A dog doesn’t live in the past

Where and how do we search for God? Remember that God is within you, but you don’t see Him because the one place you will never look is inside yourself. You will search everywhere, but never within yourself. Paradoxically, you lose sight of God because He is in you.
Now look at what God has given us. Our intelligence, buddhi , is a precious gift. Yet, are we loving and grateful enough to God who has given us all these?Do we have even a little of the gratitude a dog has towards its master? No! That is why Dattatreya considers the dog as one of his gurus. Dattatreya draws four lessons from the dog. A dog doesn’t count its misfortunes or grieve over them. A dog doesn’t live in the past. It doesn’t make long-term plans either. It doesn’t live in the future. It lives instinctively, from moment to moment.
A dogs life is one unbroken straight line marked by love, devotion and gratitude to the one who sustains it. Devotion is its defining property. Can we, like the dog, be always grateful to our Creator and Sustainer? Can we give up being miserable about our past misfortunes and mistakes? These are disciplines we impose on ourselves. When we reach this stage, we will have achieved a mental state that looks with equal ease at happiness and sorrow, at misery and luxury; in short, we will have seen God in ourselves. This is the essence of the Sanskrit saying, Tat Tvam Asi, You are That. That is, you are the object of your search. A spiritual journey is a discipline for reaching this stage of supreme self-realisation.