An ideal is beyond explanation. To analyze God is to dethrone God.
Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Related Material by Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Compiled by Wahiduddin Richard Shelquist – wahiduddin.net
Belief is like a staircase. Each step takes one higher, but when one remains standing on a certain step of the staircase one does not progress. Belief may nail the feet to the ground and keep one there … standing on a certain spot on a staircase. As people evolve so their belief evolves, until they come to that stage where they harmonize with all the different beliefs, where they are no longer against any belief. Then they are not nailed down any more; they are above all the different beliefs. Very often a person says, ‘I cannot understand what God is. Can you explain God to me? But if God were to be explained God would not be God. To explain God is to dethrone God.
God apart, can one explain anything fine and subtle such as gratitude, love, or devotion, in words? How much can be explained? Words are too inadequate to explain great feelings, so how can God be explained in words?
Since to analyze God means to dethrone God, the less said on the subject the better. … Everyone has their own imagination of God. It is best if everyone is left to their own imagination.
However religious or pious, one cannot explain God; not even a mystic or philosopher can explain God. The Ideal of God is the first lesson that must be learnt; and it cannot be learnt by analysis. Therefore the intellectual mind which seeks for an analysis of God is always sure to be disappointed. The philosopher spoke truly, ‘To analyze God is to dethrone God.’ Analysis can never portray even the Ideal of God. That is why every messenger, Muhammad, Christ, Moses, Abraham, emphasized the one word: faith. … It is the same with every ideal, even with the Ideal of God. An ideal is beyond explanation.
( from the Sufi Message Series, Volume VII – In an Eastern Rose Garden: The Effect of Prayer )
Commentary by Murshid S.A.M. (Sufi Ahmed Murad)
Samuel L. Lewis
The realm of Ideals, or what Plato called Ideas, exists above the mind-mesh. The Divine Light striking the realm of Ideals is partly refracted, and then reflected above the mind-mesh. This produces the Ideas in the realm of Pure Light, so that their Nature is Light; also they are purely God, taking on what might be called the Intelligent Aspect of God. As human mind does not and cannot reach this plane, it is impossible to express the condition there in human thought and in human words. These arise below the mind-mesh. Besides, what we call exposition or analysis is of the nature of distinction; things are known by how and to what extent they differ. The spiritual Ideas are not differentiated.
In the same way, all that is above the mental Akasha is God, whether it is explained, or described or referred to in various manners and by different words. Nevertheless, these words do not really bring one any knowledge; they are symbols which indicate there are different conditions, but as all these conditions are above and beyond the human mind and larger than the human mind in scope, they are no more intelligible to it than the ocean would be to a cup.