Into The Mystery Podcast Ep. 2: The Forbidden Word

What is God? In this episode, Rishika and Adi Vajra explore the nature of the Absolute, the One, Allah, Source, Om, or That which has no name. Is God an entity? A state of mind? A purely abstract concept? Can God, in fact, be known? Enjoy a lively conversation that touches on everything from Roman Catholicism to Einstein to the mystical poets.

Transcript

You're listening to the second episode of Into the Mystery.

In this conversation,

We'll be exploring that forbidden word,

God.

We'll be exploring the nature and essence of what we call God and our own inner divinity.

We hope you enjoy the talk.

I used to be an atheist,

At least when I was in my late teens,

Early 20s,

College years.

If you had asked me whether I believed in a higher being or an ultimate reality beyond this one,

I would have said,

Nah,

I'm more or less an atheist.

And this is after having been raised in the Catholic Church.

I was baptized,

First Communion,

And actually was confirmed in the church at the age of 14,

But a few months after that I simply left.

And the reason I left was because there were too many contradictions between what Jesus had been saying in the Bible and the practices of the church that I was raised in.

And suddenly I found myself in college and surrounded by a lot of intellectuals,

And there was a very appealing intellectual safety in deciding that God didn't exist and that the mind could be elevated to a place where it in fact sort of functioned as God.

But it was funny after that because my friends started getting married,

And every time I found myself in a church,

Every time I stepped into one of those sacred spaces,

Something would happen,

And these intense emotions would come up with me that I didn't quite understand because it made no sense to my intellectual mind.

And I began to sense that there was something wrong with my commitment to the idea of there being no God.

Part of our problem,

I guess we can start with the problem that the mind has contemplating God,

Is that we have to think of it as a person or as something separate from us.

I think you're hitting on something very crucial in what you're saying.

One of the things I love about what you're saying is you're pointing out something that I think many people who listen to a podcast like this might be able to relate to is the elevation of our intellect,

Or we could say that in our Western civilization,

The elevation of our science to the level of God,

To the level of determining what's truth.

But there's something very beautiful about what you shared because in our elevation of our intellect or our science or our logic for that matter,

There's a period or a place where we are overcome with something that our intellect simply can't manage or contain.

And I hear you describing that in your experience in the church.

And I just wanted to stop a moment and recognize how beautiful that is because I think it speaks so much to this dilemma and problem of God.

Yeah.

And there was another factor too,

I think,

In my doing a U-turn from atheism back to a search for God.

And it was when I was pregnant with my first child,

My daughter.

There's a moment when you realize when your body is in a pregnant state that,

Oh my goodness,

I have no control over this process.

And some kind of drastic intervention or an accident or severe illness,

This process will complete itself and it's completely out of my hands.

I mean,

I can't make a baby.

I can't use my mind and my hands to create a living form and to breathe some kind of a consciousness into it.

And so as that was happening in my body and I was suddenly sort of relegated to the sidelines,

Or at least my mind was,

And all I could do was ride along with the process until it completed,

That made it sort of crystal clear to me that something,

There is something that infuses life into the things that we perceive as alive,

And even to the things that we don't perceive as alive really,

But that that substance or that intelligence or that driving energy,

And there are many,

Many names for it as you know,

Works at a level which my mind and the human mind in general is unable to really contemplate on its own terms.

You know what I'm saying?

Oh,

Definitely.

Yes.

I mean,

What a miraculous situation,

The situation of being pregnant and the situation of giving birth and to be able to stand in the acknowledgement of something is at play here.

Something is working through us.

I think the same could be said for the artist who brings through a powerful poem or a powerful song where was that delivered from?

Where did it come from?

And if we really take those questions to heart,

We might actually have a chance at understanding the real nature of God.

But I'd love to come back to that question that you broke off with in your initial speaking,

Which is that dilemma of making God a person.

And in my view,

I mean,

I also had a very strong atheistic period of my life,

Mostly in my late teens.

