Making the Discovery of God
One’s Personal Interest
Realization of God is unrelated to any romantic love for God. It relates to the deeper feeling in a person that his future depends solely on one God. He can have his beloved Paradise only when God gives it to him.
Similarly, one can save oneself from the dreaded hell only when God saves him. It is only when this kind of deep consciousness develops in one that the door to realization of God opens to him.
Realization of God is no philosophic concept. Maarifah is inevitably linked with personal interest. The attainment of a high level of such realization is possible only when man discovers it at an intellectual level; when he learns ideologically that nothing save this can be his real destination; when a person’s mind is fully convinced of its veracity.
On the other hand it is also essential that a person’s personal interest should be fully associated with the realization of God. In this matter he should develop a heightened sense of discovery to the extent that he starts feeling with great intensity that without the attainment of God’s realization his existence will be rendered meaningless, his life will become desolate, all his future prospects will be set at naught and he will be a failure in every respect.
Only when this is an individual’s thinking, both theoretically or ideologically, and practically in all respects, does he become desirous of God-realization to the last extent that all the doors to it are opened immediately to him. No door remains closed to him. This is the way of God-realization. It is not possible to reach the goal of God-realization by any other path.