God and me: a like-minded pair?
Part 7: We cannot be certain of what God is, but we can be sure that we are one with him
All this talk of mind-merging is, I think, helpful to explore, but another issue that seems very important to me is that my relation to God appears to me to be a relationship with a God who is separate to myself. It is extremely likely that we can never achieve any certainty into whether or not God is “just” an aspect of my own psychology – that is, that he only exists within my own mind, or whether he is a personal, independent agent. With this uncertainty, it also implies that there will always be uncertainty over my speculation about what is going on when my mind acquires any degree of affinity with the mind of God.
What I am aware of is that my experience of God is of relating to someone who is not myself. After much deliberation, I even think it does not matter whether or not God exists separately to me or only in my own mind, because, whatever the truth of that is, I experience God in a relationship with someone who is other than me. So, although it’s possible that God is “just” an aspect of my own mind and, when I think I’m conversing with him, I am in reality just having an inner conversation with myself, I can never prove which it is that is happening. There seems to me to be a radical difference between me having an inner conversation with myself – perhaps mulling something over, and having a conversation with God, but perhaps I am mistaken. (And mistaken in a way that I will never be able to uncover) Perhaps the term “God”, that I use to refer to a separate individual that I sometimes talk with, is really the term for a special and distinctive part of my mind that has taken on the persona of God, or – if we wish to move from nouns to verbs – God is the term for a particular form of consciousness that I adopt when considering the nature and activity of what a person called God would do – IF such a person actually existed, rather than as just a concept within my mind. As I dwell on what a person like God would be like if he existed, he takes on a “real existence” – but only within my mind. In my mind, it then becomes impossible for me to tell the difference between the persona of God who has “come alive” in my mind, and an actually existing God. Very simply then, God is the way I look at life.
These thoughts seem to leave me with a sense of settlement, of the end of long searching for a solution to difficult thoughts that result in lack of fulfilment and a possible failing to achieve the highest goals of life – as though something is always out of reach – possibly out of failure to reach what could have been grasped if I was somehow “better” – in thought or life, or possibly because what I reach for is never graspable.
However, if the ultimate is not to reach out and be at one with an elusive God “out there”, who is always a will o’ the wisp ultimately unreachable and unknowable, but the ultimate is, in fact, a oneness within our own minds – the one sanctuary that is completely “me” – that entails a coming together of my mind and the mind of God, then this strikes me as something that I can know, and even (perhaps) take charge of the process by which this goal could be accomplished.
Yes, my mind will one day cease. Even at its very best, the conformity of my mind to the mind of God is so partial and temporary, yet to the degree that I experience that, I have accomplished what ultimately matters.
Spiritual Devotion 