Swami Shivapadananda Puri on ‘Where is God?’

Someone asked the holy man Ramana Maharishi, ‘Where is God?’ He said, ‘First tell me where there is no God.’

So which is your Deity? The answer is, ‘Which is not my Deity?’ All are the names and forms of the One Reality: God.

That is the secret behind bhakti yoga [the devotional path]. Name and form do not matter. But your Deity matters. And others can call your Deity by any name.

Master [Paramahamsa Sri Ramakrishna] gives it wonderfully. "If I meditate on water, I call it water. But another will say, ‘Pani, pani’, or another will say, ‘Jal, jal’. But it is the same thing. Just different sounds and names."

A man at the North Pole seeing mountains of ice will say, ‘That is water.’ The one who sees it as flowing in a river will say, ‘Now that is water.’ If the two meet, one will say, ‘Water is a big mountain.’ The other will say, ‘No, it is a flowing thing.’ Now both are referring to the same thing: H²O.

Similarly with the different forms of God one is talking of God in a condensed, concretised form and the other is talking of God the Absolute. So when singing think of your Deity only.