After describing the human condition in the first part of this lecture, Hazrat Inayat Khan now unfolds the need for each seeker to envision God according to that person’s own understanding.

And now the question arises, if God is absolute, then what is the use of worship, or prayer, or of believing in God in some form or other – as King, or Judge, or Creator, or the Superior Being? What is the use of it?

It is very easy to read in a book that it is the absolute that is God, that it is the abstract. This means no one and nothing, or all and everything! Indeed, there is some truth in this. But the idea of God being the absolute is larger than man’s mind. The mind wants to understand, but the brain cannot grasp it. Many intellectual people have lost their way by reading somewhere that God is abstract. It means nothing to them, for they have not yet arrived at that stage of evolution where they can assimilate such an idea. Before getting to that stage they have swallowed a pill they can never digest. On top of this come people who have new ideas and thoughts, and who give lessons about these. They say, ‘You are God; I am God’. In this way their insolence becomes greater and greater. The lofty ideal of God, the ideal which uplifted the seekers of all ages, is being lost. Those who have arrived at realization do not speak about such things in connection with the God-ideal; they realize it in their hearts and keep quiet. But those who have the God-ideal only in the brain, who speak about it and want to touch it, do not touch the ideal. And where do they get to? Nowhere.

Man can only conceive of an idea in the way he is able to conceive of a thing. For instance, if one speaks about fairies no one will think of them as trees or plants but as human beings. If an artist is told to paint an angel he will paint it in the form of a human being. He will conceive it in the form to which he is accustomed, which is near and dear to his mind.

Naturally every man conceives the idea of God differently. One conceives God as the Judge; he does not see justice in the world, so he sees it in God. Another conceives God as the Creator; man knows himself to be a creator, so he thinks that God is the perfect creator. It is natural for man to make God that which he thinks to be best; therefore whether people belong to the same religion or nation or not, each one of them has his own God, depending on the way he looks upon Him. To have one’s own belief is the first step on the spiritual path. It is not right for a person to say, ‘Believe in my God.’ Someone else may not be capable of believing in the same way that he does. He believes in his own way, so let him believe in that way. After all it is a first belief; it is nothing but a garb, a garb made by one’s own imagination. In order to kindle that tendency to imagine, to idealize, to worship, the wise in olden times said to those who were not capable of imagination, ‘Here is a statue of God.’ Those who worship these statues, the Chinese, the Greeks, the Hindus, were they mistaken? No, each person’s God is as he looks upon Him; and if one says that there are as many gods as there are people in the world, that is true also. Behind it is God, one and the same God of all. First there is the conception, the imagination, and in this way everyone proceeds. And if someone wanted to use another person’s imagination, the wise said, ‘Well, take this little picture; there is your God.’

It is a pity that it was not only in the past that people were primitive: today people’s imagination is even worse. Man has become a machine, toiling from morning till evening. He has very little time to imagine; if he had, he would be another being. Any scientific discovery that is made is thought most wonderful, but it must be expressed in a simple statement. Formerly things were expressed in terms of poetry, in the form of music, in symbolic pictures, so that a person might think and penetrate and understand, so that his soul might be touched after it unfolded itself by the fineness of what he saw or heard. All the great scriptures of the past were given in such a form, never in a crude form.

Today a man comes and says, ‘Will you tell me about truth? I want truth in simple words.’ But truth is never told in simple words; besides, that which can be spoken of in simple words cannot be truth. Truth should be distinguished from facts; it is something that must be realized, discovered. Sometimes when I meet those who want to find tangible truth I feel inclined to write on a piece of stone TRUTH, and to give it to them and say, ‘Hold it fast; here is tangible truth!’

How does one benefit by a belief in God? How is the knowledge of God acquired if belief in God is sufficient? The thousands and millions of people who believe in God, are they all progressive and happy? It is not so. Belief is the first step; the second step is to know the relationship between God and man. In order to understand this, one must be able to concentrate, to contemplate, to meditate, so as to forget the false identity, which one has conceived in one’s mind from the time one was born on earth. All the different methods that sages and seers have taught humanity are to help one to forget that false conception of self. And the method one can adopt to discover truth is the knowledge of God, and by making proper use of this in one’s prayers, in one’s concentration, in one’s practices. In these one benefits by means of the God-ideal, and one comes in this way to the self-realization, which is the fulfilment of life’s purpose.