Watch this inspiring Sunday Service talk with Nayaswami Maria, recorded at Ananda Village on October 26th, 2025.

Maria reflects on the nature of God as Consciousness, exploring the spiritual journey from worshiping God in form to realizing the formless divine. She opens with a passage from Yogananda's Whispers from Eternity, then recounts how Swami Kriyananda’s realization that “God is Consciousness” became a turning point in his life. Through stories from Paramhansa Yogananda’s childhood, including his devotion to the image of Kali and his later vision of the Cosmic Mother,she movingly illustrates how the devotee evolves from form-based devotion to the formless Infinite.

Drawing from the Bhagavad Gita, Nayaswami Maria recounts Krishna’s revelation of his cosmic form to Arjuna, symbolizing the devotees awe and humility before divine vastness. The talk concludes with practical guidance for meditation: to feel oneself at the center of infinite space, transcending body identity, and entering divine stillness. Whether one worships God with or without form, both paths lead to dissolving the ego and merging with the infinite, formless bliss of Spirit.

The reading for this week from Swami Kriyananda's book Rays of the One Light is
What Is the Best Way to Pray?


Truth is one and eternal. Realize oneness with it in your deathless Self, within.

The following commentary is based on the teachings of Paramhansa Yogananda.

Jesus Christ and Sri Krishna, both, advised praying to God as personal. Yet both emphasized also that God is above form, and that He must be sought, ultimately, in Infinity. As Jesus put it, “God is a spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth.”

Yet he spoke of God constantly as our Heavenly Father. In what is known as the Lord’s Prayer, he proposed a very human prayer to the Heavenly Father, asking fulfillment for all our spiritual needs.

The Bhagavad Gita explains that man, living as he does in a human body, finds it difficult to worship Infinity as though the ego and body didn’t even exist. Far better for human beings, Krishna says, to work with reality as we know it than to affirm a reality of which the human mind is incapable of forming any clear notion. Encouraging the devotee in this direction, he says, “O Arjuna, be thou a yogi!” – that is to say, be one who works with, not in rejection of, the energies of the body and the natural tendencies of the mind.

In the twelfth Chapter of the Gita, Arjuna asks:

“Those who, ever steadfast, worship Thee as devotees [that is to say, in an “I” and “Thou” relationship], and those who contemplate Thee as the immortal, unmanifested Spirit – which group is the better versed in yoga?”

The blessed Lord replied: “Those who, fixing their minds on Me, adore Me, ever united to Me through supreme devotion, are in My eyes the perfect knowers of yoga. . . .

“Those whose strict aim is union with the Unmanifested choose a more difficult way; arduous for embodied beings is The Path of dedication to the Absolute” – the followers, that is to say, of The Path of Gyana Yoga.

Thus, through holy Scripture, God has spoken to mankind.