"If you didn't first hold the concept, you would be unable to project love and devotion (or anything) toward God."

Well, that's a limited view, like someone who never ate with his/her hands saying: "If you didn't first hold a fork and a knife, you would be unable to eat".

I can't personally boast of not being guilty of having a concept of God, but I do try to ignore it as best I can in my devotion, because when approaching God, concepts are a handicap.

Yuyutsu,

"a God that exists is actually a logical contradiction"

"My love and devotion is towards God, not towards a concept."

How can you have love and devotion for something which doesn't exist?

Poirot,

<<If you didn't first hold the concept, you would be unable to project love and devotion (or anything) toward God.>>

I know we've been through it all before, but I have to say that perception, no matter how faint, can precede conceptualisation. Perhaps it's an inevitable human tendency to form concepts and they are of course necessary. But we need to avoid them in the approach to God. As Yuyutsu says, they just obstruct the path towards God (or the Ground of Being, or the Holy Other, or whatever term one might prefer). We can never capture God in concepts, no matter how hard we try, and the effort to do so keeps us away from God. (But then, of course, we can't capture God at all by any means!)

So in meditation I try to abandon concepts.

Acolyte:

<<How can you have love and devotion for something which doesn't exist?>>

God insists that God does not exist! Existence is not the only sort of being.

crabsy,

"God insists that God does not exist!"

You realise that this statement is paradoxical, don't you?

"Existence is not the only sort of being."

What other sorts of being are there?

Crabsy,

Perception can precede conceptualisation...interesting. I suppose it can, yet in order to project something like the concepts or feelings involved in love and devotion, isn't it necessary to have a concept of the entity onto which one is projecting them?

Acolyte:

<<You realise that this statement is paradoxical, don't you?>>

Only the intellect finds a paradox, because it's the intellect that forms concepts and employs logic. If the quest is to come closer to God then the intellect can be a barrier.

<<What other sorts of being are there?>>

Insistence. God is not an object, not an entity, not supernatural...God insists.

Poirot:

<<...yet in order to project something like the concepts or feelings involved in love and devotion, isn't it necessary to have a concept of the entity onto which one is projecting them?>>

No. The fundamental source of devotion is a sense of gratitude welling up from the depths -- profound thankfulness for life, beauty, the universe, everything. This can occur without any image or conception of the source of what I'm thankful for.