Devotional Path vs Path of Knowledge: Which Spiritual Path Is Right for You? (EP46)

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Discover which spiritual path is right for you: the devotional path or the path of knowledge. Both are universal spiritual practices found across all major religious traditions, yet they work in fundamentally different ways.

Learn the key differences: the devotional path emphasizes a personal, intimate relationship with God in form—deities, saints, enlightened masters, angels, or ascended beings. The path of knowledge focuses on the formless absolute through meditation, contemplation, and inner awareness. Despite their differences, both paths lead to the same destination: God-realization, enlightenment, and unity consciousness.

What you'll discover in this episode:

• Form vs. formless God: which approach resonates with each spiritual path and your own attachment style
• How attachment theory and relational wounding influence your spiritual path
• Why Western culture makes devotion challenging for many spiritual seekers
• The role of surrender, reverence, and trust in authentic spiritual practice
• Distinguishing between real enlightened teachers and false gurus
• Why skepticism toward the devotional path may reflect unhealed relational wounds
• How to integrate both paths - the devotional path (bhakti path) and the path of knowledge (jnana path) for complete spiritual transformation
• The relationship between self-love and spiritual surrender

Whether you're drawn to meditation, contemplative practice, prayer, mantra, or personal relationship with a sacred being, this episode clarifies how different spiritual practices serve the same ultimate goal: self-realization, enlightenment, and the direct experience of divinity.

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This podcast show is for people dedicated to spiritual awakening, spiritual practice, psychology, healing work, collective healing and awakening, and global positive social change. 

For free meditations, private sessions, and the Ground of Love Healing School, see www.thegroundoflove.com

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This podcast show explores meditation, mindfulness, consciousness, spiritual awakening, and spiritual growth, with a strong focus on personal healing, trauma healing, emotional healing, and somatic healing. We dive into nonduality, embodied spirituality, the true self, life purpose, and spiritual practice, while also addressing shadow and integration themes like spiritual bypass, ego-death, root causes, and holistic healing. 

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Transcript

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The thing that's missing is an actual experience with, some aspect of divinity in a form version of itself, like a deity or an angel or a saint or something like that. It's easy for people to talk about those things, but can you actually feel them in your heart, or are they just a concept to you? Because what I'm talking about here is an actual feeling, is an actual connection. This is not imagination. This is real. Welcome to the Ground of Love. I'm your host, Olivia Frazao. This is a podcast for people who are deeply dedicated to the spiritual journey. You are here for self-growth care, for others, and being of service to the world. This podcast is in service to you to help you remember who you are and why you are here, you will receive inspiration, clarity, and no BS Love. We are walking each other home. Let's begin. In this episode, we're going to talk about and compare and contrast two of the main spiritual paths, which are the path of devotion and the path of knowledge As I talk about these paths, we are looking across lineages. So this is not within a particular spiritual tradition. This is actually aspects of the spiritual path that can be found across most traditions first of all, in order to even understand this, we're going to begin by just considering what even is this spiritual path? We're gonna consider that we're going towards God-realization. And we're gonna look at what we're gonna call the form and the formless versions of God. Okay? And then we're gonna look at how each of the two paths that I'm talking about are directed towards each of those forms of God, either form or formless. We're also gonna look at how these paths are related to how we experience relationship, because one of them is more focused on relationship with other, and the other one is focused more on relationship with self As we look at how these paths relate in relationship, we need to look at our own conditioning, specifically our own attachment style, and that is within attachment theory, which I'll explain, and how our own conditioning makes it so that we have an easier way of relating either with others or with ourself that would lead us to have a preference to one of these two spiritual paths. We're also going to look at how the culture that we live in might pose a challenge to understanding, or feeling safe in a particular path okay, here we go So what even is the spiritual path? What are we actually doing? Maybe we are meditating, maybe we are going to church or temple once a week, maybe we're in some kind of a class, or we have a teacher or a healer that we're working with maybe you are interested in a particular lineage or involved in a particular lineage. The point here that we want to acknowledge is that all spiritual practices, and all spiritual lineages are ultimately taking us to the same exact place, which is