Why one might prefer to use the term "God" even outside of religion

[Stoppelmann]

A favorite scene from the movie "The Razor's Edge"

I have always been an ardent reader of W. Somerset Maugham, even though it was a while ago. I wasn't aware of the 1984 film, but it has me curious.

Maugham shared some of Larry Darrell's existential and philosophical concerns, which were informed by his exposure to diverse cultures and philosophies. While Maugham did not undertake the same spiritual journey as Larry, he was deeply interested in Eastern mysticism and existential questions. His extensive travels in India and Southeast Asia profoundly affected his worldview, which he incorporated into the novel. Having been a frequent visitor to Sri Lanka, I can understand that.

However, although Maugham was sometimes criticized for not taking a definitive stance on the philosophical and spiritual issues raised in the novel, he presented multiple perspectives, mirroring his own belief in moral and philosophical ambiguity. This ambivalence carried over into Maugham's reputation as a writer who observed life with clinical detachment, which some found admirable, while others considered it a flaw. I recently wrote about syncretism, in which I touched on this position.

My first experience of Maugham was reading The Moon and Sixpence, which was loosely about the famous painter Paul Gauguin. I remember my mother saying that I was a bit too young to be reading that book.

 

[Stoppelmann]

Yes, I can understand that. There is the experience of direct experience of the "big questions" ( through words ) dissolving into a wordless and immediate realization/understanding/comprehension. When we think about levels of understanding, most all religious traditions teach them. From basic/simple to transcendent/evanescent. Our Abbot called them "whispered truths".

Do you remember the story of Elijah? In 1 Kings 19 is the story that changed my perspective:

"Know your God! Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord! Would we have the courage to take that step? What dangers might lurk on the mountain as the Lord passes by? Dangers to the edifice of thought we have so carefully built. Dangers to the ideas with which we have explained our world to ourselves. Danger to all we have held out to others full of promise and zeal.

The great, strong wind symbolises a strong spirit that tears even mountains apart and breaks rocks. It makes the hardest lump small. We might think that such a God would bring the long-awaited movement into dead Christianity - an Elijah also wishes for such a strong God. He should sweep over the land and sweep away all the opponents. But the Lord was not in the wind.

The earthquake symbolises the mighty creative and judicial forces at work in the story of the Flood. These are cleansing forces which, according to the story of Noah, tore the ground from under the feet of God's adversaries and hurled them into the deep. But now it is said: the Lord was not in the earthquake.

A fire - the final cleanser, the final disinfectant and steriliser. It purifies the earth from corpses, pestilence and all deadly influences. But here it says: the Lord was not in the fire.

"Know your God!" Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord. And behold, the Lord will pass by. An important moment. A decisive moment. When will he come? Don't we often feel like that? Could it be that we also say, "I do not see and I do not hear God! There is nothing but a quiet, gentle whisper!”


I don't know when it dawned on Elijah. I don't know how quickly he realised that the quiet and the gentle was the Lord - I probably wouldn't have realized it that quickly - that's what we have this story for. But when does it dawn on us? When do we become more discerning in our dealings with our God? When do we recognize the quiet, gentle message of our God? And when may it define us? Who is the herald of this message?

 

[Warrigal]

What is God Consciousness? - Deep Psychology

True Believers and Vehement Deniers are somewhat right in their own way, but both also tend to miss out a core fact of the spiritual life: the deepest, fullest spiritual life is not built on belief, but upon practice and direct apprehension. Without those, you have a flaccid spiritual life.

The two groups are diametrically opposed in their views, yet both miss the key point. It’s like the ugly sisters: they’re at loggerheads, but they’re ultimately still sisters, caught in the same intractable game.

The greatest mystics and saints to have lived were fundamentally spiritual practitioners. They were not believers. They were, in a sense, great empiricists. Do as they did and use the practical methodologies of any Great Tradition, such as meditation, prayer, chanting, yoga, and so forth, and eventually you will come to directly apprehend God. That is, you will experience God consciousness.

Now that we’ve cleared that up, let’s explain what it’s like to glimpse God consciousness.

God consciousness is not an idea, or a belief, or a story, or a sign of psychosis. It’s a direct apprehension of the ultimate nature of who we are and what all of life is.

There is a lot of confusion as to what experiencing God means, even among people who don’t speak from a fundamentalist perspective. That’s because there are at least 5 major states of consciousness, each of which can evoke a valid, direct experience of divinity.

For what it’s worth, I’m going to select non-dual God as my focus. It’s not that Gross, Subtle, Causal and Witness God aren’t important, but that the Non-dual contains them all and is the highest experience of God we can have, at least at this point in human history.

