Let’s talk about God.
It isn’t going to be easy. Is there any more charged word
in all of the English language?
It seems that any conversation about God gets immediately
bogged down. So before we begin, some simply housekeeping is in order.
What do we even mean by the word “God?”
As passionate, partisan voices rush forward to answer the
question, the more ambivalent among us turn away. Why would we want to stick
around for that? We’ve heard it all
before.
But maybe there’s a way to bring us all back together.
Let’s turn to ancient India for a refreshingly inclusive approach to the whole
God question.
In the religious philosophy of India, ultimate reality is
conceptualized in two distinct ways, personal and impersonal. In the earliest
sources, the Vedas, God or ultimate reality is always personified. The Vedas
are rich with worship of various gods, most notably Indra and Agni. In the
later Upanishads a new idea took root – that all of the personifications of
ultimate reality are a foreground that in some ways obscure a still deeper
reality called Brahman, an ineffable presence much like the Force in Star Wars.
Brahman is the ultimate, sacred formless source of all
things, a boundless energy that gives rise to all matter, consciousness, and
forms, including the gods. As such, Brahman cannot be thought because thoughts
are forms, and Brahman is beyond all forms. We cannot think about Brahman
because Brahman is our ability to
think. As 20th century Vedanta teacher Nisargadatta Maharaj put it,
“The source of consciousness cannot be an object in consciousness.”
Later, further refinement occurred. There arose two ways
of thinking about Brahman, Nirguna Brahman and Saguna Brahman. Nirguna Brahman
means Brahman without qualities, while Saguna Brahman means Brahman with qualities. Let’s take them one at a
time.
Nirguna Brahman is beyond all thoughts and forms. It is
utterly indescribable because it transcends all thoughts. The less we say about
it, the better. In fact, the more we try to understand it conceptually, the more
it eludes our grasp. The only way to “know” Nirguna Brahman is to realize and
embody our oneness with it; not by intellectual understanding, but through pure
awareness.
Saguna Brahman, on the other hand, is the one we talk
about. Here we can apply all sorts of qualities and attributes to ultimate
reality, and in fact we do. At this level of consciousness we can call him or
her by many names. This is where personification begins – the curious act of
attributing human characteristics to the divine. We ascribe gender and all
manner of personality traits to the personifications we conceive. Personification
of ultimate reality is ubiquitous throughout human culture – we see it
everywhere throughout primordial and recorded history. There’s something about
the structure of human consciousness that leads to this inevitability – we need to relate on a personal, human level
to the sacred source. It’s hard to relate to an intellectual abstraction. As
Aristotle said, nature abhors a vacuum. In the absence of conceptual specificity
the imagination runs wild.
This same dichotomy between an impersonal God and a
personal one is found throughout world religions. For the majority of the
world’s Christians, God is a personified entity, an assertion further
concretized by the belief that Jesus of Nazareth was not just a spiritual
teacher but God in the flesh – the ultimate example of personification. And yet
among Christian mystics, God is far less tangible. He (or It) is not a distant
sky God, but an ineffable presence best felt within the immediacy of our sacred
awareness.
The good news is we don’t have to choose. The two forms
of God, personal and impersonal, are not mutually exclusive. In most religious
traditions it’s understood that while one modality might remain dominant, the
other is always present. It’s not either/or, but both/and. You conceive of
ultimate reality any way you like since, in the end, ultimate reality
transcends all conceptualization.
And
still more good news: if the emphasis is placed on the impersonal or
non-personified form of God, then a bucket of cold water gets poured on the
fiery theism vs. atheism debate. Once you remove all the anthropomorphic
personifications and conceive of God as a non-local energy, atheism loses its
nemesis. It’s the personifications that atheists have been railing against.
Even famed physicist and astronomer Carl Sagan refused the label “atheist,”
finding it too limiting, preferring instead “spiritual.” Turns out both theism
and atheism were too narrow and limiting.
This is what makes the Indian example so arresting and
consequential. By including and honoring both the personal and impersonal
approach to ultimate reality, Hinduism models a synthesis that has eluded us in
the west where the tiresome and false dichotomy between science and religion
has Balkanized us into two intractably warring camps. What if the God of Newton,
Einstein, and Heisenberg could be the same reality as the God of Moses, Jesus,
and Mohammad? Since all God-concepts exist at the level of Saguna Brahman, they
are therefore provisional, anaological, and metaphorical even. They simply
point to ultimate reality like signposts.
Calling
God “Father,” as Jesus and his followers do, is a clear example of the
metaphorical nature of God concepts. Christians do not mean to say that God is
their biological father, rather, that he is like
a father in a poetic sense, as the creator of the universe. In a way, all
thinking is analogical and metaphorical – we see the world through a grid of
signs and symbols largely of our own making. But that doesn’t mean that there
isn’t something profoundly real behind the masks we make.
Perhaps no other wisdom tradition gets to the heart of
the matter as quickly as Daoism does. In the opening line of the Daodejing, Laozi writes, “The Dao that
can be told is not the eternal Dao,” meaning, that whatever idea you have of
ultimate reality, rest assured that your concept does not contain ultimate
reality. In fact, as the Zen Buddhists say, all of our ideas and concepts of
ultimate reality are like a finger pointing at the moon, and only an idiot
would confuse a finger with the moon. The menu is not the food, the map is not
the place, and the concept of God is not God.
This is why it’s so vexing to be asked the question, “Do
you believe in God?” Which God concept are you asking me to affirm or deny? It
can never be a simple yes or no answer until a long discussion has transpired,
one a lot like the one we’re having now.
Maybe the deeper understanding we’re cultivating here
will take root and bear much fruit. Building a more nuanced stance on the God
question will bring enemies together around a common understanding – that even
though we call it by many names, and conceive of it in many ways, the ground of
being contains and honors them all. Within our own families, and in the entire
human family, there can be peace surrounding the God question as long as we all
agree to look past our surface concepts and into the unified depth they conceal.