what you could call God-realization. Okay, I don't need to use the word God. We could say self-realization, we could say enlightenment. The word is not the point. The point that I'm trying to make right now is there are many paths with many languages and many symbols and many, let's say, practices or tools that will ultimately take us, at the end of the day, to the same endpoint, which is self-realization, enlightenment, et cetera. The risk that we have is to lose sight of that endpoint and to lose sight of the understanding that every path takes us to the same endpoint. When we lose sight of that, we can become identified with the path itself rather than where the path is taking us to. And when that happens, we can say, "Oh, my path is better than your path," or, "My lineage is real and legitimate and yours is not," or whatever. There's some kind of a comparison there, some kind of an us versus them, or better or worse, or real or not real, and that gets-- that's illusion. So obviously, we want paths to be clean. We want integrity, compassion, heart-based approach. Yes, there can be crazy stuff that people get involved in that they think is a path to God realization, but really they're just stuck in dogma. They're stuck in some fundamentalist stuff. They're stuck in, maybe with a false guru, okay? So yes, we can be on what we think is a spiritual path, but actually it's leading us astray. What I'm talking about here is spiritual paths that are actually effective and clean. So what is it that we are ending up as or in? What I'm calling enlightenment or God realization. First of all, this is totally beyond my or probably anyone's domain to actually try to describe, so bear with me, Ultimately, it's an understanding of unity where I and you are not separate. Now, I'm naming this particular quality of God realization for a reason. I could talk about other things like wisdom, compassion, okay? But right now I'm pointing out the fact that we're looking at the reality, the ultimate reality that I and you are not separate. So why does this matter? We're gonna talk about God, or let's say wisdom, compassion, or absolute beingness, or love in two different ways right now, form and formless When I say form God, it is any emanation of the absolute that has, let's say, a particular quality to it. I'll get back to that. When I say formless, I mean that which literally cannot be described at all. The only way you could say it is the absolute itself. It's absolutely everything, and also nothing, and also everything, and also unnameable So because God ultimately, reality itself, self itself, love itself, existence itself is so unnameable and so hard to grasp, there is a benefit and almost I would say an inevitability from the human mind To creating some form version of God, basically naming God in some way, turning God into some kind of symbol or seeing God in some kind of form so that we have something to literally grasp with our mind And something to actually relate with So this is where I get back to the idea of relationship. When I said I and you are not separate, we need to look at our relationship with God in those terms One path, what I'm gonna call the devotional path, is the path in which we allow our understanding of God to be something that is form. This could, for example, be a deity, a master, a saint, a great being in your lineage that is considered to be God in manifest form. For example, in Christianity, that would be Jesus. In, let's say, Indian tradition, the yogic tradition, there would be the guru, a living, enlightened being. I know that in Buddhism, the concept of God is not spoken about in that way. We could get into the nuances of religion versus philosophy right now, but that's not my point. My point is all roads lead to Rome, even when they have very different linguistic and conceptual structures. So even within Buddhism, I could talk about the Buddha in this case, okay? The Buddha is someone who literally lived physical life, and you could also talk about Buddhas as those of enlightened nature or Buddha consciousness I could go on and on with different lineages, but I'm just giving some examples here. You can also look at a particular relationship with maybe an angel like Archangel Michael or a deity like Lakshmi or a saint like Padre Pio. You can look at, within any tradition, multiple beings that can serve the role as an emanation of the divine that a human being can feel reverence towards, trust towards, and can surrender themselves to, to be guided on the spiritual path towards God-realization. Now, this is a very important point. Ultimately, I said God-realization is I am you, you are me, there's no separation. When we experience the devotional path, we are purposely experiencing a relationship. There's an I-thou relationship. That does assume two. Relationship assumes I'm over here in reverence towards you that's over there that I'm looking at and bowing to, right? It's very important for us to understand that that is only a tool. Ultimately, with God-realization, we realize that I am also the thing that I am bowing to. I am also the same divinity as the divinity that I am bowing to. Now, that might sound sacrilegious. If someone's walking down the street and saying, "I'm Jesus," you probably think they've had a psychotic break, right? Because we need to look at what level of the spiritual path and what level of our concept of God we're considering right now. So ultimately, even in the devotional path, that to which I feel and act out through my whatever devotional practice is, my