When I speak of a relationship to God, I don't speak of hypothesis. And I don't speak of conjecture.
Every human being has a right to a relationship with God. This doesn't mean that one acquires a real relationship; there is a definite price for that, and the price is not constrained by the limitations of one's practice, or the beliefs one applies to the situation.
We pay what the Lord demands; if He demands everything, then we pay everything. The secret is that if we know the Lord, if the Lord has spoken within our hearts, we will then pay anything.
Make no mistake about it. When you look around you, you can be certain: every cruelty, every kind of force, every insistence on being right and every kind of egoism that you see is not of the Lord. A man can be 99% of the way to the Lord, and yet then he is still 100% not with the Lord. So most of what we see, most human action, is 100% not with the Lord.
The relationship to the Lord isn't in the prayers, or the inner exercises. It's not in the books; it isn't in the Masters who have eager acolytes sitting at their feet, waiting for the next gem of wisdom. It is, rather, the relationship to everything in its totality, to all that is. And although it includes every kind of intelligence that one can think up, every rational kind of thinking and response, it also includes all of the irrational thinking and responses, and even the situations in which there is no thinking and there is no response.
So everything is within the Lord; and this is not a hypothesis. It's the truth.
The Lord comes and goes whenever He wishes. We write lists of the ways He should come and go, and lists of ways He should be. We write of ways to call Him, and how to be when He is here; and yet none of these things are of the Lord, even though each one of them has something to do with Him. In the end, He is not of this world, and every effort that we undertake to make Him a part of it in the way that
we wish Him to be is in a certain sense useless. It is as though we want to take reflections in a mirror and make them real.
The deeper a man or woman is called into their own life, the closer they tread to the heart of the path the Lord has set out for them. And it is this depth that matters; this constant call, this wish to penetrate ever deeper towards the heart of God's intention for us. That intention has no words to define it, but is composed entirely of love and of compassion. In so far as we tread on this path, we move closer to that, until perhaps, finally, we may begin to see that we are secure in this world. Secure in the place that the Lord has prepared for us. Secure in the sense that this is exactly right, where we are; and that all things are quite right, indeed, because the Lord has made them.
It is in these moments when we see we are secure that for a second we sense the presence of the Lord with us. Even then, it's only a shadow that passes over us; but a shadow cast by a glory as great as the Lord's glory is already above all other shadows.
May your soul be filled with light.