God Without and God Within

God Without and God Within

That leads us to the next point, the relation of God without to

God within. To the yogi, who is the very type of Hindu thought,

there is no definite proof of God save the witness of the Self

within to His existence, and his idea of finding the proof of God

is that you should strip away from your consciousness all

limitations, and thus reach the stage where you have pure

consciousness--save a veil of the thin nirvanic matter. Then you

know that God is. So you read in the Upanishad: "Whose only proof

is the witness of the Self." This is very different from Western

methods of thought, which try to demonstrate God by a process of

argument. The Hindu will tell you that you cannot demonstrate God

by any argument or reasoning; He is above and beyond reasoning,

and although the reason may guide you on the way, it will not

prove to demonstration that God is. The only way you can know Him

is by diving into yourself. There you will find Him, and know

that He is without as well as within you; and Yoga is a system

that enables you to get rid of everything from consciousness that

is not God, save that one veil of the nirvanic atom, and so to

know that God is, with an unshakable certainty of conviction. To

the Hindu that inner conviction is the only thing worthy to be

called faith, and this gives you the reason why faith is said to

be beyond reason, and so is often confused with credulity. Faith

is beyond reason, because it is the testimony of the Self to

himself, that conviction of existence as Self, of which reason is

only one of the outer manifestations; and the only true faith is

that inner conviction, which no argument can either strengthen or

weaken, of the innermost Self of you, that of which alone you are

entirely sure. It is the aim of Yoga to enable you to reach that

Self constantly not by a sudden glimpse of intuition, but

steadily, unshakably, and unchangeably, and when that Self is

reached, then the question: "Is there a God?" can never again

come into the. human mind.