And it was just that idea that I was so opposed to,

Which was how could God be a person?

And specifically,

How could God be male versus female?

Why and how could that be?

It didn't make any sense.

Right.

And punitive to boot.

Oh,

Right.

Yes,

Absolutely.

But I think there's a wisdom in us that rejects that notion.

And unfortunately,

What we do sometimes in our atheistic or logic-oriented cultures is we throw the baby out with the bathwater.

We reject the notion of God as a human entity or as having a sex or a form,

But we don't realize that there is a completely,

A whole other way of experiencing divinity outside of that framework of understanding.

Right.

And that's,

I think,

Is the result of the fact that our human brains are not designed,

At least the way we condition them from birth.

We have not equipped them to think in those terms,

To be able to think of God not as an object that we can relate to or be punished by or that can do us favors if we pray hard enough,

But as something that we are and that drives us as energies that are so subtle and so sublime that they can't be measured.

They can't even really be described.

And we're not taught ways to think about that.

And I think it was easier,

Easier,

I don't know if easier is the right word,

More convenient in order to,

For spiritual traditions to try to convey wisdom by using the simplest possible language.

So people maybe are not able to visualize what Shakti is,

For example,

The energy that creates things.

But they could assign a god,

A female god perhaps that has this ability or this power and that gave the human brain a way to relate to it.

Yeah,

I agree.

And I do think it's somewhat important to come back to what you're saying at some point in this conversation,

Because there are very good reasons why we engender God with a feminine or masculine component at times.

And when you were speaking and you were talking a little bit about our conditioning,

It reminded me that of a state that psychologists describe that the infant experiences,

Probably prior to six months or one year of age,

A state that they call dual unity,

Which is an experience where the infant lives with an actual living experience where it doesn't actually discriminate between itself and its environment.

They're all experienced as one cohesive whole.

And if we take that state of unity that we have,

Of course,

Many of us have long forgotten almost entirely as a seed for how we might experience our innate divinity and understand that it's possible that we can peel back or strip away the layers of conditioning that have been layered over top of that,

The veils,

If you will,

Then that original state of dual unity that the infant knows is still available to us.

And that state of dual unity is very much what we aim at when we talk about seeking God.

Yeah,

There's always that longing for home.

That's how I used to describe it to myself,

Even when I didn't know what it was.

I remember when my kids were little,

I remember I dealt a lot with a lot of depression and I would be driving around and thinking to myself,

I just want to go home,

Except it wasn't my physical house that I was longing for,

Just a sense of being home.

And I would have these arguments with myself,

What do you mean you want to go home?

You have a home.

But it was something so much deeper and more compulsive,

That's not the right word,

Insistent maybe.

There was this insistent call to home that I could not articulate to myself.

And the idea or the feeling in my body that I was not already there,

Which of course now I know to be mistaken and a function of the way my ego was interpreting stuff,

But there was a desolation,

This feeling of just being so far away from a place I was actually supposed to be.

Anybody who is willing to pay attention to their life will see that there's been this estrangement from home.

And if there's even the slightest attention given,

There's a longing to return home.

And we can interpret that,

I guess,

As in a sense God speaking to us,

Trying to remind us of what we really are or who we really are.

Absolutely.

But as we know,

The vast majority of people aren't comfortable talking about God in those terms and a lot of people aren't comfortable with the word God in the first place.

Yeah,

It's taboo.

You mentioned that you had only recently,

I don't know about recently,

But for a while you weren't using it very much at all because of that reason.

Yeah.

Well,

In my initial spiritual experiences,

It was very clear what God was and that there was indeed a truth of God and an essence of God that lives in all of us.

But I was very sensitive living in Western civilization to know that the word has become so corrupted by false religions and of course it's been rejected largely in scientific and atheistic circles.

And so I felt that not using the language,

Not using the word God would be more conducive to supporting this exploration of what it is that lives inside of us.

