God and me: a like-minded pair?
Part 6: If two become one, are there two or one now? I still don’t know
It’s been a nice train of thought! However, I am, in one crucial respect, aghast at it! If there is one thing I am certain of, it is that I am NOT God! This is more than the traditional guarding against idolatry and blasphemy; we are exploring the nature of God and of ourselves, and trying to gauge our own experience of reality. The thing that impresses me most of all about God is that he is so completely different to me. He is “other”, and I use the word “holy” to convey this awesome awareness that everything that I fail to be, God accomplishes. So, as I’ve been exploring the possibility of what the connection between God’s mind and our mind might mean, I am not in any way claiming that some simplistic – and false – label of “divinity” can be applied to me. Yet my thought about giving my mind to God has opened up what seems a legitimate question about the status of God, and of me, IF there was to be some correlation between our minds. Is it a “merging” of minds, whereby our two minds still have their own identity but the boundaries of our minds have dissolved into a corporate union? Has God “taken over” my mind? And if so, does this mean I have lost “my” mind, or does it mean I have gained the mind of God? Again, taking into account the comment above, this is not claiming any status for myself, but I am trying to understand what such a development of mind would mean.
Perhaps I am making false obstacles for myself by failing to get away from my thoughts of God. as “a something” out there rather than as an aspect of me – a way of being me. However, this has been my concern throughout my life to believe that God is not me – and as I say, this is one of the things that I find most precious about him. Clearly my relationship with God has to take place in my mind – everything I experience takes place in my mind. However, my relationships with other people are definitely with other people who are apart from me, even though my experience of them happens in my mind . I still don’t want to say that God is just a manner of thinking that I can adopt – something that is entirely about me. Partly because I’m unwilling to give up the idea of God “out there”, but also because the concept of God as really being about the way I think doesn’t seem to do justice to the experience of God – even if “God” is simply “the way I think that is reminiscent of my understanding of the manner of God”. You seem to discover a reality that has always been there waiting for you – perhaps an analogy would be discovering a new continent, and, despite the myriad of unique features that each individual discovers, there seems to be a corporate unity about the experience that all discoverers of God enter into. This could be explained by the idea that “God” – who is really (perhaps) a manner of my thinking – is a faculty that all of us have in our minds, so that as each individual discovers it, it appears like a new thing but really it was lying dormant all the time. Ideas about there being some sort of “cosmic mind”, which is another way of understanding God, and each person has the ability to develop the ability to connect with this mind and become one with it, or even part of it, would also be possible.
Perhaps the simple thought is the right one: when my will is aligned with God’s, we share the same mind even though we remain separate beings.
Spiritual Devotion 