What is the non-dual experience of God? It is:

• Oneness: the directly apprehended, felt sense that your identity includes everything around you, including all sights, sounds, sensations, subtle phenomena, and pure awareness itself. It’s all you, without a separate “you” to know it. Everything is part of this oneness, is an artifact of it.
• Love: when you feel identified with everything, including the unmanifested, you feel a great sense of love and protection. You are not a little self seeing the world; you are an all-embracing Self experiencing itself in wonderful richness and fullness. Nothing is outside you. Nothing can harm you. There’s nowhere to go, nothing to get, nothing to lack.
• Divinity: oneness may seem bland and static, but that’s not the case. The ordinary becomes divine, because you realise that everything is simply an artifact of God. Everything is divine. Everything is an expression of the one true nature of all that exists.
• Ultimate Reality: accompanying the prior two is the knowing that this all-embracing, omniscient oneness and divinity is the ultimate reality of life. All other conceptions of the ultimate reality are mere theories or approximations.

I should also note that these dimensions are not simple “on-off” variables. They exist on a continuum.

The trouble is that unless you actually have the experience, you’ll insist that people like me are bullshitting you, trying to sell you something, or get you to join their Bible club.

Let’s use the metaphor of Neo waking up from the matrix. If anyone had attempted to explain the Matrix to Neo before he took the red pill, they would have failed miserably. No matter how they had attempted to explain it to him, he’d have been utterly unable to entertain the idea that it was all a simulation.
And even if he were to accept it, it still wouldn’t be enough. He would inevitably fall short in attempting to understand the magnitude of his delusion. He would be unable to step outside his familiar world and fathom the reality of his situation.

Only by taking the red pill and being unplugged by Morpheus and the crew could he understand the matrix and the depth of delusion he was subject to. There is no other way.

The same thing goes with God consciousness. Unless you experience it for yourself, you have no idea what it is. That’s not a judgment, but a simple fact of the matter. You can’t just learn about it.

And like how Neo in The Matrix film was permanently and fundamentally transformed when he saw the reality of his life, having just one brief experience of God consciousness can change you forever.

Sometimes enlightenment comes as a sudden, permanent transformation. But those cases are rare, and in any case the initial insight is followed by many hours of committed work.

It’s not sexy, I know, but in the vast majority of cases, enlightenment comes after years of spiritual practice. And it tends not to a one-time, orgasmic high but a process of mastery that slowly sneaks up on you.

As Shinzen Young says in this video, “although some people have a dramatic moment of enlightenment… for most people it sort of sneaks up on them. And unless it’s pointed out to them, they might not even be aware of quite how enlightened they’ve become… Usually it’s a more gradual process.”

Fortunately, we don’t have to rely on pot luck to experience God consciousness. Well-worn paths to God have existed for hundreds and thousands of years, East and West. And as the old saying goes, “Enlightenment is an accident. But we can make ourselves more accident prone.”

For this reason, God consciousness is both an ever-present experience and an arduous journey. In spiritual practice, we slowly peel away the layers of all our false ego-bound, body-bound, form-bound identity until we arrive at the One identity. All else in spiritual practice is an artefact of that.

This brings a huge sense of trust regardless of circumstances. I don’t need to force things. I can lean back a little and trust that things are deeply taken care of, even if the surface appears choppy. At the same time, it doesn’t preclude pragmatism and action; it provides a grand context for my daily doing.

I also have a fabulous sense of peace and repose that I’ve rarely experienced before. This goes beyond the outward, momentary circumstances of my life. It is the knowing that “all is well and all will be well”, as CS Lewis worded it, regardless of the circumstances. This is not an intellectual knowing, but a felt, visceral experience of my innate, unshakeable inner peace, which is divine in origin.
And the final thing I’ll say is that I see God in all, with no exceptions. There is a built-in understanding that everything that happens, everyone I meet, and everything that exists is all God-in-manifestation, or part of the consequent nature of God.
Often people make the mistake of dividing the world into “Godly” and “not Godly”. That which is high, or moral, or loving is Godly, and the rest is not.

I don’t see things like that. Sure, there may be levels of divinity, but everything is ultimately divine. It’s only our dirty mirror that veils that truth.


I apologize for posting this article rather than providing a personal explanation about myself and how I live moment by moment. As you can see, this explanation is deep and difficult to fathom unless you have experienced it personally. "God consciousness is both an ever-present experience and an arduous journey" My history proves this dealing with psychosis and starting over like a new born babe after each event. A blank mind takes the time to study each level of growth through experimentation, trial and error.

