Commonplace: Intuitional Proof of the Existence of God

What does "Universal Religion" say about God? It says that the proof of the existence of God lies in ourselves. It is an inner experience. Recall to your mind at least some moment in your life in prayer or worship when you felt that the trammels of your body had nearly vanished, that the duality of experience — pleasure and pain, petty love and hate, etc. — had almost receded from your mind. Pure Bliss and tranquillity had been welling up in your heart and you were enjoying an unruffled calm — Bliss and contentment. Though this kind of higher experience does not often come to all, yet there can be no doubt of the fact that all men, some time or other, in prayer or in mood of worship or meditation, perceive it in a less marked degree, at least. Is this not a proof of the existence of God? What other direct proof than the existence of Bliss in ourselves in real prayer or worship can we give of the existence and nature of God? Though there is the cosmological proof of the existence of God, — from effect we rise to cause, from the world to the world-maker, — and there is the teleological proof as well, from the telos (plan, adaptation) in the world, we rise to the Supreme Intelligence that makes the plan and adaptation. There is also the moral proof — from conscience and the sense of perfection we rise to the Perfect Being to whom our responsibility is due. Still, we should admit that these proofs are more or less the products of inference. We can not have full or direct knowledge of God through the limited powers of the intellect. Intellect gives only a partial and indirect view of things. To view a thing intellectually is not to see it by being one with it: it is to view it by being apart from it. But Intuition, which we shall later explain, is the direct grasp of truth. It is in this Intuition that Bliss-consciousness, or God-consciousness, is realized.

Paramahansa Yogananda, The Science of Religion (Yogoda and Sat Sanga Headquarters, 1925), 43-45.