And it's really only in the last several years where I began using that term more,

Becoming comfortable and,

Or I suppose what I've become comfortable with is other people's discomfort with the word.

Yeah,

That's a good way to put it.

Because,

Well,

I mean,

We spend a lot of time managing other people's reactions to us until we know better and I've definitely done the same thing.

And not to mention I have habitually hung out with some pretty intellectual people,

A lot of scientists and PhDs in the mix,

And they would kind of indulge me if I wanted to talk about why is there something rather than nothing or if we were out camping and looking up at the stars.

But if you brought the word God too much into the conversation,

There would be a little bit of a discomfort and a backlash and they'd shut it right down.

Which is unfortunate because if,

And like you say,

The word has become corrupted because instead of associating it with a true reality that's simply beyond our physical senses most of the time,

We have instead attached it to the churches and the preachers and the problems that are inherent to those things when they have been co-opted by egoic motives.

Well,

There's also very good reason for rejecting the conceptual nature of God.

You know,

I remember when I was heavily immersed in Tibetan Buddhism,

I listened to a talk by Sogyal Rinpoche and he was saying that he was leading a retreat and a man had asked him,

He was Christian,

And he had asked him about how to reconcile his Christian faith and belief in God with his Buddhist practice and he jokingly said,

You know,

Be a Christian,

Practice Buddhism.

But he went on to say that there's no God.

I mean,

Of course,

That's one of the core tenants of Buddhism is the assertion that there is no external,

Eternal entity God.

And I want to say something about that in a moment.

But what he said in this talk was he said,

There isn't a God,

But there's godliness.

And I found that very moving because it was a nice way of saying that there is something sacred in our experience,

Even if we dispense with the concept of a separate,

Distinct male god bearded guy living in the sky.

And I think that's important.

And I think it's one of the brilliant pieces within Buddhism because one of the brilliant aspects of a philosophy or a teaching that says there is no external God,

There is no savior,

If you will,

Is to point us back to the responsibility of discovering what is within us.

And I think that's the brilliance of Buddhism is that it's it removes that external factor so that we can work with the living experience of that sacredness and divinity as it occurs within us.

Yeah,

I think that's a beautiful point.

And just having grown up in a Catholic Church,

If I had been,

Instead of being directed to follow rules or else,

Because that's really what it came down to,

It's like,

Here's how we do it.

These are the ceremonies,

These are the rules,

These are the commandments,

And this is how you atone for the various things you've done wrong because you were born with original sin after all.

And there was no,

I don't want to cap on Catholic Church all day,

But there was never that finer exploration of what God means personally,

How you are an expression thereof and how the beauty inherent to your form simply because you are a part of God and God is informing you all the time.

It's very sad because within the Catholic Church,

There is a rich history of mystics and exquisite teachings.

I think of Meister Eckhart and his beautiful phrase when he says,

The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.

Such an exquisite message and yet somehow it's left out.

Yeah.

I don't know if it's just too subtle to be conveyed in most circumstances or if it was deliberately overlooked in order,

Well,

I guess we could go down a whole other tangent on that.

One of the problems of course within any religious tradition is that if people are made aware that God is the living essence within them,

They tend not to need that external source of guidance and support.

So it renders itself useless.

Yes,

Exactly.

And that's what I've always loved about yoga as a matter of fact is that you're told to just go find out.

Go sit and meditate.

Find out what you are.

No one's going to tell you because it's a very individual thing.

In that sense,

The scientific approach to use perhaps an awkward phrase,

But the scientific approach that yoga takes to solving this question,

It was something that I found very compelling and very honest.

Yes.

It's not a material science,

But it's absolutely a science of heart.

It's a science of mind.

Absolutely.

Can we return to that subject of the attributes of God?

I think it would be a worthwhile thing to talk just briefly about.

Of course.

You mentioned Shakti earlier,

And I think one of the reasons why we end up with confusion around this word and this experience of God,

I see this even in people who've had spiritual experiences because people can have different types of spiritual experiences.

