So, as we seek to avoid the pain and suffering in life as well as strive to deny the reality of decay and death, we begin to take refuge in God. If one chooses to worship steadily and do good in the world, he or she will see beyond the illusion that everything has a dual nature of good and bad to realize that God is the all-pervading reality behind the elements of creation, that He is the object of any kind of worship and that knowing Him is the reason behind your self-sacrifice. Then you will be conscious of God’s presence continually, even at the time of death.

Don't blame those who don't believe in God, it's not their fault

People are born with the innate tendency to be attracted to pleasurable experiences and averse to things that are unpleasant or painful. This causes everyone to see the world in the same way, as being full of good and bad that we react emotionally towards. Being deluded by the way the world appears to someone incased in a mortal body, some people can’t see that that there is an uncreated, unchanging God behind that veil of illusion. God knows about all the creatures of the world that have ever existed or will exist in the future, but His creations cannot see Him as He really is.

If there's nothing but God, how can you worship anything else?

God can be worshiped by any name or form. You can worship Him as the eternal all-pervading Holy Spirit, an incarnation of God such as Jesus, a saint or true guru or any kind of deity. It is the one true God who gave rise to all the various names and forms. You can’t be worshiping anything else. When someone is intent on worshiping any embodiment of God, it is God who makes his or her devotion strong. Then, with that strong and steady devotion, the seeker begins to realize the benefits of a spiritual life. God fulfills his or her longing to know Him and they cease to see Him as a single embodied deity and realize His true nature which is unmanifested, unchanging and all-pervasive.

The four reasons people seek God

Good people seek God for one or more of four basic reasons. The most common is that they are afflicted somehow and seek God to relieve their suffering. Some people look to God for the answers to the big mysteries of life. They want their lives to have more meaning than mere existence so they look for knowledge. Others believe that God has the ability to grant His devotees wealth and power in this world and give them ever-lasting life in paradise in the next. The wisest of the seekers is also the rarest. He or she wants to give their love and devotion to God just because He is all there really is. Everything else is part of the illusion cast by His creation. All four kinds of spiritual seekers have been blessed with noble souls. Still, some sincere worshipers of God let their personal desires lead them astray and their good judgment becomes clouded. They continue to follow their lower nature and are led by their own inclinations rather than the truth.

They call it "maya"

Most people cannot see beyond the tangible aspect of creation because they have been fooled by the way things appear. It is difficult to see reality through the confusion that exists because of the infinite variation that the characteristics of nature present. We are deluded, hypnotized in a way, to believe that our baser instincts of lust, power, greed, etc. is all there is to reality and that seeking refuge in God and being devoted to Him is just a fantasy. Thus, evil is perpetuated in the world.

The relationship between God and nature

Those rare few who have reached the ultimate goal of God-realization while still in their mortal bodies have told us that apart from God there is nothing whatsoever. Everything originates from God’s very essence and from it He creates and dissolves the entire cosmos. He is the fluidity in water, the radiance in the sun and moon, the vibrational energy in all creation, the sound in the ether and the virility in men. God is the wholesome fragrance of the earth, the luminescence in fire, the life in all beings and the purifying force in austerity. Know that God is always present as the seed of all creatures, the understanding in intelligence and the splendor in all that is beautiful. He is the power behind the strength that comes from being free of personal desires and attachments and the power behind the actions of anyone who performs righteousness. These qualities of nature and nature itself come out of God, but they do not comprise all of Him. He is not contained by them, they are manifested from Him

Chapter 7 begins here

Out of many thousands of people, perhaps there is one who really strives for spiritual perfection. And among thousands of those true seekers of God perhaps only one will ever reach the state of complete union with God. But when they do ultimately understand the absolute truth, there is nothing else to know.