Searching Everywhere Except Where It Was
I spent most of my twenties looking for peace in places that couldn’t hold it. A better job would do it. A relationship. A move to a new city. Each time I arrived at the next destination, there’d be a brief glow of satisfaction, and then the old restlessness would creep back, whispering that the answer must be somewhere else, somewhere I hadn’t looked yet.
Then I came across Paramahansa Yogananda’s commentary on Luke 17:21, and I realized the joke had been on me the entire time. I’d been searching the whole map while standing on the treasure.
Here is the verse as Jesus spoke it to the Pharisees:
“Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.” – Luke 17:21 (KJV)
Most of us have heard this verse so many times that it slides right past us. “The kingdom of God is within you.” Nice sentiment. Put it on a bumper sticker. But Yogananda didn’t treat it as a sentiment. He treated it as a precise, literal instruction, and his reading of it cracked something open in me that hasn’t closed since.
Yogananda’s Radical Literalism
Paramahansa Yogananda, the Indian master who brought Kriya Yoga to the West, spent decades bridging Eastern and Western scriptures. His two-volume The Second Coming of Christ: The Resurrection of the Christ Within You is a verse-by-verse commentary on the Gospels that reveals startling parallels between the teachings of Jesus and the yogic tradition.
On Luke 17:21, Yogananda was emphatic: Jesus was not speaking metaphorically.
“When Jesus said, ‘The kingdom of God is within you,’ he was stating a literal truth. Within the body of every human being lies the potential to experience infinite bliss, cosmic consciousness, the direct perception of God. This is not poetry. This is the central fact of human existence, waiting to be discovered through deep meditation.” – Paramahansa Yogananda
Think about the context. The Pharisees had asked Jesus when the kingdom of God would come, as though it were an event on a calendar, a political upheaval, something you could point to “over there.” Jesus’ answer must have baffled them. Don’t look here or there. It’s already within you.
Yogananda saw in this exchange the same truth that yogis had taught for millennia: God is not a distant entity to be appeased or awaited. God is the very consciousness animating your body right now. The “kingdom” isn’t a place you go when you die. It’s a state of awareness available in this life, in this body, through direct inner experience.
The Connection to Eastern Wisdom
What made Yogananda’s interpretation so striking to me was how effortlessly he connected Jesus’ words to the Vedantic tradition. The Upanishads declare “Tat Tvam Asi”, Thou Art That. The Bhagavad Gita teaches that the Self (Atman) dwelling in every being is identical with the Supreme (Brahman). And here was Jesus, telling the Pharisees the exact same thing in Aramaic.
Yogananda didn’t see this as coincidence. He saw it as confirmation that all great spiritual teachers point to the same reality: the divine is not outside you. It never was.
“Jesus and the great rishis of India spoke the same truth in different languages. ‘The kingdom of heaven is within you’ and ‘The Self is Brahman’, these are not competing doctrines. They are the same realization, clothed in different cultural garments. The one who meditates deeply will find this kingdom, and upon finding it, will see that the Christ and the yogi speak with one voice.” – Paramahansa Yogananda
This floored me when I first read it. I’d grown up thinking of religions as separate, often contradictory systems. Yogananda showed me that at their mystical core, they’re pointing to a single experience, the direct contact with the divine within your own being.
The Practice: Finding the Kingdom Through Meditation
For Yogananda, the verse wasn’t just theology. It was a call to action. If the kingdom of God is within you, then the most important thing you can do with your life is go looking for it. And the tool for that search is meditation.
He taught a specific practice, but here’s a simplified version anyone can begin with tonight:
Sit comfortably with your spine straight. Close your eyes. Take several slow, deep breaths and let your body settle.
Bring your attention to the point between your eyebrows, what Yogananda called the “spiritual eye” or kutastha. This is the seat of spiritual perception in the yogic tradition, and Yogananda taught that it corresponds to the “single eye” Jesus described in Matthew 6:22: “If therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.”
Simply rest your attention there. Don’t strain. Don’t try to see anything. Just be gently present at that point, as though you’re listening for something very quiet in a noisy room.
When thoughts arise (and they will) don’t fight them. Just return your focus to the point between the eyebrows. Each return is a small victory, a strengthening of your inner attention.
Stay with this for at least fifteen minutes. What you may begin to notice, over days and weeks of practice, is a growing sense of calm, of spaciousness, of something luminous and warm at the center of your being. Yogananda said this is the first glimpse of the kingdom Jesus spoke of.
What I Found When I Stopped Looking “Out There”
I won’t pretend I had some dramatic lightning-bolt experience the first time I tried this. I didn’t. My legs went numb and my mind raced through a thousand unrelated thoughts. But I kept at it, morning and evening, because something about Yogananda’s certainty compelled me.
After about three weeks, I began to notice a shift. There were moments (brief at first, then longer) where the mental chatter would just stop. And in that silence, there was something. Not nothing. Something. A fullness, a presence, a warmth that didn’t depend on anything external. It was there before I added any thought to it, and it remained after the thoughts returned.
I remember walking outside after one of those meditation sessions and feeling like the world had been freshly painted. Colors were more vivid. The air felt alive. And I had this quiet, unshakable sense that everything was already okay. Not because my circumstances had changed, but because I’d touched something inside myself that was beyond circumstances.
The Verse That Ends the Search
Luke 17:21 is, in a sense, the verse that ends all seeking. If the kingdom is within you, then every outward search for happiness, peace, and fulfillment is a detour. Not wrong (we’re human, we engage with the world) but ultimately a detour from the main event, which is the discovery of what you already are.
Yogananda dedicated his life to helping people make that discovery. He believed it was the birthright of every human being, regardless of religion, culture, or background. The kingdom isn’t reserved for saints and monks. It’s in you. Right now. Whether you’ve meditated for decades or never sat still for five minutes in your life.
All that’s required is that you stop looking “lo here” and “lo there”, and turn your attention inward.
The kingdom has been waiting. It’s never gone anywhere. And neither have you.