prayer, my bowing, whatever it is, reverence, ultimately, my true nature is the same as the ultimate true nature of whatever that-- whoever that being is or whatever that emanation of God is, right? Because at the ultimate apex of this whole story is absolute being as God, the undefined, the formless. But through the devotional path, we purposely experience divine emanation in form in order to have a relationship with something that we can actually conceptualize. Okay. Now let's go to the other path, which is the path of knowledge This path tends towards, and again, we're talking about this path within multiple lineages, so I'm doing kind of a generalization here. This path tends towards seeing God only as the absolute and not considering or looking towards a form version of God. So in this case, what's left? We are not going to be having an I-thou relationship in this path because there's no thou that we're able to actually even define In this path, we are in the understanding that God is everything. Just like as I mentioned in the devotional path, that actually is also the case, but it's not, let's say, seen or acted out that way during the experience of relating with the divine. In this path, in the path of knowledge, you are only doing, let's say, the oneness factor, rather than the two being in relationship, you and the divinity having some kind of a-- you having some kind of a relationship with that. In this case, divinity is undefined. So what's left basically is divinity within yourself or divinity within all things. Okay? But again, I don't wanna do the all things approach right now because it might lead us to the concept of relationship. So just assume in this case that now we're talking about Meditation, let's say mindfulness meditation or a meditation that is contemplation meditation or a meditation that is very deep and can take you to what you would call samadhi, but not through anything visualized, felt, reached towards external to you, but only whatever your own inner, let's say, breath meditation practice is or something like that, some kind of a tool that helps you shift your consciousness. So what you could call relationally, if you wish, if you need to consider relationship in this case, for this path is the relationship of self with self. If you wanna get specific, you could say it's the relationship between the egoic self and true nature, the true self Ultimately, what this means is the egoic self is wanting to dissolve itself through trusting particular practices that will allow the egoic self to dissolve and experience true self. This sometimes could feel a little more abstract Or it could even feel very specific because it's about specific practices, but the concept of divinity remains abstract. Okay, now let's look at which path you might prefer We're going to summarize what we discussed so far about both paths very simply by saying that one of them, the devotional path, is mainly focused on God as a form version of itself. So for example, we talked about deities or angels or saints or masters within a particular lineage with which you might have some form of connection or reverence or trust. And we have a relationship with God as, let's say, visualized as external to us. So I'm over here, divinity is over there, and I am in prostration to it Okay. The other path to summarize, we talked about God is remaining in our concept of itself as the absolute formless. And thus, this is not a relational practice, but this is a practice within ourselves. Okay Before you consider which one you like best based on your own personality, I want to remind everyone that the-- what we're talking about right now are paths. We are not talking about ultimate reality. Both of these paths sound different, but they are leading to the same ultimate reality, which is the reality of God realization, one specific quality of which I defined is I and I and you are not separate. Thus, whether you're going on a binary, on a relational path with form God version of itself, or whether you're going on a self to self formless God version of itself, I and you are not different. So relationship or self are ultimately the same thing When we forget that, we might not understand the other path because we might think that the other path is telling us what ultimate reality is. But ultimately, ultimate reality is the result of both paths, of either one, and they don't have to be mutually exclusive. You can practice both. Let's look at what you might be most interested in. Right now, let's consider, are you someone who tends towards relational connection, or are you someone who tends towards your own self-relationship? Some people have an easier time relating with someone outside of themselves. Maybe they're a family person. Maybe they're someone who really cares about their friends. Maybe they're someone who loves romantic relationship. Maybe this is a person who feels very easeful with intimacy, who feels safe in connection, who sometimes might actually, potentially, not necessarily, but potentially have trouble with their own self-connection. Maybe they can feel themselves more easily when they actually have someone else reflecting them back to themselves. This is someone who might prefer the devotional path because it's a relational path with God Again, I'm saying God as ultimate reality, okay? Not what a specific religion would define God as, to be very clear Alternatively, are you someone who might feel safer in your own self-connection? Maybe there is a mistrust in the relational landscape in your life. Maybe