Eventually, we're all asked the big question: "Do you believe in God?" In that moment, there are a
couple directions you may go in. You may directly (and wisely) give a simple
yes or no answer; but if you're like me, you’ll experience a kind of systems
freeze, and once again find yourself back in the place where you struggle to define
what God really means to you. Where suddenly you have to focus all your limited
(like me) mental powers on that limitless concept, and try to get in touch with
enough profound inner intelligence to provide some honest meaning. You have to
try to contact and express your highest consciousness. You have to try to find
God.
"In the beginning was the word," it
is said, but then no words–their forms or meanings or manifestations–are
possible for us without consciousness.
Now I wish I had that Big Guy up on the marble
throne, sporting a regally coiffed beard, and absolute omniscient creative
mastery over all being. Or some universal intelligence like a giant
extraterrestrial brain, seated in the center of a super galactic organism—but
I'm afraid I don't really have either of those. Either—or both, may well be
true, but I still seem to need something closer to home. Something I may not be
able to understand, but that I can identify with. Like, what would the requirements
and qualifications of God's job description look like?
1. Must
be able to create, energize, and animate all life and material creation, as we
know it.
2. Must be able to define and direct all
reality or realities, based on an infinite variety of material structures,
natural processes, and perceptions–as determined and experienced by all the
sentient and non-sentient forms you create.
3. Must be able, and willing, to provide constant,
unconditional love; and to benevolently support and guide all of life by
establishing eternal standards of beauty, ethics, morality, and evolutionary
progress (in both a physical, and spiritual sense).
Consciousness itself is the only
universal force I can think of that can conceivably achieve and sustain all of
that. I know that what little of it I possess myself is the only thing that
permits me some identification, and some means for understanding the miraculous
nature of Life, writ very large. For me, that makes Consciousness a pretty good
candidate.
Quantum Physics has been performing reliably
for long enough, and has been specifically and exhaustively tested enough to
indicate that it’s Consciousness that provides the link between energy and
matter– both in the sense of conscious observation being the catalyst for
material creation; and for the existence of an active, intelligent Consciousness
at every level of being.
"No
phenomenon is a physical phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon."
John Wheeler, Physicist
"Matter…is
not an inert substance but an active agent…mind, as manifested by the capacity
to make choices, is to some extent inherent in every electron."
Freeman Dyson, Physicist
I won't pretend to understand any of this too
well, but all the evidence suggests that the connection of everything on a
sub-atomic level ("entanglement" and "non-locality" in
quantum physics' terms) demonstrates that there’s a transformational, creative
force underlying our reality—a kind of connecting
field that we, and everything else in our world, participates in. If we
call that field Consciousness, we may be revealing the impossible magic trick
that can make simple matter (like my brain) assume energy and intelligence. We
may be pointing to the power that catalyzes the source and substance of all
creation.
That sounds a little like a God requirement,
doesn't it?
Look at all the forms of life that we easily
associate with "The Divine," and they're natural, aren't they? The
miraculous presence of life is so obvious in the forms of nature: cells, plants,
animals, humanity. The Earth itself is alive—the ground and skies and seas—it's
apparent to us in all those cumulative expressions of Consciousness like cell
mitosis, the heliotropism of plants, the organic integration and sentience of
animals, and the experience of this downright crazy life that we all share.
Even our scriptures defining "The
Divine" suggest that at the heart of it all is the radiance of
Consciousness:
I am
the light that shines on everyone
I am
the All.
The
All came forth from me
and
the All came into me.
Split
the wood and I am there.
Turn
over the stone,
and
you will find me.
The Gospel of Thomas, Logion 77
I am the true Self
in the heart of every creature...the beginning, middle, and end of their
existence.
The Bhagavad Gita
10.20
As for that last job requirement, the power and
potential of unconditional Love can’t be denied by anyone. The world itself, at
every level, undeniably responds to that force and calling. The characteristics
of transcendent human behavior, like compassion, humility, tolerance,
forgiveness, and generosity that also describe an ideally benevolent 'Great
Spirit,' are the same ones we attribute to connecting to our "Higher
Consciousness;" the connection that merges us—in Love—with the beauty of
all being.
"...my own true inner being
actually exists in every living creature...[and] is the ground of that
compassion upon which all true, that is to say, unselfish, virtue
rests..."
Arthur Schopenhauer
And tell me, where does our sane and charitable
"voice of reason" come from, if not from the field of Consciousness, independent
of the selfish gymnastics of human ego? The idea that ‘thought requires
consciousness, but consciousness does not require thought,’ is something to
keep in mind.
When we sit in the stillness of meditation, we
encounter that radiant fluctuation–the effervescent ground of being that is Consciousness.
There, in that field where anything is possible, we lay out the parameters of
the workspace that we call imagination.
And they are false borders—strictly of our own individual, and collective,
design. Beyond them is the limitless possibility of Consciousness, alive and
awaiting our willingness to explore. You might even call that uncharted
territory “The Mind of God.”
The clear bead at
the center changes everything. There are no edges to my loving now.
Jalal ad-Din Rumi
In the radiance of the limited senses we possess,
we are clearly a part of this creation. We are all an expression of this
Consciousness, and I wouldn't be the first to suggest that as an expression of
that Divine Consciousness, you (like everyone and everything) are an expression of God—however you
choose to define that field, that being, that infinite possibility.
In pop technology we say that “if the
application (consciousness) is free, the user (life) is the product (God).”
I guess it would have been a lot faster if I'd just
given a yes or no answer to that big question, but apparently, I need to run it
around a bit until I can let go and simply experience what appears to be real
to me—that Consciousness is God.
…Or was it vice versa?
The latest book: How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying), Wisdom From a Near-Death Survivor from Llewellyn Worldwide can be ordered direct on this page or online; and the first book: How to Survive Life (and Death), A Guide To Happiness In This World and Beyond is available the same ways – but ask for them it at your local bookstore!
