How can I know God is? How can I know the world makes sense? How can I know there is purpose in living? How can I know? These are the questions of all of us. When we seek for an answer to them, where shall we look? Look out at the vastness of things. See the stars blossoming like the unfolding petals of a rose and you sense the moving order that rules the depths of space. Look at the least blade of grass out of sunlight and water and air, it makes new life! – and you sense the inconceivable intelligence that works in the least of things. And more than intelligence! If we could get at the heart of things, a heart is what we would find-something much more like heart than mind, much more like love than law, much more like beauty than reason. Take rainbows, for example. There is a reason for rain, but not for a rainbow. The universe would operate as efficiently without one, only not so beautifully, that is all. Only the spirit of divine delight could have conceived rainbows, the same Spirit that made butterflies-those flowers with wings! And indeed all the infinite, outpouring , heaped-up, overflowing variety of things bursting the seams of the world makes me know absolutely that something is at work here so alive that life is too weak a word to describe it. The Spirit of God is not just life, not just intelligence. It is sheer exuberance, the love of joy in living! It never makes two blades of grass alike. It crowds every crack with growing things and space with universes. Clouds form and dissolve, birds sing, insects rise, leaves tremble, flowers unfold-all is change, activity, livingness. You may be part of this livingness. The universe is a web, beautifully woven; its threads spiraling out, linking every living thing, even every atom, so intimately so perfectly that no least thread, no least point at the perimeter, can be touched, but the whole web vibrates in harmony. You can be one with this oneness of things. You need not be little and alone, isolated and meaningless. You are part of life. One with life, you loose your sense of separateness, your sense of self. No bird flies, but your thought takes flight; no bird sings, but a song is in your heart. You are brother to the fly and cousin to the cricket. You are as much a part of life as a cloud is part of the air. Who shall say where cloud ends and air begins? At its edges, it is some of both. At your edges, you are part of all that is, part of the livingness of life. In the infinite flux of life, there is no separateness; there is only wholeness-only the many faces of the One. Give yourself to living, and you will find meaning, for you will be one with the One life. Where shall you look to see God? Look at yourself. Do you see a mortal, flesh and blood creature? That is not what I see when I look at you. I see a spiritual being. Why do I think you are spiritual? For one thing, because you have to live as if you were. If we know what makes a creature happy, we know its true nature. To be happy, a swallow must fly. So we say it is a bird of flight. To be happy, a thrush must sing. So we say that it is a songbird. To be happy, a person must try to satisfy spiritual desires. What else then can we say, save that a person is Spirit!

- courtesy Akhand Jyoti