For example,

A person can have an experience of a love,

A field of love that connects everything in its fabric.

And very clearly when one experiences that truly and deeply,

One can know that that is God.

One can also have an experience of absolute spaciousness,

Emptiness,

And one can know that as a sacred experience.

And I think one of the problems that people face,

Whether they are atheistic or practicing spiritual practice,

Is to conceive of God in a limited form,

Either masculine,

Feminine,

Spacious or loving.

And I think that it's important for us if we really are to explore the truth of God absolutely in our experience,

To understand that that which we call God has many facets,

Many natures,

And that they are all emanations.

They're all attributes of that singular divinity.

And that helps us from thinking of God as one particular kind of experience or plane.

Yeah,

Exactly.

And we should talk about language too,

Because the fact that we're limited to conveying information to each other about spiritual truths using an inherently limited form of communication causes a lot of confusion,

Frustration.

Well,

You've got a great subject here.

I think of even just in yoga,

When you refer to God or divinity,

You may refer to that in many different forms.

For example,

There is Brahman,

Which is the absolute nature of existence.

There is Atman,

Which is the self nature of existence that exists as the self within everything.

There is Purusha,

Which is the seer or the observer within everything.

And so a science like yoga gives us a technology and a language to understand God in a totally different way,

Which is I think why many people have clung to or run to the practice of yoga for that openness,

For the depth of the language that exists around infinity.

Yes,

Yes.

And a lot of the language will convey a truth in a way that's not necessarily targeted toward the linguistic framework of the brain.

It speaks to you at a level that is above or,

I don't know,

Finer than that perception.

For example,

Most people think of yoga classes doing the asanas,

Doing the postures.

But there is God inherent or an aspect of God inherent to something like warrior pose.

You're experiencing and resonating with a particular energy,

That strength and that groundedness of the warrior,

Where something more like dancer is expressing a totally different energy,

Not just in the feeling you're having inside your body,

But in the expression,

The shape of the body and what that's communicating to the environment around you.

I like to tell my students,

And I'm not sure that they understand me or maybe I'm just babbling,

But that it's a two-way communication when you're practicing.

It isn't just,

You know,

Can I get my body in this shape and hopefully absorb some kind of wisdom in that state,

But you're actually communicating back an intention to the universe that this is how I see myself,

This is how I experience myself.

I like that.

You know,

It's almost what I hear you saying is that the postures serve to facilitate our contact with an attribute or an archetype of our divinity.

Yes,

You said that much better.

You said that much better than I did.

If we look at positioning ourselves within a physical posture that gives us that experience of an innate strength,

Such as warrior,

And we start to understand that that innate strength is actually a part of our intrinsic divine nature,

We tease that archetype into existence.

Exactly.

Thank you for that.

I love that idea of teasing it into existence.

I always think of it sort of as an invitation.

Yeah,

I love that.

But teasing is a great word because it's playful,

And I love the idea that you can be playful with God and that you can be playful as God.

That alone is an attribute of God,

That God has a play,

That the very essence of our divinity has an organic form that is mischievous and playful.

It's beautiful.

The divine gesture.

Yes.

So,

It's interesting because there's a usefulness to giving God a form.

There's something worthwhile to depicting God as Shiva or through an incarnation such as Jesus or Krishna or Buddha or any of these great beings.

There's some usefulness because what it does is it allows us to begin to conceptualize our own inner potential by giving it a form.

By giving it something to aspire to.

Now,

I think one of the things that we see as a trapping in many religions is we don't ever grow beyond that.

And if we understand that that form is there to introduce us,

Like you said,

It's an invitation to invite a possibility of discovering our own potential,

Then at a certain point we transcend or we grow,

We mature beyond the need for that external form of God.

And I think that's an important thing in terms of understanding that our enlightenment,

If you will,

Our spiritual growth,

Our development,

It goes through phases.

And there are phases where it seems absolutely essential to need an outer form of divinity.

And there's a place where that naturally drops away.

