The Known God

     Then there arises the question: Is God partial, showering His grace upon some and withholding it from others? And then another question arises: What kind of a God is He? When we think of divine grace, we think of personal Being, with human attributes, human feelings and emotions, an anthropomorphic God. Then again, those who believe in an Impersonal God think: How can there be any grace from the Inpersonal? To them, the Impersonal is like an automaton, a mechanism, an abstraction; it has no response. But that also is a great misunderstanding. What is God? The Scriptures tell us that He is Consciousness itself. And whether we call Him personal or impersonal does not matter. The Infinite Consciousness, in which we all believe, cannot be a mechanism, an abstraction. Those who have realized God point out that God is personal, but not an anthropomorphic idea; He is also impersonal, but not an abstraction. He is Infinite Consciousness, beyond both personal and impersonal. Sri Ramakrishna used to say: "Never finitize the infinite." In other words, never think that what you conceive as God is the only conception, the only truth. I would say that the best expression, from our human standpoint of that Infinite Reality is the Sanskrit word, Hari, which means, He who steals the hearts of mankind — the Eternal Beloved, That is God! That Eternal Beloved is within our very souls, and without the grace of the Beloved it is not possible to realize Him.
— Swami Prabhavanada, from "Divine Grace," in Vedanta for the Western World, Christopher Isherwood (ed.), pp. 65-66.

     Perhaps such high matters should not concern beginners. Perhaps all we on our level have to fear is quite common laziness, the wish for comfort and excitement, the impatience with the slow assimilation, the lack of advance because we will not let fall much that makes, by its weight and back-pull, our advance necessarily slower than it need be, would we abandon more. Still the problem remains as one of interest to all students of humanity. How much of our difficulties, even the difficulties of the advanced, is due to igorance, which greater knowledge could remove, and how much is due to the necessities of the case? An entomologist was particularly anxious to hatch out successfully a valuable moth which had been found in its cocoon stage. The moment came when it began to emerge. It was watched with delighted care. But just when the dangerous emergency seemed safely over, one of the beautiful wings, which made so largely the value of the specimen, remained caught in the husk of the cocoon. In vain the moth seemed to struggle to get free and at last it seemed quite clear to the anxious watcher that the insect's strength was failing and that it must die in the vain struggle. As it lay helpless and exhausted on its side, trapped and inert, the watcher snipped with sterilized scissors the stiffened edge of the cocoon. The wing was released. The insect crawled out free. But it could not fly; the specimen was ruined. The wing remained curled and shrivelled. That final struggle to the limits of life and strength seems to have been necessary. The circulation was not driven into the delicate veins of the wing and so it could not expand. The agonizing effort was not merely to get free but to grow whole, not merely to get out into the new world of winged flight but to have, full of power and energy, the fully unfolded wings, without which the new and larger life was vain and a mockery. So it may be with our struggles. We may be made, not merely to win the larger life, but, through the agony of effort, to attain the powers and capacities and the quality of consciousness to function fully and rightly in that life.
— Gerald Heard, from "Dryness and Dark Night," in Ibid., p. 141.

....Nevertheless the fact remains that all spiritual souls know that this world is a vanishing dream. They know that they are "not of this world." Thus they are interested neither in the world nor straightening its affairs. But what they are concerned about is you and me and every individual. Not to do us any earthly good, not to give us the taste of life that ends in death, not to give us happiness that lasts for a moment; but their concern is to lead us to that life which is eternal, to that joy which knows no sorrow, to that knowledge which brings liberation. They give their life-blood for humanity that man may wake up from his dream of ignorance of an earthly life and be born in the life in spirit. Therefore, such spiritual souls are by no means humanists in the sense of those who believe that "this world is all and we must rest content in it."
— Sri Ramakrishna, from "Sri Ramakrishna, Modern Spirit, and Religion," in Ibid., pp. 245-246.

....much which used to pass as metaphysics has now come to reveal itself, with the advance of linguistic studies, as no more than misunderstood grammar. Does this apply to such statements as that God is He who is? The answer is, no. For the statement that God is He who is, is one that can be, in some measure, empirically verified by anyone who cares to fulfill the conditions upon which mystical insight into reality depends. For in contemplation the mystic has a direct intuition of a mode of being incomparably more real and substantial than the existences — his own and that of other things and persons — of which, by a similar direct intuition, he is aware at ordinary times. That God is, is a fact that men can actually experience, and is the most important of all the facts that can be experienced.
— Aldous Huxley, from "Reflections on the Lord's Prayer,"
in Ibid., p. 300.

     The final phrases of the prayer re-affirm its central, dominant theme, which is that God is everything and that man, as man, is nothing. Indeed, man as man, is nothing; for he is a nothing capable of evil, that is to say capable of claiming as his own the things that are God's and, by that act, cutting himself off from God. But though man, as man, is nothing and can make himself less than nothing by becoming evil, man as the knower and lover of God, man as the possessor of a latent spark of godhead, is potentially everything. In the words of Cardinal Bérulle, "man is a nothing surrounded by God, indigent of God, capable of God and filled with God if he so desires." This is the central truth of all spiritual religion, the truth that is, so to say, the major premise of the Lord's Prayer. It is the truth which the ordinary unregenerate man or woman finds it hard to accept in theory and harder still to act upon. The great religious teachers have all thought and acted theocentrically; the mass of ordinary human beings think and act anthropocentrically. The prayer which comes naturally to such people is the prayer of petition, the prayer for concrete advantages and immediate help in trouble. How profoundly different this is from the prayer of an enlightened being! Such a being prays not at all for himself, but only that God may be worshipped, loved and known by him as God ought to be worshipped, loved and known — that the latent and potential seed of reality within his own soul may become fully actualized....
— Aldous Huxley, from "Reflections on the Lord's Prayer,"
in Ibid., pp. 311-312.