We Have to Stop Killing God

It is on the question of God’s relation to the world that east and west diverge. In the west, our world stands apart from God. It is His creation and it exists insofar as it participates in his essence, which is existence. The universe, and therefore we, are made in “the image and likeness of God”. The West, tied as it is to Judeo-Christian thought, draws much of this conception from scripture, particularly the old testament. Consider quotes such as:

• “God remembered that they (mankind) were only mortal beings, like a wind that blows by and is gone.” (Psalms 78:39)
• “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding.” (Job 38:4)
• “The same fate awaits man and animal alike. One dies just like the other. They are both the same kind of creature.” (Ecclesiastes 3:19)

We also hear the same sentiment in Christian prayers, such as “remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return” from the Catholic Church’s Ash Wednesday liturgy. Such language has become an integral component of our cultural grammar, branding our nature as fundamentally distinct from the Ultimate. It is a dualistic worldview in which the terrestrial domain pales in comparison to God, who dwells somewhere far away. The great western theologians and philosophers take a more subtle position, but I wish to address the common spiritual grammar of the west.

There is a famous riddle regarding God’s omnipotence: “Could God create a rock that is too heavy for Him to lift?” In order to understand the eastern worldview, consider the following answer: “If there is a rock that no human being nor any of his machines can lift, then the answer is ‘Yes’ because the universe, and mankind, are God.” To the eastern mind, broadly speaking, there is no ultimate division between God and the world because God is the world. He is the ultimate shapeshifter: pure potentiality and infinite consciousness. We erect borders between ourselves and objects, but these demarcations do not exist absolutely. All phenomena are interdependent and we cannot truly consider any one aspect apart from the whole. It is folly to attempt to prove the existence of God because, in order to craft a demonstration, we must first assume existence. That is, if I asked you to prove to me that God exists, you would immediately turn to words or writing, which already exist. To attempt to prove God is to undertake the demonstration of existence itself using existence as a proposition, which is impossible. It would be as if you tried to demonstrate the existence of paint by making a painting — you couldn’t start without the paint! Such an endeavor is as nonsensical as trying to bite your own teeth or see your own eyes. The following quotes exemplify this viewpoint:

• “All separation, every kind of estrangement and alienation is false. All is one.” (Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj)
• “Boundary lines, of any type, are never found in the real world itself, but only in the imagination of the mapmakers.” (Ken Wilber)
• “The consciousness in you and the consciousness in me, apparently two, really one, seek unity and that is love.” (Nisargadatta Maharaj)

Whereas the scriptures endlessly highlight mankind’s inferiority and exile from God, the eastern traditions dismiss any such notions of separation to be a pernicious illusion. By conceiving of ourselves as isolated egos residing within a skin-bag, we fail to recognize the true interdependence between “ourselves” and the remainder of the world. The “consciousness…apparently two, really one” is God, the primary matrix for phenomena. The Zen tradition is particularly fond of referring to God as “emptiness”, a space which pervades all Being and which is always potentially other. This void is present even where objects are also present as a precondition of their place. The emptiness may be occupied, but it is not eliminated, for then where would the object be? When we conceive of ourselves as other than this emptiness, we forget who we are, our “original face”.

I once asked a buddhist monk for the most direct route to enlightenment. After the usual admonitions that it was not a state that could be attained, he told me to sit still, eyes closed, and to ask myself ‘Who am I?’. After each response, I was to consider whether the proposed answer was “me” or something of which I was aware. For example, I might answer that ‘I am my body’. Upon further consideration, it would become clear that, ‘no, I am not my body but rather I am something which experiences and controls the body’. If I were to answer that ‘I am my brain’, then I could wonder ‘What is the brain? Do I know at this moment that it exists? Is it something I am experiencing? Who is this “I” that is experiencing it?’ Further, after wrestling with each response, I was to note that these were all simply thoughts which “I” was experiencing. Even the inner voice which delivered these proposals was something of which I was aware — who was this interior speaker addressing? ‘Well, it is addressing me, of course!’ would be my answer, to which the response would arise ‘Well who is that?’ and so on. Eventually, after extensive practice, the monk informed me that I would realize that I could never nail down any concrete, enduring “self” with which to identify. This discovery is the doctrine of anatta or “no-self”, the idea that there is no abiding, individual soul. Absent its contents, there is nothing to individuate consciousness — it simply is, and this is God.

