God and me: a like-minded pair?
Part 2: I’m sad to say goodbye to the God who is separate to me – but perhaps it’s not so bad really
In this sense, “God and I are one” – which sounds lovely, but does it take us into more troubling territory?
We seem to have made God into a mind, which can be identical with our mind. This seems to give a big shove to the argument that God is not, in fact, out there, but is, indeed, an aspect of our psychology. That sounds too weak to me. It would mean that God is a facility or capability of our mind. We might – as many great thinkers have in the past – term it “God-consciousness”. I don’t know all the existing links that people might make when they hear the term “God-consciousness” and I am not yet able to say whether I agree with them or not. I am simply considering whether the term “God” is better understood to refer to our consciousness of God, not as a “person out there” but as a way of thinking and even, I think, more than that, as a higher realm of thinking – and perhaps the Buddhist concept of enlightenment applies here. We can acquire God consciousness, which is not consciousness of a noun – “God”, but which is a verb relating to the way we think – that is, thinking in the manner of God. This argument clearly (perhaps!) settles the search for the God “out there” – we must give up trying and find God inside. But we must be careful that this terminology of “the God inside” does not fool us into thinking that God is still a “something”, separate to us, when God is really us – though a radically different us!
[As a tangent to our main flow of argument, we should acknowledge that the idea of God existing as “Mind” has a lot of mileage in it, and could simply be an alternative way of talking of God as “Spirit”, and so it is not necessarily the case that if we “confined” God to the idea of being mind that this must mean that he only exists within our minds. However, our main train of thought is to consider the status of minds if it could turn out that our mind is the same as God’s]
My initial reaction is to be extremely sad at the thought of God NOT being separate to us. I was told he was when I was young; I believed that devotedly; and it all made perfect sense in terms of according with my experience of the God who is out there calling to us. That is definitely how the experience of God strikes me. I would not like to think that I had been mistaken – with the sudden panic that perhaps I have wasted my life on some sort of wild goose chase. However, once we start to consider what it is we’re suggesting with this idea of us really being God, and – crucially – this only being true if the us who is God is a very radically different us, I think we find that there is not really any sting of loss. We may, hopefully, find our spiritual lives enhanced. I think it will also reinforce my view that, in practice, it really doesn’t matter if God is outside us or completely contained inside us. Also, we must always follow where the truth leads us, even if this should take us away from belief in an external God.
Spiritual Devotion 