The impersonal God cannot be described, or even understood with the intellect. The only way you can know the Absolute is to be one with Spirit. It is only the personal God that you can think of or worship. I would ask any human being if he can convey what God is like without employing any personal concept; he can’t. When you think of God’s love, you think of the human love you have felt in your heart, and you picture God’s love as greater than that. Because goodness, love, wisdom, have been embodied in persons you know, or more perfectly so in the lives of the saints, you are able to conceive these as qualities of God, and to say that He is kind and good and beautiful, that He is wise and loving. Do you see how tangible He is? But without a personal example of God’s divine qualities, we could not conceive of Him at all. So long as we are identified with our own body consciousness, God will be more real to us in the personal aspect than in the impersonal. So it is easier to strive first to realise Him as the personal God. In fact, we should approach Him through the visible, because that is more tangible to us. For this reason are great ones such as Jesus sent on earth. Though one with God, they have a body of bones and flesh. In this way, God takes a body at will to guide and inspire His children. But He cannot be confined to any one body because that would mean He is born and He dies; He would be limited, not limitless. He would not be God.
Extract from the book “The Divine Romance” by Sri Sri Paramahansa Yogananda
