How can you love God without knowing Him? You cannot love anything that is unknown to you. Can you love a flower you have never seen? Can you love the ocean if it is just a word to you? Could you love someone you had never known or heard about? Could you love someone as a friend whom you never met? Could you love anything that you knew nothing about? How, then is it possible to love God, having never seen Him? You have to get to know Him to love Him.
I cannot say that anymore. I see Him all the time. Every thought you are thinking right now, I see as coming from that light. When you see from a hilltop how beautiful are the twinkling lights of a city, you forget that it is the dynamo that is providing the electricity to illumine the bulbs. So when you see the sparkling vitality of human beings, but you do not know what is enlivening them, then you are spiritually blind.
That Power, even though unseen, is very evident. It is all the time playing hide-and-seek behind our thoughts. Because God chooses to remain hidden, that is why it is difficult to think of Him and to love Him. The paradox is that the simplest way to know God is the way of love.
The Spiritual Masters Say Love God With All Your Heart But When We Are Told To Love Something As Abstract As The Infinite We Don’t Know How To Do, It What Then?
Forming a Meaningful Concept of God In the beginning of one’s spiritual search, however, it is very difficult to conceive of God, let alone feel devotion for Him, without the intermediary of some concept or form on which to focus the attention. But, here we are in human form, so long conditioned to the idea of form that when we are told to love something as abstract as the Infinite, we don’t know how to do it. The great spiritual savants, saints, and avatars — whoever has found God — have interpreted their experience or realization in terms that could be understood by humankind.
Christ interpreted Spirit as Father, Krishna interpreted Spirit not only as the transcendental formless Absolute, but also as having a personal creative aspect, which devotees in India refer to as Mother. God is both Father and Mother, personal and impersonal, immanent and transcendent; He is all things to all men. This is why the Guru’s invocation to God addresses Him as “Heavenly Father, Mother, Friend, Beloved God.”
Sometimes devotees will say, “When I think of God, am I to think of a form, or any specific image” The Infinite cannot be circumscribed by anything finite. Truth is illimitable, so vast that it encompasses everything. Therefore, the devotee may pursue Spirit —It, Him, Her —in whatever form or aspect most appeals to his present spiritual need or inclination.
A true guru-one who knows God —is like a transparent window through which the attuned devotee can glimpse something of the otherwise abstract qualities and attributes of God. Deep reverence for the guru, the divinely appointed instrument of enlightenment, draws the devotee closer to God through the blessings he feels by contact with that one who knows God.
There is a way of knowledge (Jnana Yoga) by which He can be known: the path of analytical discrimination, eliminating all that is not God – “Neti, neti,”. not this; not that. Another way is to purify oneself by performing nothing but good actions and renouncing the fruits thereof (Karma Yoga). And then there is the path of devotion (Bhakti Yoga), continuously thinking of God until one sees Him in everything. From the teachings of P. Yogananda.
