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.

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.

God and me: a like-minded pair?

Part 5: Oneness with God as a simple reality, experienced now

If all this is sounding simply like fatuous metaphysics, I would object. I am not pursuing some phantasma, as opposed to engaging in the real business of living; I am seeking empowerment for living. If I can understand the truth about human existence, and what the true relationship with God actually is then – quite apart from wasting energy in false pursuits – I can give myself entirely to the task of seeking full union with God. I can end the anguish that so many people feel when inherited beliefs about God do not tally with the evidence of what reality is actually like. I believe it is possible to show that faith in God is, indeed, the ultimate human experience – as has always been claimed – but that this faith can be fully integrated into our understanding of the reality of the universe and the reality of what we know being human to entail. It is a faith that offers complete fulfilment here and now in this lifetime (regardless of whether life after death may be possible) and is a faith that can be embraced by all people, for it entails nothing that is reliant on unfulfilled belief or a promise that it will only be fulfilled in the life to come, after death. Complete union with God must be the ultimate goal, and it is that which is open to us through the idea of our mind becoming one with the mind of God.

Of course, we did confess that this will never be fully achievable in this life, yet we seem to be opening ourselves to the possibility that it is achievable on at least some points. And being the same as God – fully one with him, even if only on some points, seems quite something. And as a little bit of God is traditionally understood as being the same as the whole of God, perhaps there is a never-ending dimension to even our partial or momentary union with God. God is understood to be the ultimate. And oneness with God must count as the ultimate “achievement” for human beings – the ultimate fulfilment.

God and me: a like-minded pair?

Part 4: Who is it that exists if we attain union with God?

Clearly, in this case, there are still two minds: the believer’s and God’s and they are in complete agreement. When this “new thought” first occurred to me, I sensed that there may be more to it than this. That God has either taken control of the person, so that their separate individuality had ceased, or that it could suddenly be seen that God has ceased to exist, in that God is nothing more than a state of mind existing within us, so it is God who is shown to have no separate existence. It may be that this conundrum is solved by some sense of union with God – perhaps familiar with the mystics – whereby talk of one or the other party ceasing to exist is mistaken, for what is really happening is that the two persons are merging into a full union. In this case, both continue to exist – and, I think, both still exist as individuals, but they also, perhaps, take on a corporate existence, where the two truly have become one – even though both persons of the union maintain their separate individuality – though, in practice, neither party ever chooses to act contrary to what the other party also desires.

I note that I have started talking about the will as the central aspect of explaining how two might become one, and I did not initially expect this. I was thinking in ontological terms – about the nature of being – as to “what” it is that is existing if the believer’s mind “became one with God”. Have we shown that the ultimately important part of the human person is a mind that must “be lost in God” if it is to attain complete wholeness – and thereby attain eternity, such that, in the end, the individual ceases to exist and all there is is God? Or have we shown that all our thoughts about God as a separate, independent personal agent are mistaken, and, all along, God is the word we use when we attain a state of mind whereby all that we conceive God to be (as that personal agent) has been fully integrated into the person we actually are (as opposed to simply desiring to attain in principle)?

God and me: a like-minded pair?

Part 3: Behold, I have become God – and I mean that very humbly

What have we said? The mind of God is – sorry, can be – the same as our mind. Rather than thinking I have destroyed God, or, at least, terribly demeaned him with this idea, claiming that God is nothing more than something our minds can do, let us instead take in the awesome elevation of what this means for us: we can take on – and become – the mind of God.

This is not some megalomaniac delusion: “Look at me, I’m God really!” Remember, there is absolutely NO endorsement of ordinary humanity as though it has divine status. The idea only has any validity at all IF we can be transformed by giving our minds to God and allowing him to shape us so that we “take on the mind of God”. In practice, of course, this will never be fully achieved, but even aiming for it raises our question about the relationship between our minds and God’s.

If some sort of correlation, no matter how imperfect, between our mind and God’s is possible, what might this mean in practice?

We might begin by thinking in terms of us, as individuals, being in complete agreement with God. Not simply in the usual terms of believers acknowledging – wholeheartedly – that they understand that what God thinks is completely and absolutely right and good (believers have always accepted this), but we would be saying that, in practice, the person has come to completely desire what God desires. There would be no more divided will, whereby the believer wants, in their inmost being, the same as God, but other parts of their will want what is contrary to God’s will. If a believer could attain some sort of integrity, or full inner harmony, so that they experienced no inner conflict – on at least some points – then, to this degree, their mind would be the same as the mind of God. God would not have to tell the person: “Do this, for this is my will”, because the person would say, “I have already decided to do this, for it is my will too”.

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.

(A theological reflection in 7 parts)

God and me: a like-minded pair?

Part 1: What does it mean to say that my mind is one with God?

A new thought occurs to me.

The essential thing for me about God is that he should be real; he should be there. What do I mean by that? What I want most of all is for God to be independent of me, different to me, not me. I have fought hard to maintain a reasonable belief that God is more than an aspect of my mind, that God is not simply a psychological condition, contained within me. I have also developed a strong defence of the value of God as “simply” a psychological condition, and I have also put forward some ideas that I think are very strong and valid that, in practice, it makes no difference whether God is “just” inside my head or whether he is also “out there”. However, I hope that he is other than me.

An important element for me is that I have claimed that I can tell the difference between me having an inner conversation with myself – mulling things over, as it were – and what is happening when I am having a conversation with God. Some of my recent thoughts make me a little less certain of this now, but I still veer towards there being a difference. My new thought impinges on this.

Is my mind my own?

We must say, “Well, of course it is!”. If there is one thing that is yours, it is your mind. However, I want to say, “Lord, I give you my mind”. What am I after here? I am conscious that I want to be fully united with God, “walking fully in his way”, and I am conscious that there is so much of my life that is unworthy of God. If we are to be truly at one with God, then this must fully embrace everything that is going on in our minds. Hence my desire to “give my mind to God”.

Yet my mind must be my own. ALL my thoughts take place in my mind – there is nowhere else for them to happen. There is nothing more central to me being me than possession of the mind that is mine. So, if God were to somehow “take over my mind” that would then be God living in me. This fits in with a long-standing desire for believers, that God might indeed “live in me and I in him”. But what does this mean within our minds themselves? If my mind was completely God’s, is it still my mind, and am I even still alive? The only solution, I think, would be to conclude that my mind has become the same as God’s mind.