My post-surgical brain fog continues, though now more episodically. Several times I struggled to grind out a paragraph of this post and then lost the energy to go further. I’ve also found myself reading the same paragraph of a book or article multiple times and then giving up. I’ve talked with a few people who’ve had similar experiences and lingering anesthesia is the popular culprit. Apparently it can take months to fully clear your system. Plus, I know the healing process is a whole body effort with the resulting necessary downtime. So I hope all this provides some explanation for my delayed posting and that I’ll be back on a more productive schedule soon. Thanks again for reading! 

Near the end of my last blog post, I said that our notion of God is changing. That we are finding it hard to believe in God as a kind of celestial “help line,” granting our desires and rescuing us from calamity. We are experiencing

… the gradual abandonment of what some have called the “mythic God.” That is, God as essentially an inflated and overwhelming human being, existing in some far-off realm, watching over the events of humanity and the universe. The man behind the curtain, in other words. While at times we may all wish for a special invisible magical friend, today it seems that few of us anymore can take such a notion seriously.

What this really means is the end of the idea of God as a person. For anyone raised in Christianity or any other theistic religion, this is very difficult to hear. This is the punch in the face delivered by Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous 1880s declaration that “God is dead.” In response to this realization, people typically jump to conclusions like life has no meaning, the universe is purposeless, there is no right or wrong, and other nihilistic assumptions. But none of these ideas are necessary and there are strong and ancient nontheistic traditions that view existence otherwise.

But first, we need to get the God-as-person idea out of our system. God is not an inflated version of us, nor, conversely, are we deflated versions of God. History overflows with evidence that viewing God as a bigger version of ourselves has always been problematic. Such a God often becomes the excuse for our worst behavior and the source of unending suffering and disaster. As the Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg said, “With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil – that takes religion.”

To push this to its inevitable and for many the most upsetting conclusion, God doesn’t think about us, judge us, care about us, have opinions about us, or tell us what to do or not do. God does not reward or punish us. God is not a religious version of Santa Claus, checking his list to see who’s been naughty or nice. Freud and others are basically right: our ideas about God are often essentially projections of our parents into an ethereal realm, for better or for worse.

This subconscious God has hung on tenaciously, even though science demolished any literal meaning to it long ago. Where in our unimaginably vast universe could a personal God possibly be? Is anyone really waiting for one of the new amazing telescopes to find him? The only alternative is to create fantasies of other places or dimensions which have no basis in experience or even in religious tradition. While in times of need or distress we may be able to cling to such an idea of God, over the long haul it provides no support or guidance to life as we actually live it today.

Many of us have distorted and dismissive notions about the ancient religions of the world. In Sunday School we learned about their silliness in believing in multiple gods and idols of wood and stone, in contrast to the Bible’s supposedly obvious truth that there is only one, invisible God. In fact, ancient people were far more sophisticated than we give them credit for. They understood that their gods were characters in stories which helped make sense of life and the world, and how to relate to them. But these gods were actually pointers to a divine reality which transcended them and the universe but which was ultimately unknowable.

The unknowability of God is, of course, a fundamental teaching of the Bible but one usually ignored by religious teachers, preachers, and ordinary believers who have so much to say on the matter. This is a central theme of Wisdom books like Job and Ecclesiastes, but it’s also present from the beginning in the mystery of creation and in God’s dealing with Abraham. The awareness that “no one can see God and live” echoes throughout the Bible.

But the personhood of God has a more fundamental problem than conflict with science or religious tradition. The reason God isn’t a person is because we aren’t either. The egoic self we imagine ourselves to be is an illusion. The ego is the creation of our minds to provide ownership for our thoughts, feelings, hopes, fears, intentions, plans, and presumed destiny. You’ll have as much luck finding yourself somewhere inside you, as you will finding God somewhere out there. There is no little being inside our head peering through our eyes, pushing buttons and pulling levers, and generating our thoughts and feelings.

This egoic fantasy is what we have inflated and projected outward as God Almighty, living in an equally imaginary transcendent realm called Heaven. It was out of the insecurity of our ego that we produced a Supreme Ego to protect us and calm our anxieties. In other words, we can’t figure God out until we figure ourselves out. Our distorted view of ourselves will inevitably lead to a distorted view of God.

Socrates is supposed to have taught, “To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom.” And the instruction “Know thyself” was inscribed over the entrance to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. An ancient and fundamental spiritual practice of many traditions is called “self-inquiry.” All of these point to the most basic human question: Who am I? This is not an intellectual pursuit, however, but an inner search, an experience leading to a deep knowing of our true identity.

Contrary to many wellness coaches or corporate programs, this is the actual purpose of meditation. We sit and focus our attention inward not to create silence but to discover the silence that is already there, the nature of our very being and our true self. From within that silence, we listen to and observe all experience: the natural world around us, including our own bodies, and the thoughts and feelings streaming through our minds. As we continue in this practice, we come to the realization that our true self is not any of these sensations but that which observes them, our aware consciousness. And as we go further, we discover this is also the intersection point of the divine reality we call God.

Attempting to overcome the misconceptions of his time, Jesus introduced the notion of the “kingdom of God.” It was mostly misunderstood, including by his own disciples and the gospel writers. But occasionally his intention and meaning sneaks through, as in a remarkable passage in Luke 17. When asked when God’s kingdom was coming, Jesus rejects the very idea. It’s not coming with signs to watch for, he says, because “the kingdom of God is within you.”

This awareness has been most prevalent among the mystics of all religious traditions. The great Muslim poet and Sufi mystic, Rumi, said, “I searched for God and found only myself and I searched for myself and found only God.” Among Christians, it is the medieval theologian mystic, Meister Eckhart, who I quote often, who has provided the clearest and most powerful teaching on our oneness with God.

The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.

This also explains one of Eckhart’s most astonishing quotes, “I pray God to rid me of God.” That is, he wants to get rid of all notions of a theistic God-out-there to know only the inner yet transcendent God who does not “exist” like any object but is rather “the ground of being.” Here we connect with a remarkable statement in the book of Acts that’s attributed to Paul, that God is “the one in whom we live and move and have our being.” Which points to the paradoxical truth that God in us, and our being in God, are one and the same reality.

One could spend a lifetime trying to make sense of all this, but that isn’t the point. Again, the mystics are our guide, for their words are intended not to fill our minds with ideas but to point us to a knowing experience. And if religion is to regain its value this is what it must be about: not pointing us out of this world to some imagined heavenly dimension but rather deeper and more profoundly into this world. For we need a new (but actually ancient) recognition of the sacredness of Being itself, permeating all reality, the entire universe, and each one of us. And by knowing our own sacred identity, we will then know what Paul called “the peace that surpasses all understanding.”

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