(God is real and can be found)
The glory of God is great. He is real, and He can be found….Silently and surely, as you walk on the path of life, you must come to the realization that God is the only object, the only goal that will satisfy you; for in God lies the answer to every desire of the heart. —Paramahansa Yogananda
God Is Moved Only by Love The average man prays to God with his mind only, not with all the fervor of his heart. Such prayers are too weak to bring any response. We should speak to the Divine Spirit with confidence and with a feeling of closeness, as to a father or a mother. Our relationship with God should be one of unconditional love.
God is constrained to answer such an appeal; for the essence of a mother is love and forgiveness of her child, no matter how great a sinner he may be. The relationship between mother and child is the most beautiful form of human love that the Lord has given us.
“I am Ishwara (the Lord). I am Light.” The Voice was as murmuring clouds.
He will not talk with you until you have convinced Him that no other desire is hiding in your heart. Why should He reveal Himself to you if your heart is filled only with longings for His gifts?
God will not tell you that you should desire Him above all else, because He wants your love to be freely given, without “prompting.” That is the whole secret in the game of this universe. He who created us yearns for our love. He wants us to give it spontaneously, without His asking. Our love is the one thing God does not possess, unless we choose to bestow it. So, you see, even the Lord has something to attain: our love.
(God is both personal and impersonal)
But if our Creator is impersonal, how is it that He has created human beings? We are personal; we have individuality.
Considering the impersonal aspect of God, we get the impression of a Remote Being, One who merely receives the prayer-thoughts we offer, without responding to them; One who knows everything, yet maintains a heartless silence. But this is a philosophical error, because God is everything: personal as well as impersonal.
I receive much of my knowledge from God, rather than from books. I seldom read. I tell you what I have perceived directly. That is why I speak with authority, the authority of my direct perception of Truth. The opinion of the whole world may stand against it, but the authority of direct perception will always be accepted eventually.
(The body as light and vibratory energy)
With your spiritual eye you can see the body as a mass of scintillating specks of light — the energy that is emanating from your twenty-seven thousand billion cells. Only through delusion do you see the body as solid flesh. In reality it is not matter, but energy. It is because you think you are made of flesh and blood that you sometimes imagine yourself to be a weakling. But if you register the consciousness of God in your body, you will realize that flesh is nothing more than a physical manifestation of the five vibratory elements of earth, water, fire, air, and ether.
The five fingers also represent the five vibratory elements of the Cosmic Intelligent Vibration that maintain the structure of creation. The thumb represents the grossest vibratory element, earth; hence its thickness. The first finger represents the water element. The second finger represents the darting fire element; that is why it is the longest. The third finger represents air. The smallest finger represents ether, which is very fine.
“If therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.”6 If we look through the spiritual eye, the single eye of God, we perceive that all creation is made of one substance, His light.
In the form of the earth He has a positive and a negative side — the north and south poles. The stars are His eyes, the grass and trees are His hair, and the rivers are His bloodstream. The ocean’s roar, the skylark’s song, the cry of the newborn babe, and all other sounds of creation are His voice. This is the personal God. The heartthrob behind all hearts is His pulsing cosmic energy. He is walking in mankind’s twenty-six hundred million pairs of feet. He is working through all hands. It is the One Divine Consciousness that is manifesting through all brains.
(God speaks through vibration and cosmic energy)
God “Talks” Through Vibration God does appear to us in physical form. He is more personal than you can imagine. He is as real and actual as you are. This is what I want to tell you today. The Lord is ever responding to us. The vibration of His thought is constantly being sent forth; this requires energy; the energy manifests as sound. There is a very strong point here. God is consciousness. God is energy. “Talking” means vibrating. In the vibration of His cosmic energy He is talking all the time. He has become the Mother of creation that materializes Herself as solids, liquids, fire, air, and ether.
What is matter? Nothing but a particular rate of vibration of God’s cosmic energy. No form in the universe is really solid. That which appears so is merely a compact or gross vibration of His energy.
(Relentless yearning compels the Divine to respond)
She sends him a plaything to keep him quiet. But when the child refuses to be comforted by anything except the mother’s presence, she comes. If you want to know God, you must be like the naughty baby who cries till the mother comes. If you make up your mind never to stop crying for Her, Divine Mother will talk with you. No matter how busy She is with Her housework of creation, if you persist in your cries, She is bound to speak. The Hindu scriptures tell us that if for one night and one day, without a moment’s interruption, a devotee talks to God with intense devotion, He will respond. But how few will do it! Every day you have “important engagements”— the “devil” that keeps you away from God.
But to those devotees who day and night with utmost intensity pray and talk to Him, He does appear. To such devotees He comes without fail.
haven’t cared about the gifts that have come to me from God, except that I see, behind them, Him who is the Giver. Why are all my desires materialized? Because I go deep; I go straight to God. In every aspect of creation I see Him. He is our Father; He is nearer than the nearest, dearer than the dearest, more real than anybody else. He is both unknowable and knowable. God is crying for you. He wants you to return to Him. It is your birthright. You will have to leave this earth someday; it is not an abiding-place for you. Earth life is only a school in which He has put us to see how we shall behave here; that is all.
“I am through with all this, Lord. I want to talk with You alone. I know You are all I really own. You will be with me when everyone else is gone.”
Make your life more simple and put your whole mind on the Lord. Earth is a place of preparation for getting back to God. He wants to see if we love Him more than His gifts.
And here we are begging, begging, begging for a little money, a little happiness, a little love. Why ask for things that must be taken away from you one day?
(Renunciation as trading small pleasure for eternal bliss)
Renunciation doesn’t mean giving up everything; it means giving up small pleasures for eternal bliss.
Let Him know that you will never be satisfied until you have Him. Finally He will give you an answer. In
To coax Him to give Himself takes steady, unceasing zeal. Nobody can teach you that zeal. You have to develop that yourself. “You can take a horse to water but you cannot make him drink.” Yet when the horse is thirsty it seeks out water with zeal. So, when you have an immense thirst for the Divine, when you will not give undue importance to anything else — the tests of the world or the tests of the body — then He will come.
(Aum as the audible voice of God)
The Cosmic Sound9 that you hear in meditation is the voice of God. That sound forms itself into language intelligible to you. When I listen to Aum and occasionally ask God to tell me something, that sound of Aum changes into English or Bengali language and gives me precise instructions.