''Human conceptions of the Divine divide themselves first into the worship of the formed and the aspiration towards the formless, secondly, into the adoration of the Qualified and the urge of the rarest spirits towards the Unqualified, the Absolute.
For all these stages the Tantric worship and discipline provides.
How can the Formless invest Himself with form, asks the religious rationalist.
The universe is there to reply. Hinduism worships Narayana in the stone, the tree, the animal, the human being. That which the intellectual and spiritual pride or severity of other religions scorns, it makes its pride and turns into its own form of logical severity. Stocks and stones, the quadruped and the human being, all these are equals in God, our brothers in the Divine, forms that the Omnipresent has not disdained to assume.
But beyond the material forms there are others that are ideal and symbolic, but not less, if anything more real, more full of divine power than any actual physical manifestation.
These are the mental images in which we worship God. The Hindu believes that to whatever form he brings his devotion, the love of God is bound to assume and vivify it, and we cannot say that the belief is irrational.
For if there is a Consciousness in the universe and transcending it which answers to the yearning of all these creatures and perhaps Itself yearns towards them with the love of the Father, the Mother, the Friend, the Lover, and a love surpassing all these, then it is idle to suppose that It would assume or create for its own pleasure and glory the forms of the universe, but would disdain as an offence to Its dignity or purity those which the love of the worshipper offers to It and which after all Itself has formed in his heart or his imagination.
To these mental forms mental worship may be offered, and this is the higher way; or we may give the material foundation, the pratiṣṭhā, of a statue or pictured image to form a physical nodus for a physical act of worship.
In the formless also we worship God, in His qualities, in His Love, Power, Bliss, Wisdom, in the great cosmicPrinciples by which He manifests Himself to the eye of knowledge.
We worship Him as the Impersonality manifested in these things or the Personality containing them. And we rise at the apex of the pinnacle into that which is not only formless, arūpa, but nirguṇa, qualityless, the indefinable, anirdeśyam, of the Gita.
In our human ignorance, with our mental passion for degrees and distinctions, for superiorities and exclusions, we thus grade these things and say that this is superior, that is for ignorant and inferior souls. Do we know?
The Theist looks down with reprobation on the form-adoring man-worshipping idolater and polytheist; the Adwaitin looks down with a calm and tolerant indulgence on the ignorance of the quality-adoring personality-bemused Theist. But it seems to us that God scorns nothing, that the Soul of all things may take as much delight in the prayer of a little child or the offering of a flower or a leaf before a pictured image as in the philosopher's leap from the summit of thought into the indefinable and unknowable and that he does best who can rise and widen into the shoreless realisation and yet keep the heart of the little child and the capacity of the seer of forms.''
Sri Aurobindo - Early Cultural Writings - Review of 'Hymns to the Goddess'Translated from the Sanskrit by Arthur and Ellen Avalon
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A stone figure of 'Hara-Pārvatī' (Śiva seated with Pārvatī on his knee). Also known as 'Umamahesvaramurti'. Accompanied by a lion and a bull (Nandi) and surrounded by many flying and standing attendants (musicians, garland-bearers), there is also a row of ritual equipment: two conch-shell trumpets on stands, a lamp and a bell. British Museum [wikipedia]
