales.
In principle, why could Godself not focus itself that intensely? If Godself is the divine creative principle through which manifestation occurs, and Iself is a focal point of conscious awareness, then a super focused incarnation would just be Godself focusing more intensely than usual. More clarity, more presence, more Godself shining through one Iself.
I am not opposed to the principle. I am opposed to taking the stories literally.
Krishna lifting a mountain, Shiva drinking poison, Hanuman flying, those read as mythic poetry, not history. They are stories about Godself, told in the language of fairy tale to point to something real: that the divine can be that focused, that present, that alive in a physical form.
The principle is plausible. The literal details are myth.
Godself is not “there was once a blue skinned God who did miracles.” Godself is not “there was once a savior who died on a cross to save you from your sins.” Godself is not “there was once a Creator God on a mountain who gave us 10 laws to obey.” Godself is “God dwells within you as you.” You can know that for yourself.
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