That leads us to the next point, the relation of God without to God
within. To the yogi, who is the very type of Hindu thought, there is no
definite proof of God save the witness of the Self within to His
existence, and his idea of finding the proof of God is that you should
strip away from your consciousness all limitations, and thus reach the
stage where you have pure consciousness—save a veil of the thin
nirvanic matter. Then you know that God is. So you read in the
Upanishad: “Whose only proof is the witness of the Self.” This is very
different from Western methods of thought, which try to demonstrate God
by a process of argument. The Hindu will tell you that you cannot
demonstrate God by any argument or reasoning; He is above and beyond
reasoning, and although the reason may guide you on the way, it will
not prove to demonstration that God is. The only way you can know Him
is by diving into yourself. There you will find Him, and know that He
is without as well as within you; and Yoga is a system that enables you
to get rid of everything from consciousness that is not God, save that
one veil of the nirvanic atom, and so to know that God is, with an
unshakable certainty of conviction. To the Hindu that inner conviction
is the only thing worthy to be called faith, and this gives you the
reason why faith is said to be beyond reason, and so is often confused
with credulity. Faith is beyond reason, because it is the testimony of
the Self to himself, that conviction of existence as Self, of which
reason is only one of the outer manifestations; and the only true faith
is that inner conviction, which no argument can either strengthen or
weaken, of the innermost Self of you, that of which alone you are
entirely sure. It is the aim of Yoga to enable you to reach that Self
constantly not by a sudden glimpse of intuition, but steadily,
unshakably, and unchangeably, and when that Self is reached, then the
question: “Is there a God?” can never again come into the. human mind.