My life history is unique and a struggle most people cannot comprehend, however difficult life was is nothing compared to the reward of satisfaction and completeness I am in this moment.
"
This brings a huge sense of trust regardless of circumstances. I don’t need to force things. I can lean back a little and trust that things are deeply taken care of, even if the surface appears choppy. At the same time, it doesn’t preclude pragmatism and action; it provides a grand context for my daily doing"

Thank you.

 

[Stoppelmann]

But a question for you or @Stoppelmann, do you suppose the five levels exist precisely because many need to get there in steps and the lower levels are simpler to attain? Since they are more attainable and transcendable in the end perhaps that has made them evolutionarily favored as a carrier of human religious experience?

I think the one point that is made in the article that Mr. Ed quoted is valid: If you want to master anything, you must train. That includes the process of maturation, by which we learn to master life. The next step is to master awareness and the deeper understanding of who we are. There are phases of development which you can call levels, but as Ross Edwards says, mastering awareness is about stripping back much of what we have learnt until then.

We experience it during our maturation too, there are things we are taught as children that have to be revised when we grow older, and there are aspects of life that children are unaware of. This is also true of ‘spiritual awareness’ which is unpopular because our society is built of the principles of power rather than wisdom. This means that there are even more layers of illusion that have to be stripped back.

It is telling that much of what we are rediscovering is thousands of years old, and it has been a continuing competition between power and wisdom, with wisdom gradually building but always set back by periods of power assertion, whether wars or oppression. The sustainability of what we have built is questionable, which is a warning that the ancients sent down through history, but we choose to ignore it. Of course, the man in the street is often distracted by more immediate things than wisdom, but when we reach old age, we start to realise that we have perhaps put off the important things for too long.

 

[Paco Dennis]

I have always been an ardent reader of W. Somerset Maugham, even though it was a while ago. I wasn't aware of the 1984 film, but it has me curious.

Maugham shared some of Larry Darrell's existential and philosophical concerns, which were informed by his exposure to diverse cultures and philosophies. While Maugham did not undertake the same spiritual journey as Larry, he was deeply interested in Eastern mysticism and existential questions. His extensive travels in India and Southeast Asia profoundly affected his worldview, which he incorporated into the novel. Having been a frequent visitor to Sri Lanka, I can understand that.

However, although Maugham was sometimes criticized for not taking a definitive stance on the philosophical and spiritual issues raised in the novel, he presented multiple perspectives, mirroring his own belief in moral and philosophical ambiguity. This ambivalence carried over into Maugham's reputation as a writer who observed life with clinical detachment, which some found admirable, while others considered it a flaw. I recently wrote about syncretism, in which I touched on this position.

My first experience of Maugham was reading The Moon and Sixpence, which was loosely about the famous painter Paul Gauguin. I remember my mother saying that I was a bit too young to be reading that book.

I was a spiritual searcher as a teenager. I always had a book on some aspect of the spiritual quest. My Dad thought it was a waste of time and scoffed at it. I also lost interest in public school. The topics became irrelevant to what I wanted to learn. I barely made it through High School.

 

[Mr. Ed]

The article speaks of rigid practice and devotion to the purpose of spiritual enlightenment. in the midst of madness the person I was, was stripped down the bare minimum of consciousness and because of this phenomenon of nothingness I put myself back together again as I examined every particle of personality with the question’s Why does this work and this does not in a particular situation.
It was madness but I gained great insight into who I am and what I am capable of understanding.

I did not purposely meditate but when nothingness is all you are aware of your mind is open to endless possibilities of knowledge and reasoning. You learn you are not alone with the understanding of safety that goes before you, safety of god in you and if circumstances put you in danger you deal with it without hesitation based on faith it will be all right.

 

[David777]

Actions without forces bears on the logical possibility of gods with supposed omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, OOO powers. Those that believe gods have those powers think somehow such entities can do so in ways they cannot imagine. So sometimes resort to adding unknown simultaneous philosophical dimensions they exist within that we cannot experience where they suppose interactions are possible. Part of that orientation for Abrahamic religions, are described as miracles one is supposed to simply accept as unknowns.

Those with more science based knowledge are more likely to reject anything magic so as in actions without forces. In my case, I reinterpret Bible scripture that are described as such miracles, into oral stories that could have otherwise been the result of powerful entities using advanced technology and science. And have asked anyone to challenge this person with any OT or NT scripture that is supposed miracles.