there's wounding there. Maybe you feel like you can count on yourself, but you're not really sure about connecting with other people. It would be more natural, probably, for you to have more of a self-to-self practice, to have more of a God absolute practice, to have more of the path of knowledge. This is something where you don't actually need to trust anyone else. You can trust yourself So let's look right now at cultural conditioning. And most of the people listening to this are in the West, so I'm gonna focus on the cultural conditioning of the West when it comes to both of these paths In Western culture, there is a focus on the self-relationship, and in especially, let's say, American culture, there is actually a difficulty with relational intimacy and with relational trust compared to, let's say, other cultures in the West, like Latin cultures, which are more family-based, which might have more similarities to the East, actually. So I'm talking about the West, I'm talking especially about the US The extreme, let's say, wounding or conditioning of American culture in this case, is a culture where people are taught individualism. They're taught to lift themselves by their own bootstraps. They are taught to leave home early and often might live far from their family members and not necessarily be in as close contact. This is very different from other cultures where, let's say, multi-generational families live together American culture has also lost the reverence towards our elders, and there's a very youth-dominant culture here. I'm saying here 'cause I'm in the US. How does this relate to spiritual paths? We have lost the cultural understanding of what it is to bow, of what it is to respect our elders, of what it is to prioritize connection of what it is to actually be able to trust each other. This is a very competitive culture and a very me, me, me culture where success is often considered that you have gotten to the top rather than mutual support. Because of these relational wounds, and even more so because of the wounding of what we see with people who have taken power and authority too far in a way that is manipulative, in a way that hurts other people, the concept of the devotional path can feel very foreign and actually potentially dangerous Why would you reach towards intimacy with the divine when you don't even feel a safety to experience intimacy in your family and friend and potentially romantic relationships? That pathway would not be available Why would you prostrate yourself? Why would you surrender yourself? Why would you bow to a saint or an angel or a deity or Jesus or Buddha or Krishna or whatever your lineage is about when the concept of bowing is triggering to you? When the concept of potentially lowering your guard or lowering your sense of your inner authority in reverence to someone else, in respect to someone else, is something that does not exist in your upbringing or in your culture. Why would you do that in your spiritual path if, let's say, respecting your elders is not something that even exists in your relational life the concept of being small Of being smaller than your parents, respecting your parents, respecting your elders is something that has erased itself from American culture. So why would you be small in the face of a sacred being? There is no imprint of that within our psyche. And not only is there a lack of that imprint, but there's the opposite. There's a sense of mistrust and skepticism and a need to protect ourselves Because in everybody's fight towards fame and success and wealth and whatever else people consider to be important People have misused authority and power to a very dangerous degree So in the spiritual version of that, there would be people who are pretending to be enlightened who are not, and potentially are even abusive. Those stories unfortunately are very-- they're real, they happen, and that might actually be the only thing you've ever heard of when someone says the word guru It could be a very triggering word because in the West, that concept is not protected. Whereas let's say in India, guru is simply on the most basic level, a spiritual teacher. Now, I have other episodes where I talk about the false guru and dogmatic religion and the risks of all that stuff. If you're interested in diving into that particular issue, please look at episode number 23 so as a result In the wounding conditioning of, let's say, American culture, Western culture in general, but as I said specifically, especially American culture We are configured inside to have skepticism, mistrust, and thus self-protection, understandably so, towards the idea of allowing ourselves to surrender to someone else The only place where that is celebrated is in romantic relationship Which is actually a crazy place to attempt to experience this because in romantic relationship, you're basically surrendering your heart to another wounded person, not to an enlightened being. So apparently that's okay, but surrendering yourself to an enlightened being is considered unsafe. That's quite ironic to me The only way that that would be understandable is the fact that there is no way to measure or understand who is actually an enlightened being that you can feel safe towards and who might be full of BS. And if you can't tell that difference, then of course it would be better to protect yourself, of course. Now, one solution for is this being okay to trust or not, a very simple one, is go through lineage and go towards the canon of beings, of deities, angels, great masters who