My God in Many Images and Names
A Lifelong Affair of the Heart and Mind
Almost the whole of my life has been oriented toward God. This is not a political or cultural statement but a confession of the central truth that has guided my heart and mind since my self-awakening and conversion to the divine life in 1970 when I was a troubled teenager.
Although I had had momentary intuitions of the divine presence before this momentous event, I only began to steer my life consciously toward God from that hour of awakening. But the God to whom I awoke—or, better, who awakened me—was a nameless and formless presence. It was pure light suffused with the honey of bliss, and it called me to itself with compassion and delight. I swam in this ocean of spiritual unity and happiness for many days, as I recount in my autobiography, The Light of the Self. And, even now, when reading the Upaniṣads or gazing upon an image of Krishna, a Catholic saint, the Buddha, a Hindu siddha, or a Jain tirthankara, this holy light, this formless light of eternal life, reveals itself in my intellect, mind, and heart as a spiritual sun emerging from behind the clouds of mundane existence.
The quest to live truly in the service of this holy light has led me through numerous religions and spiritual paths, and while I have learned much from each one of them, none of them has been able to keep its hold on me. This is not due to fickleness but because the formless light of the sacred has continued to grant me fresh insights that cannot be limited to the images, names, and scriptures of only one spiritual path. Some may see this as a defect in my spirituality or even as a sign of its lack, but my inward guide counsels me to keep moving forward on the path toward itself while still loving all of my deities and the inner guides that have accompanied me this far: Krishna, Radha, Mary, Jesus, the Buddha, Sri Ramana Maharshi, Swami Sivananda, Neem Karoli Baba, and Shreyamsanatha among many others.
I have loved God—the formless holy light—under all of these names and images, and, again, on this balmy morning, this devout mood arises like the polestar in my soul and raises me into union with the divine as the safe haven of my heart and mind and as the ultimate purpose of my earthly journey.
I am aware that the apparent eclecticism of my spiritual insights and writings may be off-putting to some readers. A reader committed exclusively to one religious or spiritual path may stop reading as soon I make a reference to a teaching or holy figure that is not part of their tradition. Other readers may think that I am picking and choosing aspects of religions that I like, as if I were dining at a spiritual salad bar. But I affirm that I have been guided from the hour of my awakening—and before—by the divine presence that has ordained the major turns that my life has taken and that has guided me into and out of many religions and spiritualities. Along this twisting way, I have learned that the spiritual life is singular although its expressions are diverse. No matter the path that one follows, whether traditional or uniquely evoked by the divine, there is no escape from seasons of inner purgation and illumination as one tries to live in faithful accord with the sublime presence within. It is no different for me in this regard than it is for a devout contemplative or yogi living within the secure but sometimes confining embrace of a particular tradition and practice. A central reality for all spiritual practitioners, whether we are self-guided or are students of a human guide, is that we retain clear awareness of the divine presence and remain conscious of its gracious embrace only by rejecting what is false and detrimental and by embracing what is true and wholesome.
In our post-postmodern age, many of the markers of life that people once took for granted have been effaced by savage academic theories and the virtualization effects of the internet.1 This is as true of religions and spirituality as it is of shopping malls and newspapers. When ancient spiritual traditions are naturalized as therapies for achieving calmness and efficiency or when they are reduced to marketable products, the connection to the ancient worlds of metaphysical meaning that they evoke is nearly lost. It’s virtually impossible to invent an effective spirituality in the aftermath of this diminution of humanity’s extensive spiritual heritage, so today’s spiritual seeker must be awakened from within. The proof of the validity of this awakening will be an increasing sensitivity to the cycles of spiritual purgation and illumination that is the infallible and timeless path to conscious union with the divine. But if the path of allowing ourselves to be taught directly by the divine seems too steep, we can apprentice ourselves to a genuinely spiritual teacher or a venerable tradition of purifying practice and transcendent wisdom. Even when we let ourselves be taught by others on this less direct path, we must rely on external guidance only until we learn to hear the divine voice within us on our own. Then we can entrust ourselves to the play of intermittent purgation and illumination, which will prevent us from falling into spiritual errors or from falling away from the path of the divine life. Then we will be truly spiritual without being religious. And, most importantly, we will be able to evade the trap of undue submission to teachers with secondary motives and to the exclusivism of thinking that we cannot have a spiritual life apart from the organization where our spiritual life began and was first nurtured. Of course, as long as our inner guide and our outer guides concur, we can and should continue to learn the ways of the divine in any religious community that serves that end exclusively.
Because the path of learning from the divine within requires a capacity for testing one’s spiritual progress against the revealed essence of the religious and spiritual heritage of humanity, it requires a level of introspection and honesty that is difficult for many people to achieve on their own without external guides. To facilitate the spiritual regeneration of humanity as a whole, there will thus alway be a need for new communities of the spirit. Whether they are unprecedented communities gathered around an enlightened teacher or a new revelation or whether they emerge as movements of revitalization from older spiritual movements, their continued emergence is a perennial sign of the care of the divine and an impetus to unite with its liberative and perfecting perfection.
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For canny insights on the effects of digital virtualization, see Ross Douthat’s recent column in The New York Times, “An Age of Extinction Is Coming. Here’s How to Survive,” April 19, 2025. See also Kenneth Rose, Reviving Intellectual Intuition in Metaphysics: Contemplative Philosophies and Being (Bloomsbury, 2024), 87-9.