Ask: When did you break through your concept of God?

         “... People get bogged down with their concept of God and never break past it. Meister Eckhart was quoted ‘the ultimate leave-taking  is the leaving of God for God.’  The myriad of mental constructs of God or Truth seems to be a formidable barrier…I know you’ve been addressing this pretty much your whole life, it’s a big stumbling block for most people, and I wonder when you first broke through it yourself.” –ESA 

A concept of God, or Reality beyond consciousness, is inevitable in ego-consciousness. A concept is all God can be to ego, which is the denial of God. So, ego uses concepts of God for its own ends, which is to validate its own seeming-reality. These evolve as one’s spirituality evolves, but they are always false and only fall away if ego falls away.

There are two aspects of ego’s concepts of God. First, in practice, ego is the god in ego-consciousness. Ego is the arbiter of reality. It determines what is real and does not question this. The second aspect is the concept of God ego projects to disguise it is its own god. It projects its own traits onto a concept of God, but also borrows what you may experience of God’s Spirit in consciousness, giving those experiences meaning that validate it. Ego spiritualizes itself in this process by granting the ego experience spiritual significance. You see this most clearly in its religions, but it also does this with its spiritualities. All spiritual practice is ultimately ego trying to make itself real. As Adayashanti said, “If you’re like most spiritually oriented people, your spirituality is your most cherished illusion.”

I am only breaking through this illusion now. I have only recently seen how spiritualized ego was here. It characterized the whole life that fell away at The Break. A Course in Miracles was a big part of that. (I will be writing about this in the coming weeks).

Bernadette Roberts (The Path to No-Self) said when ego fell away, she lost God because she had connected to God through ego. This led to the typical “dark night of the soul” in Christian tradition. She eventually came out of this when she realized that the emptiness she encountered was God. But for me, I did not feel I lost God, but I lost anything that felt like me.  I felt God was here and I was gone. (That “I” was ego, of course.) The result was the same, though. Gone with the “I” (ego) that was here was the god it made in its own image and by conflating itself with Reality. The “I” that remained is Spirit, Which represents Reality beyond consciousness—the true God.

 >>>>> 

If you have a question the answer to which you feel may be helpful to others, send it to Liz@acimmentor.com and indicate that you want it answered in this newsletter/blog.