have been revered for millennia in these lineages. I'm saying this as a stopgap measure for people who might be interested in potentially trying the devotional path, but who have a lot of fear and skepticism. Go towards the safest form versions of God then. Okay? And let's say what I'm basically espousing here is maybe you want, for example, doesn't have to be this lineage, this is just one example. Maybe you wanna practice what it's like to actually have your own relationship with, let's say, Jesus. Now, this is extremely important what I'm about to say. Your relationship with Jesus is your relationship with Jesus, not what the church tells you Jesus is Otherwise, you're having a relationship with a story. I'm talking about a living relationship. The devotional path is an alive, living relationship. It doesn't matter what dimension of reality this sacred being that you are in reverence to and in relationship with, it resides within. This can be a living guru. This can be a living enlightened being, a living avatar of the divine, or it can be a being who is always existing in another dimension, such as, let's say, the archangels, okay? I don't even know if I could call that a being. It's more like a ray of, of, of reality, and I don't know, a consciousness energy emanation. I don't even know how to call that. But we put that-- that is a, a form of the divine, right? A different flavor. Each archangel, for example, is a different flavor of divinity, so you might have a relationship with that. You might have a relationship with, let's say, Mother Mary. You might have a relationship with Ganesha. You might have a relationship with Buddha or a specific Buddha or a specific Tibetan deity or whatever. These relationships are alive, and they are personal, and they are intimate. Your relationship with Mother Mary does not need to be the same or at all similar to someone else's relationship with Mother Mary. Because Mother Mary, in this case, what we're looking at is we can look at the form version on a literal level, like, oh, this is the mother of Jesus as a person, or, and what I'm espousing here at this moment, especially to try to link concepts, is ultimately Mother Mary is an emanation. Mother Mary is a frequency, as is Quan Yin, as is Yemoja, as is White Tara. Okay? I'm naming different forms of, let's say, the Divine Mother in different lineages. Each of them are the Divine Mother, and they are each slightly different flavors of the Divine Mother based on how they emanate through. So you are ultimately in relationship with a flavor of God, and that relationship means that you are ultimately linking your consciousness with that frequency. So you are allowing yourself to attune yourself like a radio dial to a radio station through your intention, through your trust, and through your surrender, you are allowing yourself to connect with that frequency. That is relationship. That is how you relate with a non-physical consciousness, with a form version of the divine. What are you doing? You are saying yes to bowing to, to surrendering to that form of the divine. What's happening here? You are saying yes to choosing to dissolve your egoic self, meaning all of your conditioning and ignorances and wounding and trauma And instead offer yourself, your psyche, your being, your energy body, your whole beingness to instead enter into alignment with that particular frequency of God. And that particular frequency of God, because it's divinity, let's say the frequency of Mother Mary in this case. When you offer yourself to Mother Mary, Mother Mary, that consciousness knows itself as, let's say, a ray of absolute beingness, right? Like, uh, when you put white light through a color-- through a prism, all the different colors show up, right? Red knows itself as an emanation of bright white light. Orange knows itself as an emanation of bright white light. Yellow knows itself as an emanation of bright white light. Jesus knows itself as an emanation of God. Krishna knows itself as an emanation of God. Buddha knows itself as an emanation of God. So if you bow to Buddha or you bow to Krishna, ultimately they're taking you to absolute God beingness, which is what? You. Because absolute God beingness is everyone and everything. So even in the relational path, it looks like a binary. "Oh, I'm over here, you're over there. I'm, I'm bowing to someone," right? From the conditioned American mind, right, or Western mind, you're looking at someone doing that, and you're like, "What are you doing? Why are you getting on your knees in front of a statue? Like, this is just a man-made creation made of, I don't know, marble or whatever," right? That's not the point. That's the surface level of what you're seeing. What you're actually seeing is, in the devotional path, what you're seeing is, "Oh, I am recognizing that there is a ray of divinity here that is offering itself in its purity as an emanation." Just like you're in front of the sun and the sun's rays are coming towards you and you get to sunbathe. In the devotional path, what's happening in that surrender is, "I am going to choose, I'm gonna make the choice- That all of this BS in my brain of all of my limiting beliefs, of all my conditioning and trauma is less real and less desirable than allowing myself to dissolve into this ray of divinity. You're basically letting yourself become that. You already are that, but you're consciously making the choice to focus your understanding of reality towards the pure emanation of absolute beingness in a particular form version of