Yes I found that in my meditation practice especially.

Well,

And as we turn our attention to the absolute nature of God,

We start to realize much to what we were hinting at earlier on is that at the absolute level,

God has no form,

No name,

No sex,

No gender,

No,

There's nothing to conceive of.

And yet it is absolutely experienceable.

Yes,

Yes.

You said something the other day about the 99 names of God in the,

Is it the Sufi tradition?

Yeah,

Islam.

In Islam,

You know,

The word Allah points to that absolute nature of God.

That's one of the words that point to the absolute nature of God.

And it is beyond all attributes.

It's beyond all conceptual frameworks.

So there's nothing we can really say of it.

We can look at it somewhat as the backdrop or background of experience on which everything in our life experience occurs.

But within that,

One of the practices in Sufism is the practice of the 99 names of God.

And one of the useful dimensions of that is that we're exploring 99 different forms that God takes as compassionate,

As fierce,

As strong.

And as we start to understand those various attributes of divinity within us,

We start to understand that we're not just dealing with one solid object or thing,

We're dealing with a multiplicity.

And of course,

There is this absolute,

What we could call a Godhead,

But there are many forms that it emanates as just as light can be refracted into many colors through a prism.

Yes.

And that's yet another concept that the human brain has a hard time holding,

The idea that something can be a whole thing and all of its parts simultaneously.

Yeah.

Well,

If we're interested in knowing God,

We better get used to the notion of paradoxes.

Trapdoors and paradoxes everywhere,

Around every corner.

So if somebody asks you to define God,

And I realize what I'm asking,

But just a random person walks up and says,

Well,

You know,

Tell me,

Tell me what God is.

How would you go at that?

You know,

There's a good story to illustrate that question that you're asking right now.

And it's a story about Buddha.

And in this story,

We get to see that the experience of God is a very personal one.

And it's one that speaks very much to the personal inclination of the seeker.

In this story,

Buddha is approached by three separate individuals.

The first individual is a fundamentalist religious person.

So he's very attached to his beliefs and his viewpoints and his perspective.

And he asks Buddha,

Is there a God?

And Buddha says,

No,

Absolutely not.

The man in his clinging and aggressive position storms off.

The second man approaches Buddha and asks,

This man has a very humble,

Very devoted heart.

And he asks Buddha,

Is there a God?

Buddha says,

Yes,

Absolutely.

The man leaves with his heart warm and delighted.

So standing by this whole time is Buddha's assistant,

Ananda.

And Ananda is confused because he's seen both interactions.

And he's seen Buddha give one answer to one individual and a completely different answer to another individual.

So he approaches and he asks,

So what's the truth?

Is there a God or is there not a God?

And Buddha remains silent.

And so we see in that example,

Three different answers to the same question.

And our brain doesn't like that.

Our brain,

Our mind doesn't like the fact that there's inconsistency in that.

It's not coherent.

But there's truth because in each example,

Buddha is telling a truth as the seeker needs to hear.

Yes,

I love that.

I love that.

It reminded me,

Of course,

In miracles and the way it systematically begins to deconstruct the thinking framework that you have habitually used to interpret reality and then to reorient it in a way that makes contradictions and truths of that nature more accessible and almost more obvious.

It's like we've been looking through the wrong lens all this time.

And once we change our focus just so,

All of a sudden everything makes sense.

And you do see the brain can finally come to a place where it can entertain contradictions and paradoxes and seeming inconsistencies about the nature of reality in a way that is not threatening,

That doesn't feel like it,

That doesn't generate just this fearful egoic resistance to it by,

What's the word I want,

By default.

So therein we see one of those aspects of what we could call the God mind,

Is that the God mind is able to comprehend and understand even through paradoxes in ways that the logical mind is incapable of.

Yeah.

And isn't that what naturally arises anyway as we strip away the layers of the ego?

That's really what we're getting down to is a place where our mind can simply resonate with that or vibrate in harmony with it.

