To know God

If you want to know God, then turn your face toward your friend, and don't look away.

Rumi

The Formula

The mystic was back from the desert. "Tell us," they said, "what God is like."
But how could he ever tell them what he had experienced in his heart? Can God be put into words?
He finally gave them a formula - so inaccurate, so inadequate - in the hope that some of them might be tempted to experience it for themselves.
They sized upon the formula. They made it into a sacred text. They imposed it on others as holy belief. They went to great pains to spread it in foreign lands. Some even gave their lives for it.
The mystic was sad. It might have been better if he had said nothing.

Anthony de Mello in "The Song of the Bird" page 30

Do you wish to catch a glimpse of God? Look intently at creation.

Anthony de Mello

God has no religion

God has no religion.

Mahatma Gandhi

The highest knowledge of God

The highest knowledge of God is to know God as unknowable. There is far too much God talk; the world is sick of it. There is too little awareness, too little love, too little happiness, but let's not use those words either There's too little dropping of illusions, dropping of errors, dropping of attachments and cruelty, too little awareness. That's what the world is suffering from, not from a lack of religion. Religion is supposed to be about a lack of awareness, of waking up. Look what we've degenerated into.

Anthony de Mello in "Awareness" page 102

God's home

Once upon a time there was a forest where the birds sang by day and the insects by night. Trees flourished, flowers bloomed and all manner of creatures roamed about in freedom.

And all who enterd there were led to Solitude which is the home of God who dwells in Nature's silence and Nature's beauty.

But then the Age of Unconsciousness arrived when it became possible for people to contruct buildings a thousand feet high and to destroy rivers and forests and mountains in a month. So houses for worship were built from the wood of the forest trees and from the stone under the forest soil. Pinnacle, spire and minaret ponted towards the sky; the air was filled with the sound of bells, with prayer and chant and exhortation.

And God was suddenly without a home.

Anthony de Mello in "The Prayer of the frog" page33