There is no God or Atma within you || Acharya Prashant (2020)
Questioner (Q): So I had your advice and I got some books in terms of getting different perspectives. It might be a bit weird in a way question but I kind of wonder, when people are praying for God somewhere and also you're mentioning something about the myth of the God and I still can't grasp how you can visualize Brahman, God, whatever you can call it, inside of you being part and not being somewhere outside. Because for me I wouldn't say I'm a strong Christian in a way but whenever there are bad times or something you would pray but you would pray somewhere outside. Where in some of the Vedanta books they would mention that once one realizes that the Atman is also the Brahman — how to realize it in a way?
Acharya Prashant (AP): The question is, how is it possible to visualize God or Truth or the ultimate within oneself? The questioner says that she has been brought up in the tradition of visualizing God, if at all visualization has to happen outside of herself, the Christian way. But then she says that she has read in some of the Vedanta books that, because there is identity between Atman and Brahman, so God is within you because Atma is within you. Atma is within you, Brahm is God and Atman is the same as Brahm. So, by implication, God too is within you. So the questioner says that she's not finding it easy to reconcile this.
At no point does Vedant say that the Atma is within you. It is a gross miss interpretation, misunderstanding. There are the two principal paths. Looking within is primarily a feature of the path of knowledge Gyan Marg. And when you look within, it is not the Truth that you look at. When you look within, it is always your falseness and ignorance that you encounter. That's why the path of knowledge is the path of negation:
