God

            This is about what is labeled God and how sometimes in spiritual teachings contradictory things are labeled God, which leads to confusion. So, here’s some sorting out.

There is what is going to happen in your person’s life and there is ego thinking it is autonomous and has free will and that it determines what happens in the person’s life. Even if you cannot accept that everything is predetermined, objectively you can see that your person does not exist in a vacuum. Their life is influenced by others and circumstances, often people and circumstances that are far away. Your person’s life is part of a greater unfolding. Adjusting to this fact is what is called maturing. Spirituality accelerates maturity by fostering acceptance of what is unfolding, often through the idea that what happens is the “will” of a supreme being, often called God.

Ego senses things beyond itself and these it tends to label God or a like term. The supreme being it generally senses first is simply the greater unfolding. Ego senses it, its person, and the material world are part of something greater. This story appears in a “space” called pure consciousness. Ego senses this beyond itself as well. This is why the greater unfolding and pure consciousness are often conflated. And there is the absolute, which is indescribable. Ego does not sense this but is likely to feel that any truth beyond it is the absolute.

These three things—the greater unfolding story, pure consciousness, and the absolute—are conflated in all spiritual teachings, except nonduality, but including A Course in Miracles. This results in a concept of God that jumbles up the aspects of each of them. This conflation generally isn’t a problem unless someone has mystical experiences that reveal more going on beyond ego than that ego and their person is part of a greater whole.

By far, what most think and feel is God is the greater unfolding story. They discover a sense of being part of something larger, something they feel is their creator and that planned and oversees what occurs in the material universe. This generally at first seems outside of them. They may try to manipulate the unfolding with prayer toward the supreme being, or good behavior to please the supreme being, to retain some sense that they can affect outcomes. They may thank the supreme being when things go their way, but they are thanking what was simply going to happen anyway. They are not wrong that their person’s story is tucked into something larger, just wrong about what that something larger is. It was not devised and is not overseen by a supreme being. It is a depiction of a moment an idea arose in the absolute and was simultaneously undone by its impossibility. They are seeing past ego when they feel this because they do sense that they—meaning ego—are not wholly in charge of their person’s life. If they find this movement of the greater story within themselves, they no longer feel their life is unfolding because of something outside of them but rather something within. This is experienced as a huge spiritual shift. One feels that they have found God within, and they have found the flow of the unfolding story and the awareness that their person’s life is part of it. “God is in me and I am in God.” “I am not a drop in the ocean; I am the ocean.” Their perception may expand and go so far as to feel the interconnectedness, or “oneness”, of all things in the material universe. They see more connection, more synchronicity, more meaning in the world. This may come with temporary physiological responses of joy and love. Life is richer for them and things that drive people apart from each other and nature are more painful for them. Though not absolute reality, these experiences are profound for the experiencer, the deepest and most desirable experiences in ego consciousness. They are the “truth” of ego consciousness because ego, the person, and the material world are part of one larger story.

Many get there and stay there. Some, however, stumble beyond the greater unfolding to the “space” in which it appears, pure consciousness. They do nothing to make this happen. What is really occurring is pure consciousness rising to conscious awareness. This is often experienced as emptiness. From ego’s point of view, this emptiness is terrible, a barren void. It is, after all, the very thing ego arose to deny so ego does not experience it as it is. But for one’s conscious awareness, which is part of pure consciousness, the experience is everything. It is wholeness; still, quiet, and constant. It is timeless. It is immortal. It is recognized as always having been here. It is recognized as truth. This experience, too, can result in a temporary physiological response of joy and love. There may be a feeling of oneness as union as, with ego absent, conscious awareness recognizes itself in pure consciousness. But if pure consciousness continues to rise to conscious awareness, eventually union is replaced by unity in the recognition that pure consciousness is the one and only thing that is here and ego and the material world are only appearances—illusions—in consciousness. Some come to call this God but have a hard time reconciling the God they thought they knew—the greater unfolding story of which their person’s story is a part—with this emptiness which reveals the meaningless of the greater unfolding story. God cannot be both behind what is appearing, giving it meaning, and the experience that reveals appearances to be meaningless.

There are those who say what is called in these articles pure consciousness is the absolute. Up until recently, the experience here was that the absolute was beyond consciousness. But there have been some glimpses lately that indicate what was seen and felt as the absolute is beyond conscious awareness as it had been experienced with ego in it, but not beyond pure consciousness. So maybe pure consciousness is the absolute. Ah, the glimpses were too brief to be sure what was seen. But the result is this mind is no longer landing hard on the absolute is beyond pure consciousness. It sees that more remains to be revealed as ego falls further away. In any case, for ego, whatever it calls God it is likely to call the absolute.

You can see in this sorting out how the Course, like so many other teachings, does not sort these out. What it refers to as God is sometimes the greater unfolding, sometimes pure consciousness, sometimes the absolute. That is because the Course, as it states, is concerned with an experience, not with precise concepts. It is an answer, it is a “better way” to be in ego consciousness.

God falls away with ego. God, Christ, Holy Spirit, supreme being, true self, the divine, the sacred, etc.—without ego, these are seen to be ego constructs for what it senses beyond itself but cannot fully understand. They are bloated symbols because ego is bloated with itself and projects itself onto what it senses but cannot know. But truth—pure consciousness—is simple, ordinary, and you experience it all the time. 

>>>> 

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.