itself, rather than you basically This is kind of an intense way of saying it, but you're basically worshiping your own egoic self. You're basically saying, "No, I'm gonna believe in my skepticism more than I'm gonna believe in surrender. I'm gonna believe in my own arrogant self-knowledge and personal egoic desires more than I believe in surrender to whatever God has in, in store for me and whatever ultimately God is within me." Again, I, I completely understand the difficulty of trusting and choosing surrender. I totally get that. Which is why there is, gratefully, a lot of spiritual practice that we can do and a very legitimate spiritual path that we can do, which as I said, is the path of knowledge. When the idea of surrender is not available to us in that particular way In the path of knowledge, we can still work our nervous system, work our energy body, work our physical body, work our mind and our focus in order to basically master the, let's say, human aspects of ourselves so that we can control the mind and control the focus, and control the breath and control the energy in order to be able to not be imprisoned by our wounding and find liberation through clearing our consciousness and opening out of who we think we are as our independent egoic selves. This is a very legitimate path. They're both very legitimate paths. I'm speaking more about the devotional path right now because it is harder to understand from the Western mind, so I'm spending more time on it Now, one thing we can consider is are we stuck in valuing or validating only one path and judging the other? It's one thing to say, "This works for me. I like it. I respect all other paths. I'm just gonna stay focused on what works for me." Cool. It's another thing to say, "My path is good and yours is not." Okay, what's happening there? There's some kind of a judgment. Why? There's some kind of an aversion. There's something that we are judging in the spiritual path itself that's actually coming from our own egoic wounding, high likelihood around either our relationship with ourselves or our relationship with others So this is where we look at attachment wounding In attachment theory, to make it really super quick and easy version of this We can get stuck in over-prioritizing others and kind of forgetting ourselves and being overly dependent on relationship, or we can get stuck in the opposite, in running away from relationship and intimacy and only trusting ourselves. If we experience one of these attachment woundings, we will clearly feel more comfortable in one path and high likelihood have a lot of ick factor towards the other path, aversion and judgment. So that is something to look at. If we have aversion or judgment towards either the devotional path or the path of knowledge, we need to look inside of ourselves. How am I doing in my own attachment wounding, in my own relationships on a human level? Am I abandoning my own self-relationship? If that's the case, that can actually be dangerous. You could potentially, not necessarily, but maybe, maybe, maybe end up in A kind of not legitimate version of the devotional path. Because you're so relational, you might end up with the false guru because you're actually running a relational wound, which is you're forgetting yourself, and you're overly giving authority to others without keeping your own sense of discernment and your own focus on trusting your own intuition. I wanna make this very clear. Someone falling for the false guru does not mean that the devotional path is messed up. It means that the false guru is total BS. And unfortunately, the reason it didn't work out is not because the devotional path doesn't work, but it's because the person who ended up in the devotee relationship with a F'ed up person has attachment wounding, where they are not trusting their own intuition, they're not listening to their own worthiness. Th-there's some kind of attachment wounding there that allowed them to become vulnerable to a BS relationship. That has nothing to do with the spiritual path. None of that is spiritual. None of that is the true path. That's all, that's all a, a false display. In the same way that dogmatic religion is not actually the spiritual path, it's BS. It's politics and patriarchy pretending to talk about God. It's just mental rules that keep people stuck in judgment, stuck in shame, stuck in judging other people, et cetera, okay? Just like that is when I said maybe you're into a devotional path with Jesus, that's all that religious stuff that can be really painful for people. It's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the alive, true relationship with an actual emanation of divinity that is trustworthy. So one of the reasons it's hard to talk about all these things is because there are so many false versions of what I'm talking about that it makes people mistrusting of the real versions of what I'm talking about. Let's go to the other side now. Let's talk about the path of knowledge and attachment wounding with that I already talked about this a bit when I was talking about Western culture, especially American culture. If we have a wounding where we have difficulty trusting intimacy or trusting somebody else we are going to high likelihood choose the path of knowledge. That's totally fine. The issue, however, is we might stay in our comfort zone and never heal our relational wounding. So we know that that's happening through the little test of the following. Great, you're on the path of knowledge. You're loving it. It's working for you. Fantastic. Continue. Now, how