Consider this essential question: Do we know about God or do we know God? The first question is conceptual; the second, experiential. In the domain of things and objects, conceptual or intellectual knowing helps us to balance our check books, build computers, and so forth, but it will not help us to experience God. When it comes to the experience of God, a different kind of knowing is needed, what Yogananda terms “intuition.” To know God in an experiential or intuitive way is to embody the very life and love of God within our awareness and thus to become God-like. The first stage in the development of intuition is the choice to leave the world of measurable things behind and to enter into our own deep inward spaciousness. We do this, of course, through the discipline of meditation or contemplative prayer. Without this kind of practice we remain imprisoned within the matrix of the ego’s distortions. A spacious interior world waits for us, a door that opens into the divine life. This is what Jesus meant when he said, “The kingdom of God is within you.”
Beloved Guru,
You have taught me that
A door to heaven,
A door to home,
Awaits me always.