Yes,

Where it can display its full God-like nature without obscuration.

Yes,

Without resistance and without interference.

Yes.

So maybe this is a good place to work in this Alan Watts quote that I came across this morning.

Let's hear it.

So Alan Watts,

Of course,

A philosopher who wrote a lot in the 1960s,

And he wrote.

And in this passage I'm about to read,

He refers to the reality of God as it,

For reasons that are clear in the book but don't need to be explained here.

So he wrote,

You were probably brought up in a culture where the presiding image of it has for centuries been God the Father,

Whose pronoun is he,

Because it seems too impersonal and she would,

Of course,

Be inferior.

This is the 60s,

Remember?

That's what I would take exception to that.

Anyway,

He continues,

Is this image still workable as a functional myth to provide some consensus about life and its meaning for all the diverse peoples and cultures of this planet?

Frankly,

The image of God the Father has become ridiculous.

That is,

Unless you read St.

Thomas Aquinas or Martin Bover or Paul Tillich and realize that you can be a devout Jew or Christian without having to believe literally in the cosmic male parent.

Even then,

It is difficult not to feel the force of the image because images sway our emotions more deeply than conceptions.

As a devout Christian,

You would be saying day after day the prayer,

Our Father who art in heaven,

And eventually it gets you.

You are relating emotionally to it as to an idealized father,

Male,

Loving but stern,

And a personal being quite other than yourself.

Obviously,

You must be other than God so long as you conceive yourself as the separate ego.

But when we realize that this form of identity is no more than a social institution and one which has ceased to be a workable life game,

The sharp division between oneself and the ultimate reality is no longer relevant.

Yum.

Yeah,

I like what he's saying there because it really delineates in a very intellectual way.

So it's speaking to somebody with a high wattage brain,

Brainy people here,

And putting that into a language that,

You know,

A brain that prizes itself very highly can accept.

Well,

He's raising a very important issue here that anyone who does sincere spiritual work will actually have to work their way through,

Which is there's really kind of two main things that I think are important here.

One is our tendency to transfer that parental image onto God.

And so,

For example,

If you've grown up in a situation where you were punished unfairly by mother or father or both,

Then you might conceive of God as a punishing being.

Those imprints of our early life last through our perception.

And so when we conceive of God,

Those perceptions are a part of that.

And I think that anybody doing real sincere spiritual work will eventually at some point begin to cut through some of those transference and some of the unconsciously held notions of God.

Yeah,

That's a,

I'm glad you brought up the unconscious because that's where so much of our confusion is rooted.

Yes.

And we're not aware of the ways in which our brain has been conditioned.

I think I said this earlier,

But we're not aware of those dynamics that are going on at a level below our perception.

And as you know,

When I started reading A Course in Miracles,

That particular system cuts directly through the ego and speaks to something in you that you can't articulate.

And it may be so uncomfortable in the beginning.

I've since gotten very used to it,

But in the beginning,

I had resistance coming up that I had no idea what it was about,

Where it was coming from,

But it was upsetting.

And it's because it targets your errors in a way that is kind of sneaky and is happening outside of your awareness.

So the brain doesn't know what to do with that.

You know,

The brain is like,

Something's happening.

I'm out of control.

The ego is thinking,

Oh my God,

Things are going horribly wrong here.

This makes no sense.

And eventually,

Like I said,

Things settle down,

But it's brilliant the way that works.

I would recommend that to anybody who really wants to challenge themselves and their belief systems to just read like the first three,

Four chapters and see what happens.

Well,

One of the core concepts in the Course in Miracles is that we are not the author of reality.

And we stubbornly resist that because we'd like to believe that we are,

And we'd like to believe that we create our own reality.

And of course,

We live out our own creations all the time,

But that doesn't mean that we have the authorship of what reality really is.

And what the Course does is it systematically deconstructs this arrogance of thinking that we are the author of reality to bring us to a true availability,

To really see what God is,

To see what reality is in its true nature.