do you feel about the devotional path? Are you neutral about it, or are you skeptical or judgmental towards it? Again, I'm not talking about the false guru. I'm not talking about people pretending to do spiritual stuff. I'm talking about the real thing. Are you skeptical towards what I'm calling the real thing? What you are probably calling BS. If it all looks like BS to you, rather than realizing that there is the real thing and some people co-opt it, if it all looks like BS to you, that's relational wounding. That is not having had, in your own life, high likelihood, an actual experience of being able to trust someone else's authority in a safe way. High likelihood it is not having had the intimate direct experience of what it actually feels like to be touched by the divine on an intimate level relationally. So what I just said, let me just say this in a different way. I talked about two things that are missing. One is safety and human connection. That is high likelihood missing in some way. The second thing that's missing is an actual experience with, let's say, a real enlightened being, okay, who can be alive, or an actual experience with some aspect of divinity in a form version of itself, like a deity or an angel or a saint or something like that, okay? It's easy for people to talk about those things, but can you actually feel them in your heart, or are they just a concept to you? Because what I'm talking about here is an actual feeling, is an actual connection. This is not imagination. This is real. So when we have not experienced human health nor, and/or a real connection with divinity on a relational level, we are high likelihood not going to believe in it or consider it to be potentially even bad or dangerous A more subtle judgment would be, "Oh, that's a waste of time." Okay. Is loving your family a waste of time? Is being in a romantic relationship a waste of time? Maybe in a certain way, somewhere there, maybe to you. So we can look at-- The whole thing I'm trying to say here is, how can we look at our relationship to these spiritual paths and how they might reflect our human relationships? And remember, each spiritual path defines God in a particular way. Devotional path defines God as form. Knowledge path defines God as formless. Very important to remember, ultimately, these are tools, and God is both of those things. God is everything and nothing. God is the undefinable, and God is in every definable thing, right? Those paths know that. So we're not gonna get lost in the wounding of our attachment, wounding relationally. We're not gonna get lost in actually thinking that the paths are the end of in themselves, but understanding that they-- and somehow thinking that they're opposite to each other in competition to each other-- with each other when they're not. We need to ultimately also not get lost in thinking that God is either form or formless because it's both So when we make sure that we don't get stuck in any of those places, what we're actually seeing is unity. We're seeing God as unity and as multiplicity in unity. So both paths are very valid. They offer us fantastic things. When we can have a safe relationship where we're honoring ourselves and honoring each other on a human level, then we can have an openness to either of these paths and be benefited by either or both of these paths. And we can understand that we can relate with God as form and formless, and both of those things are true. We're out of the binary. We're out of thinking it's either this or that. God is either this or that. The path is either this or that. This is either good or bad. And we're understanding the unity of all of this. We're understanding that self and other is ultimately the same thing. We're understanding that I can value and validate myself, and I can value and validate my reverence towards somebody else, and both of those things can exist. I can maintain my own self-dignity, I can maintain my own safety, while I am also in reverence. I can maintain my own inner authority while I'm also in reverence to an external authority. There's no longer this huge binary. There's no longer a competition between ways of seeing things. We ultimately see that everything is God and everything is a path to God. Again, there are BS versions, there are distorted versions, not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about a real contemplative practice in the path of knowledge where we're asking ourselves the deep hard questions. We're doing who am I, who am I? Or You're doing pranayama, you're doing whatever your personal meditation practice is. Or on the devotional path, maybe you're doing prayer, you're doing mantra. Maybe you have a particular being that you are in a live, intimate, personal relationship with. Different paths, same outcome, same reality Hope this helps. Blessings thank you for being with me in The Ground of Love. You can follow this podcast to receive the next episodes, and who is it that comes to mind to share this episode with? Please go ahead and pass this along to them and go ahead and leave a review or a rating if you wish. I thank you for that. For one-on-one healing sessions and a group membership. you can go to www.thegroundoflove.com Blessings to you. May you be protected, held, regenerated centered. And taken forward with all light, love, truth and highest and best health and wellbeing on all levels and taken forward to make the greatest, most beautiful impact doing exactly what you're here to do. God bless you. Protection, grace, protection, grace. So it is.