It is true that eastern temples are often filled with statues of gods and goddesses and that many buddhists venerate the historical buddha as if he were a divine being (despite the fact that he admonished his followers not to deify him). Does this undermine my claim that non-duality is at the heart of these traditions? Hinduism, for example, recognizes over thirty three million deities! While this would seem a rank contradiction, we should note that these are not all-powerful gods in their own right, but are considered to be expressions or avatars of the ultimate reality, brahman. This mysterious deity is the first creative principle which does not change but which underlies all change. It is infinite possibility, of which the myriad divinities of the Hindu pantheon represent aspects. Because the human mind cannot grasp formless emptiness, personified depictions of brahman offer practitioners something to latch onto.

It is also true that the Bible contains many passages which imply non-duality. Consider the following:

• “I am that am.” (Exodus 3:14)
• “Before long, the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live.On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.” (John 14:19–20)
• “What can be seen (creation) was made out of what cannot be seen.” (Hebrews 11:3)
• “In Him we live and move and exist.” (Acts 17:28)

Do these passages, alongside the differing conceptions of God in the old and new testaments (the jealous, fiery Yaweh and the compassionate Christ), imply that perhaps Christianity is more cognizant of non-duality than its common practice reveals? Just as many Hindus might think little of Brahman but fervently believe in the reality of Vishnu and Shiva, it may be that large numbers of Christians have missed the non-duality of their own religion and have instead latched onto older, dualistic paradigms. The Genesis creation story is, after all, a litany of God’s divisions: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters”. This phrasing implies God’s independent subsistence and priority in time, but could it not point to the continuous creation of Brahman, whereby emptiness continuously gives birth to form? We are accustomed to understand “in the beginning” as a particular moment in the deep past, but what if “the beginning” is simply the root of Being at every ‘now’, just as the foundation of a house is continuously “beginning” the house moment to moment? Perhaps the scriptures are one extended exercise in the realization of non-duality. Jesus, after all, emphasizes loving one’s neighbor as oneself and forgoing the trappings of ego (note his castigation of the Pharisees) in favor of interior transformation. He seeks to level hierarchy, preaching that we are all equally children of God.

The west has always killed or persecuted those who suggest an identity with God. Even those Christian mystics, such as Teresa of Avila or Thomas Merton, whose writings are suggestive of the identity of subject and object (God and human), must continuously remind their audiences that they do not claim to be God. Their works are also not usually emphasized to the casual practitioner — their existence is a bit awkward. Meister Eckhart, one of the Rhineland mystics, who employed non-dual verbiage such as “The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love” was censured and put on trial for heresy. Even Socrates belongs in this camp, as his probing called into question the prestige of the Athenian deities and the sovereignty of the state.

The most notable killing is that of Jesus, and I have often wondered how things would have turned out had he been spared. What would be the doctrine of a gray-haired Jesus? What would a world in which we bore each others’ burdens look like? Or one in which we loved our neighbor as ourselves? Clearly the Pharisees shuddered to think what such a reality, devoid of hierarchy, might look like. I myself have a difficult time conceiving of such a radical leveling.

Perhaps this axiom of non-duality, while the most difficult concept to grasp, is the most important. If it is true, then to live in accordance with it would mean to live in the truth. There is no doubt that the self is the enemy of the other (this is why Jesus said to love the neighbor as oneself), and the non-dual traditions proffer concrete practices, such as the continuous ‘Who am I?’ interrogation described above, designed to aid us in realizing this fact. It strikes me that, while easterners get tangled up in images nearly as much as their western counterparts, the east has never killed its prophets of non-duality, but has revered them as great sages, whereas the west has disposed of them. The roots of this habit are mysterious. Perhaps it is because, in the west, we believe in a definite moment of creation and in the finite nature of the world, as opposed to the eternal cycles present in Hindu or Buddhist belief. Maybe it is because we have effectively utilized hierarchy as a tool in the service of great civilizations; in every hierarchy someone must occupy the apex. To suggest that you are god is a rejection of the proper order of things. God is infinitely separate and instructs us in “the way”. To suggest otherwise is to call the basis of the hierarchy into question, for God serves as an absolute point from which we fall nearer or farther away. Furthermore, the east does not depend on revelation for the authority of its teachings, relying rather on “go and try it for yourself” injunctions which negate the force of revelation. This, understandably, does not sit well with the keepers of revelation: the clergy.

Whatever the cause, I think that this is the great spiritual impasse with which we westerners grapple. Until we can say “I am God; you are God” and mean it, we will be forever outside of the kingdom. Perhaps heaven is not a place in which we dwell with God, but a state in which we exist as God. In order to find out, we must refrain from slaying God when he appears. And he is always appearing.