There is a lot of controversy about “God.” People from different religions maintain that their view of “God” is the correct one. People get into arguments about “God,” families break up over differing views of “God,” people get into wars over whose “God” is the true one. People have mystical experiences concerning “God” – some of which seem inexpressible and others of which wind up generating thousands of pages of commentary. Some say there is no “God.” There is so much conflict concerning “God,” but how often do we take the time to figure out what each other actually mean by this term, and what we actually believe “God” signifies? Just what do we mean when we talk about “God?” Does “God” have any significance in the modern world, in a scientific Universe? What is important to remember when discussing ”God?”
This is a very difficult topic to approach, for it is involves an attempt to use words to describe something that doesn't fit in a word - like Love. It is also a very loaded topic for many. It can also be hard to be sure people are talking about the same understanding when discussing, arguing about, or fighting over this term, this concept, this idea that seemingly transcends definition. One time, when I was looking up the definition of the word "God" on my computer's dictionary... It defined "God" as a "soul," a "soul" as a "spirit," and a "spirit" as a "God" - not too helpful!
There are a variety of approaches to and beliefs concerning what this "God-Soul-Sprit" may be... Many agree that this is a designator for a “Creator” – a “Creative Source” of the universe. But views on just what this "Creator" may be differ. Some think that there is only one “Creator,” only one "God" - others think that there two or more; or that the "Creator" is more like a principle - for example the Tao, or Yin and Yang. Some believe there is a "God" and "Goddess" and yet others believe that there is a whole pantheon of deities, as in the case of Hinduism. In some beliefs there is one "God" but it has many differing aspects, as in the 99 names of "God" in Islam, or the 72 names of "God" in Judaism. In Christianity, in the Lord’s Prayer, “God” is referred to as a “Father,” implying an individual being that has a personality that is familiar to us, is recognizable – and one that looks after those in “His Kingdom.”
However it does not necessarily follow that a "Creator" is the same thing as its creation or that it even sticks around to find out what happens to its Creation. Perhaps the "Creator" changes, leaves, or dies? What if it “runs into” its creation or even becomes it? Some believe that this “Creator” is personified - a self conscious individual - and others don't feel that is a requirement. After all, the "Creative Source" may be whatever blew up in the "Big Bang" - creating the universe but destroying itself in the process - and not even any type of personified identity at all, as modern science may suggest.
Some maintain that this “Creative Source” is “All” - that it is everything that exists - the good, the bad, the ugly, and the beautiful. Many feel that it is All-loving, All-knowing, All-seeing, All-powerful, eternal, and immediately present everywhere all the time. Yet such aspects of being are the extreme extensions of things we are not… We don’t know or observe much, we aren’t very powerful, don’t live long, and we have limited mobility: so the reasoning goes, the “Creative Source” must be the infinite extension of our limited capacities. Yet not all believe that the "Creative Source" has to be such anthropomorphized projections of those things we are not. Is the “Creative Source” a being, or just a concept? Is it an actual person or a formless presence that floats around and holds things together? Does it have a personality? Is it a generic organizing dynamic like an impersonal force or governing principle? Some may say that it is easier to describe what the “Creative Source” is not than what it is - but what if it is everything?
If we say that “God is All,” then we are adopting an Islamic conception of deity. Allah does everything, is within everything, everywhere. In Judaism and Christianity it is suggested that there is a distinction between the Creator and its Creation. Gnostics maintain that the ultimate "God" is a "Godhead" beyond anything we can imagine and that the "Creator God" is a lesser deity. Animists believe that the whole universe is filled with "Gods" that are each "Creative Sources" in their own rights.
Perhaps a modern philosophical approach to the topic of a "Creative Source" might be to look at this issue through the lens of ontology - the study of being. If we do this we can ask, “What is common to all beings – what is shared by all independently existing, unique identities in the universe? What is common to all of them throughout all of time and space (so far as we are aware) since the ‘Creation’?”
