When we are separated from God in our thought, our belief is of no use, our worship is of little use.
Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Related Material by Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Compiled by Wahiduddin Richard Shelquist – wahiduddin.net
God and humanity are like the two ends of one line. When believers in God conceive of God as a separate entity and of humans as being separate from God, they make themselves exiles, exiles from the realm of God. They hold fast to the form of God created by themselves, and they do not reach the Spirit of God. However good and virtuous they have been in life, however religious in their actions, they have not fulfilled the purpose of their life. …
Those who think that God is not outside but only within are as wrong as those who believe that God is not within but only outside. In fact God is both inside and outside, but it is very necessary to begin by believing in that God outside. From our childhood we have learned everything outside. We learn what the eye is by looking at the eyes of others; everything we see in ourselves we have always learned from outside.
So even in order to learn to see God we must begin by seeing God outside: as the Creator, the Judge, the Knower of all things, the Forgiver; and when we have understood God better, the next step is that the God that we have always seen outside we now also find within, and that completes our worship. If we have only found God outside then we are God’s worshippers, but we remain separate from God and there is no communion, which is the purpose of life.
Commentary by Murshid S.A.M. (Sufi Ahmed Murad)
Samuel L. Lewis
Just as in electricity there must be a circuit that current may flow, so in the Divine Life on a much greater scale must there be a circuit. By cutting God asunder, by making God in one’s mind as something different, something apart, there can be no worship, there can be no love. Love unites, and the worship of a tree or flower may contain more of divinity than the prayer wherein God is placed far away. If God is love, if God is like Father or Mother, how can God be far away?