That's how we might conceive of our ego as something which is in competition with our inner being for authority,

For control.

And one of the things that makes people very uncomfortable when they consider that there actually is a God essence,

Not only that exists but is what they are,

Is that it challenges every notion of who we think we are and what we think is real,

And especially to a mind that relies on fact.

That is a very uncomfortable truth.

And a mind that's used to thinking of itself simply as a separate thing with agency.

Well,

I think you do have a worthwhile point there a bit,

Because we do have will,

And what we could think of as free will,

Which of course needs to be a whole other episode.

But though we have free will,

We don't have the capacity to determine reality.

And any idiot can look and see that.

I mean,

You can will,

You can make choices in your life,

But that doesn't mean that you turn the earth or make the sun rise and fall.

That's fairly obvious if we look with even just a little bit of sense.

Right.

But from an atheistic perspective,

Those things.

.

.

I mean,

I've tried to get my atheist friends to explain to me,

I mean,

This is the challenge,

Why is there something rather than nothing?

And I get answers like,

Physics,

It's just the way it is,

But why?

And I forget who said that in science you get one free miracle,

Which is that anything exists at all.

And from there,

It's just all random happenstance and whatever we decide to do with our lives,

Which to me is a very unsatisfying solution.

Well,

Even an atheist and even a good scientific atheist,

Which in my mind means one that's truly willing to investigate without bias and predetermined axioms.

Even a true atheist and true scientist will eventually become a mystic,

Essentially.

I mean,

If you look at the life of someone like Einstein or such beings,

They arrive at a point where their understanding borders on the mystical and they may not use the same language,

But we might arrive at the same truth without ever having held a conception of God at all.

Well,

Even Einstein famously said that there are two ways to view reality and that's that either nothing is a miracle or that everything is.

Which I think is his way of reconciling the equations that he was never able to solve.

And in a sense,

Both of those things are true.

Because it's simply,

Everything simply is.

And is that miraculous?

Well,

From a certain standpoint,

It could be,

But it's also simply what is.

Yes.

And you know,

One of the things that makes this conversation on God complicated,

Given what you just said,

Is that there are different levels of experience of divinity.

And that can be confusing to an individual because there are different ways of experiencing God and they're not necessarily coherent with each other.

Yes.

So ultimately God ends up being a very personal thing,

But it's important,

I think,

To just rely on the truth that God can be known.

It just can't necessarily,

And whether you want to call God he,

She,

It,

That,

Or simply use no name at all,

It can't be known through the habitual tools of the mind.

It requires a shift in awareness such that yoga can help provide or other traditions.

And it requires a malleability of your thinking processes and habits of perception.

Yeah.

It requires that deep desire to know what's true,

What's real,

Beyond what I have conceived of,

Beyond my established axioms and precepts.

So you brought a poem today,

I believe,

Did you?

I did.

I did.

This one is Rumi,

And it's maybe my favorite of his.

In the first line,

He quotes something that Jesus said.

You know,

One of the things that poetry can do that maybe our intellectual discourses can't achieve is it gives us that feel.

And you know,

If we follow the poem into our heart,

Into our being,

It has the potential to give us a taste of something sublime.

So this one,

Like I said,

It's Rumi.

Lo,

I am with you always,

Means when you look for God,

God is in the look of your eyes,

In the thought of looking,

Nearer to you than yourself or the things that have happened to you.

There's no need to go outside.

Be melting snow.

Wash yourself of yourself.

A white flower grows in the quietness.

Let your tongue become that flower.

So beautiful.

Rumi always has that capacity to deliver us into the heart.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Into the Mystery.

We hope you gained something useful.

If you'd like to learn more about our work,

You can go to our websites.

Mine is at adivadra.

Org,

A-D-I-V-A-J-R-A dot org.

Or visit rishikas at interdimensionalyoga.

Com.

If you have questions or topics you'd like to hear about in future episodes,

Be sure to drop us a line.

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Again,

Thanks for listening.