One thing that all entities - we have so far observed - have in common is that they are systems composed of other systems and parts of other systems. Each identity is a whole-part-system-relation. For example, an electron is a whole identity (an electron), a collection of parts (quarks), a part of a larger system (an atom), and a relation between these (a negative charge). On yet a vastly differing scale, as a human, I am a whole identity (a living human being), a collection of parts (organs), a part of larger systems (family, community, or humanity), and a relation between all these (a personality). This type of arrangement of beings in a universe appears wherever one looks, on every scale, and seemingly at every point in time (at least up until now).
When taking a systems view of being, we risk getting lost in a hall of mirrors. Is everything just a part of a part of a part of a part of something else? If so, then how does anything exist as its own being, as a distinct entity? This seeming problem of beings seamlessly interconnected and yet individually distinct may be addressed through the amazing principle of “synergy” – the whole is more than the sum of its parts. How do a few things in special combinations produce more than their sum? How can several things working together produce more than each of their individual efforts added up? This principle truly is magical, although it appears to apply to all systems, everywhere we look.
Each of these "whole-part-system-relations" has a synergizing combination of such relations - a way of interconnecting and functioning from which a collection of parts combine to synergistically emerge as a novel identity. This is true at every scale of the universe and applies to every existent thing we have observed so far. So we can say that the principle of synergy too is something that all beings everywhere throughout all of time (at least since the “Creation”) share in common – that is, that each “whole” is more than the sum of its parts.
It would appear that any ontological approach to the nature of the "Creative Source" of our arising – if it actually is, if it “be” -would involve aspects of identity - of being - such as system, relation, combination, and synergy - as well as holism (wholes) and composition (of parts). Now, whether such things are differing aspects of that source, are distinct altogether from it, or are all somehow combined (or unified) in a dynamic, creative, thought - form are issues that may be pondered until “the end of time."
So where can we go with this? Well, I might suggest that whatever we think or say about the "Creative Source" may reveal more about us than the nature of "God." Nonetheless there are ways to approach this topic that involve recognition of commonalities of beings that are shared throughout the "Creation."
Since all beings share similar features of being, it suggests that these are essential qualities of being in and of itself, which would be shared with any “Creative Source” that actually exists. These similar features are manifestations of, or aspects of, the implicate order or inherent structure of existence. Is this implicate order of ‘synergetic system’ the “Creative Source” or is it a manifestation thereof, or both? This may be a point for discussion, but if we have any relation to this “Creative Source” then might it not be through the very organization of being itself? If so, then everything shares essential aspects that are similar to the “Creative Source.”
When people throughout history have had religious, mystical, or spiritual experiences of the “divine,” each has done so uniquely. Since our impression of, experiences with, and cognition of our "Creative Source" will be entirely subjective and relative to the individual involved (we are not separate, but we are individually distinct) - albeit with some similarities… at least enough to vaguely discuss the topic - then the attitudinal relation of the individual to this concept becomes paramount. Regardless of which beliefs we hold about the "Creative Source," how we feel about it, the "Creation," ourselves, and each other become critically important, because our attitudes drive our behavior.
One of the key understandings regarding all this is that the idea of "God" is a human one, it is not a term which can truly designate what it is supposed to mean. It is a definition-defying term and as Walt Whitman suggested, perhaps humanity’s most advanced concept. Nonetheless, although our conception of "God" is a marker for all those concepts we lump together and consider the source of "Creation," (or even an infinite extension of all of those qualities that we are not) it is unlikely that we will ever come to truly know that mystery as it is unto itself. Unless we are "it," we will not, as Kant suggested, know the "thing in itself." But then again – we share an essential aspect of the organization of being and yet are individuals – so we are that, but also not just that…..
There is a question as to whether any “God” actually exists outside of our conception thereof. Perhaps there is some “Creative Source” – or perhaps not; although it flies in the face of common sense that a whole Universe of “somethings” could be created out of nothing, by nothing, and without any organizational aspect. For as Karl Stern says:
"If we present, for the sake of argument, the theory of evolution in a most scientific formulation, we have to say something like this: "At a certain moment of time the temperature of the Earth was such that it became most favorable for the aggregation of carbon atoms and oxygen with the nitrogen-hydrogen combination, and that from random occurrences of large clusters, molecules occurred which were most favoraby structured for the coming about of life, and from that point it went on through vast stretches of time, until through processes of natural selection a being finally occurred which is capable of choosing love over hate and justice over injustice, of writing poetry like that of Dante, composing music like that of Mozart, and making drawings like those of Leonardo." Of course, such a view of cosmogenesis is crazy. And I do not at all mean crazy in the sense of slangy invective but rather in the technical meaning of psychotic. Indeed such a view has much in common with certain aspects of schizophrenic thinking." - Karl Stern, The Flight from Woman, Chapter 12 New York, 1965
So what is more outlandish, an instinctive understanding that there is a “Creative Source” or the belief that – and it is only a belief – the universe manifested out of nothing?
