That leads us to the next point, the relation of God without to
God within. To the yogi, who is the very type of Hindu thought,
there is no definite proof of God save the witness of the Self
within to His existence, and his idea of finding the proof of God
is that you should strip away from your consciousness all
limitations, and thus reach the stage where you have pure
consciousness--save a veil of the thin nirvanic matter. Then you
know that God is. So you read in the Upanishad: "Whose only proof
is the witness of the Self." This is very different from Western
methods of thought, which try to demonstrate God by a process of
argument. The Hindu will tell you that you cannot demonstrate God
by any argument or reasoning; He is above and beyond reasoning,
and although the reason may guide you on the way, it will not
prove to demonstration that God is. The only way you can know Him
is by diving into yourself. There you will find Him, and know
that He is without as well as within you; and Yoga is a system
that enables you to get rid of everything from consciousness that
is not God, save that one veil of the nirvanic atom, and so to
know that God is, with an unshakable certainty of conviction. To
the Hindu that inner conviction is the only thing worthy to be
called faith, and this gives you the reason why faith is said to
be beyond reason, and so is often confused with credulity. Faith
is beyond reason, because it is the testimony of the Self to
himself, that conviction of existence as Self, of which reason is
only one of the outer manifestations; and the only true faith is
that inner conviction, which no argument can either strengthen or
weaken, of the innermost Self of you, that of which alone you are
entirely sure. It is the aim of Yoga to enable you to reach that
Self constantly not by a sudden glimpse of intuition, but