Mysticism is an outlook on life. Things which seem real to an average person are unreal in the eyes of the mystic; and the things that seem unreal in the eyes of the average person are real in the eyes of the mystic.

For the mystic God is the source and goal of all. God is all, and all is God; but a real mystic does not say, as an intellectual student of philosophy does, "I do not believe in God, although I believe in the abstract." Such a man is unpoetic and without an ideal. He may have got hold of some truth, but it is a flower without fragrance. One cannot worship the abstract; no one can communicate with the abstract, give anything to it, nor take anything from it. To worship in that way is meaningless. We must have something before us to love, to worship, to adhere to, to look up to, to raise high. But while it is true if we say, "God is everything and all", yet at the same time, from another point of view, "everything" means "nothing."

The mystic says, "If you have no God, make one." It is the man without an ideal and without imagination who ignores God. A cup of water is as interesting as the ocean, or perhaps even more so when one is thirsty. A personal God is as important as, or even more important than, the idea of the abstract from which we gain nothing. We human beings have our limited mind. We can grasp the idea of God inasmuch as we can conceive of God. For instance we may have a friend whom we love and whom we wish to praise; and yet he is above our praise. All we can do is to say, "How kind, how good, how patient, or how wonderful is my friend." That is all. Our words cannot make him greater. Our words cannot even express fully what we ourselves think of him. All we can do is to make a conception of our friend for our own understanding.

It is the same with God. Man cannot comprehend God fully. All he can do is to form a conception of God for himself in order to make comprehensible something which is unlimited. That is why the mystic does not say, "My realization of God is higher than yours, therefore I keep away from you."

I have seen a mystic walking in a religious procession with the peasants, singing hymns with them before an idol of stone. He himself was greater than the god in the procession and yet he was singing with the same reverence as everybody else. He never had any desire to show that his belief, his realization, was higher or greater than the realization of the others.

God is not abstract for the mystic; to him He is a reality. The mystic does not think of God as abstract, although he knows God to be so. It is not a question of knowing, but of being. God for the mystic is the stepping-stone to self-realization. He is the gate, He is the door, the entrance to the heavens. God, for the mystic, is a key with which to open the secret of life, the abode from whence he comes and to which he returns and where he finds himself at home.

Once a Western seeker of truth went to a sage in China and said to him, "I have come to learn from you what truth is." The sage said, "Many of your missionaries come to us here and teach your faith. Why do you come to me?" "Well," he said, "what they teach about is God. We know about God; but now I come to you to ask you about the mystery of life." The sage said, "If you know God, that is all there is to be known, there is nothing more. That is all the mystery there is."