Many people around the world throughout history claim to have had mystical experiences in which they felt they had some experience of “God.” Even if one disagrees as to whether any of our notions of “God” or a “Creative Source” are merely products of our imagination this in no way invalidates the fact of these experiences nor does it invalidate the fact that our brains’ can produce such experiences.
There appears to be a connection between the temporal lobes in the brain and the experience of mystical states. It may be suggested that religious art, architecture, principles, esoteric formulae, rituals, chants, music, potions, etc. are all various formula that have been designed by people as spiritual technologies to catapult themselves into mystical states. Whether it is the call of the muezzin, meditation, ingesting mind altering substances, enjoying nature, dancing, singing, practicing a ritual - or many other activities; all such things are technologies that worked as means to reach a mystical experience for someone, somewhere, at sometime. However, following the recipes handed down to us historically exactly may not always work when translated over the course of millennia by people of different lifestyles, languages, and cultures - and who have different interpretations of the meanings of key ideas, terms, and symbols.
That being said, it is important to note that all cultures have these practices to get us outside of normal, mechanical, sleepy, automatic, daily life impressions and thereby help us to transcend the limited ego reacting to temporal stimuli and experience being in a larger context of awareness and connectivity with the rest of the universe. These experiences do occur to people and although differing from individual to individual, religion to religion, and culture to culture, the experience of the transcendent, the mystical, “God,” or the “Divine” have many similar aspects. The sense of experiencing a shamanic oneness with nature, the rapture of divine bliss, the access to higher knowledge, and the manifestation of unusual abilities all seem to be related to accessing parts of the brain not used in negotiating the check-out counter, parking a car, or making dinner.
Now here's a clincher: even if mystical experiences and our conception of “God” are only products of our minds, the larger issue looming is the question, "how is it that we have these capacities for experiencing the universe in a mystical fashion hard-wired into the very structure of our brains?" Mystics and anthropologists may answer this question differently, but the fact that we do is proof that spiritual aspects of the universe are objectively present within the physical composition of our beings....
The key point of all this is that without incorporating the mystical functions of the mind through whichever spiritual practice works for the individual today, in the here and now, one is not using one's whole brain. It is less important whether what we are experiencing (when we access these parts of the mind) is actually objective or not – whether the content of the experience is “out there" or "in here" - than whether we actually experience the use of these functions.
Perhaps what matters concerning our various understandings about “God” is our own relation to it and how it affects our subsequent behavior. What is more important – whether the individual is actually communing with a “God” out there in the actual universe or whether the person is having a significant experience of transcendence? It is likely that there is some form of “Creative Source” to existence, and as such we have a direct relation to that through the very structure of our own being. Yet even more significant than the question about what that is, may be the question – “what does a person do with their experience, how does it affect their life?” For this reason, what Meister Eckhart has to say about this has great relevance today, even though his words come from ~700 years ago:
"You may call God love, you may call God goodness. But the best name for God is compassion."
Many spiritual people might agree with this – be they Hindu, Jewish, Taoist, Buddhist, Christian, or Moslem. It is clear that Eckhart grasped that if the understanding of compassion is not central to the notion of "God" then the results of the exploration of this topic can become horrific. He understood that how we act based upon our conscience and understanding is more important that what we may think “God” to be at the time. Perhaps what we each believe when we say the term “God” is different from one individual to another, changes throughout culture and time, maybe even evolves through the course of one’s life. Isn’t it therefore more important how we act as a result of our beliefs about the “God” than what we think it means at that moment?
Copyright 2010, B.E. Foley
