Our Relation to the Spiritual: The Meaning of God

Divine love seems inexplicably tied to divine judgment at times. With even a cursory search online the subsequent finding of so many articles and images depicting people of otherwise benign feelings supporting hatred and irrational judgment, there is much to be questioned. From Westboro Church to suicide bombers, the only seeming constant in a species devoted to exhibiting the divine in their lives is divisiveness and cruelty. As a former adherent to a particular brand of fundamentalist Christianity, I can with rueful head-shaking recall many a moment of righteous judgment and resultant hurt feelings, even among those I would have called my spiritual brothers and sisters. As I began to fervently question the ideological grounds for my thinking I rarely had to step beyond Christian circles to find criticisms being thrown from one group against another, from one form of apologetic against another. When I then branched out to find that many of the criticisms apologists had against other ideologies were outright inaccurate, almost deliberately so on occasion, I could not help but begin wondering what was the meaning behind this “God” everyone was talking about. When 9/11 hit I am not ashamed to admit that the effect this had on me was the proverbial last straw, though it certainly felt like a large tree. I left it all behind or at least started the journey of doing so, but looking back now I can see I never stopped searching for the meaning of it all.

Those focused on delivering immediate emotion-laden diatribes against religion can declare more people have died in the name of god than through any other means in history. Frankly I’m not sure how this can be quantified and I’m not sure how this makes a point beyond directing attention to the human predilection of rationalizing behavior. Without providing a particular definition of the term “god” the observation is meaningless beyond a recognition that people will fill a term with all manner of subjective intent. A better statement would be that more people die from those justifying their actions through identification with a transcendent idea than any other, but there just doesn’t seem to be that strong a ring to this and since ideologies typically associated with liberalism can then be lumped into this observation, I don’t imagine there are many who would be quick to use it. However, as a statement concerning human behavior it provides a far greater point of contact for analysis and the potential of behavioral change.

A feeling of the transcendent is quite likely an inevitable by-product of how our brains organize experience and for that matter create the delusion of a self. Putting together the vast disparate information provided by the existence of which we are a part of and apart from, the brain creates a seamless reality often even if it needs to make things up. Our sight for instance is not nearly as comprehensive as we like to think, focused primarily on identifying movement (no doubt from our evolutionary predator-prey history) and funneled through only a small section of the overall eye. The image that we “see” is largely a creation of the mind, built from the constant movements of the eye taking in data and then left there until something is noticed to have changed and even that is controlled in no small part through conscious awareness. Anyone who has been startled by finally noticing someone who’s been standing right beside them for a length of time is well aware that consciousness is not all-encompassing. That our brains can include things that aren’t or weren’t in experience is the stuff of memory research, most notably Elizabeth Loftus, where people have been known to utterly ignore a person in a monkey-suit or add false details to someone observed during a particularly charged emotional experience. All of this and more lends itself to the observation that the provision of a transcendent narrative is foundational to human experience, indeed could almost be synonymous with it. From here it is not a stretch to note that just as in memory recall where a person can deliberately place themselves as a participant or as outside observer, the feeling of a transcendent ideology can be thrust out beyond a single person and encompass more, or at least contain the feeling of having more.

This ability to create transcendent intent is not in itself an evil thing. Everything from skyscrapers to iPads, social organizations to NGOs helping out the poor and hungry, is a creation out of transcendent intent, the form that was once only considered in consciousness. I am reminded of people who lament how cell-phones have created distance within families but then note how during hurricane Katrina the Red Cross raised millions from small donations through texts on phones. Every form once manifest, while still retaining the qualities of which it was made, now creates a space for the impartation of anyone’s intent, however different it may have been from the original. This is as Ken Wilber points out, part of the nesting reality of interlocking systems, where everything in consciousness or in spirit has a corollary that while not reducible to the other is neither bound solely within it. In other words, while particular manifestations of the god idea can be used to justify any manner of behaviors, it should not be ignored that the ideas stem from a universal ability within humanity, that of determining transcendental purpose. By focusing on this underlying aspect of experience we can then move forward with the creation of a god concept that is both humanizing and uplifting, exhibiting the best of what we are and wish to be, community-building rather than further separating us (the particulars of this will be dealt with within the next two entries).

There is from Ernest Holmes a recognition of this reality in his contemplation of conscious spirit when he declares: “He should feel a unity of Spirit in all people, and running through all events. He should declare that the Spirit within him is God, quickening into right action everything he touches, bringing the best out of all his experiences, and forever guiding and sustaining” (The Science of Mind, p 167). Meaning is debatable, the creation of it is not. Once we begin from a place of connection, there is no space for separation, but if we begin in separation that is all we will find.