The Eye Through Which God Sees Me
From abyss to embrace (Parts 4 and 5 of "My Search for Certainty")
Dear Living Dark reader,
Following on from “The Abyss of Doubt” and “Stumbling across God,” here is the third and final installment of “My Search for Certainty,” the essay that I wrote nearly thirty years ago, at age 25, to articulate my own philosophical and spiritual beliefs to a friend who had challenged me to do this after listening to me quote from a host of books for months on end. Remember, the first installment contains a full introduction, newly written by me for you, that explains the essay’s origin.
In “The Abyss of Doubt,” younger me detailed the years-long experience of philosophical schizophrenia that had led him to a state of agonized inability to believe anything while longing to believe something. “Stumbling across God” recounted his discovery of an initially disorienting but increasingly fascinating and eventually pivotal capacity for a special kind of self-awareness that seemed to link up with what he had read in various books about mystical awakening. “It wasn’t long,” he asserted, “before I made the connection and understood that I had stumbled across God.”
This final installment delves even further into younger Matt’s intellectual and spiritual outlook during that formative period. Here, you will see him—or rather, you will see me (to drop the third-person shtick)—grappling with specific theological concepts, including the notion of forgiveness through Christ’s substitutionary atonement, the doctrine of the resurrection, and the relationship between theism and pantheism, that were central to my ongoing conversations with that friend in the context of the Southern Baptist church in the rural Missouri Ozarks where we had met several months earlier. In a sense, this third installment serves as a more direct window into those discussions than the previous two installments did, as the topics it addresses clearly indicate some of the specific questions and ideas that had fueled our interaction. I haven’t generally written as much about Christianity in the context of my own beliefs or outlook as I did in this essay, though in my journals you can see me returning to it repeatedly over the years. And of course some of my books and stories have grappled with Christianity in a subversively horrific way.
Before handing you off to the 25-year-old version of myself, I’ll point out that while the core understanding expressed in this essay still resonates with my current outlook, the passage of time has inevitably brought a deeper understanding and a broader perspective that plays more in a general nondual direction (as reflected in some of the things that I have published here at The Living Dark). Back then, armed with my youthful enthusiasm, an overheated intellect, and a bookshelf full of well-worn volumes, I plunged into the writing of this piece with a kind of heedless zeal. Today, with three decades of continued living and learning standing between me and that former self—including, in a formal vein, a master’s degree in religious studies and a Ph.D. in leadership with a dissertation written on a historical religious subject—I can see that my enthusiasm was also accompanied by the limitations inherent in a less mature mind and a limited cultural vantage point. That perspective had been formed and informed largely by American evangelical Protestantism. This shows up in, to name just one example, the essay’s broad-brush references to the relationship between Christianity and Jewish religious beliefs and practices in the first century C.E., which were clearly, though unconsciously, a bit under-informed, or at least lacking in nuance, and which were planted firmly within the theological and conversational soil of the essay’s precipitating Southern Baptist social relationship.
I’m also now also able to recognize that the mystically inclined take on Christianity and religion that I explicated to my friend, which felt so bold as I was stating it, was actually only that way within the context of the church environment where we were interacting. It wouldn’t have seemed quite as revolutionary to, say, the many mainline Protestants and other Christians of a more liberal theological persuasion whose thoughts and company I had not yet been exposed to.
That’s one of the things that stands out most to me when I reread this piece after so many years: that its overall thrust and tone illustrates James Hillman’s insightful observation in The Soul’s Code that a person’s daimon thrives on opposition. Hillman focused mainly on the influence of parental opposition or incomprehension to a child’s native, budding interests and inclinations, which serve to sharpen and clarify what the daimon really wants. But I think broader social and cultural circumstances can also serve the same function. For me, the fact of being isolated, as it were, within a social-religious circumstance where my native interests and inclinations went far beyond the attitudes and understandings that were considered conventional—and remember, this was back in 1995 and 1996, when the internet was still new to most people (including me) and had only just begun to form new real-time social communities that were not dependent on geographical location—this fact, I say, had an effect that was exactly what Hillman described. Writing this essay, to explain not only to my friend and to myself but to a wider invisible audience that I was unconsciously positing as I wrote it—perhaps an audience consisting of the writers, thinkers, and sages whose company I craved, and whose society seemed cut off from me by my then-present social environment—was a significant formative experience for me.
I hope the whole of this text has provided something of interest for you as well. What have been your own most important, most pivotal experiences in a philosophical or spiritual vein? Who are the people, and what are the events and circumstances, that you can recognize in retrospect as having helped to define you by spurring you to define yourself? It’s worth considering.
Warm regards,
My Search for Certainty
Part 4
“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.”
—Meister Eckhart
“For it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose.”
—Philippians 2:13
In retrospect I can see that I did what I had to: I reconstructed my relationship with God from the ground up. Considering where I was coming from, this was the only way I could do it. I had reached such a point of skepticism that I could accept no statement, no claim, no belief, let alone a comprehensive theory, without asking at each and every point, “Why?” My college career might have been easier academically if I had majored rather than minored in philosophy, for I seem to possess by nature the skeptical cast of mind that university philosophy programs seek to inculcate.
Asking questions is not the problem, of course. The refusal of most middle Americans to question their own presuppositions is a source of never-ending irritation to me, and a dose of philosophy would do them some good. But the point of asking questions is to find answers, whereas the American university, as I experienced it, seems designed to induce students to ask questions without knowing how to answer them. I wasn’t even taught to expect an answer in my colleges classes.
It has taken me too long, but I’ve finally found one.
It should be quite evident that my idea of God is mystical through and through. An excellent definition of mysticism is given by Aldous Huxley in The Perennial Philosophy, which is simply another name for the mystical insight. Huxley defines the perennial philosophy as
the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine reality; and the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being.
Separating this definition into its three divisions, I can see that it more than adequately describes my new vision of life. My recognition of an invisible reality of real importance corresponds to the first part. My quest for my own identity, culminating in the discovery that God lies at my center, corresponds to the second. The third part is the natural outflowing from the first two, for the recognition of a divine Reality cannot be filed away for future reference like a unit of factual knowledge. It demands a response from the whole person. Huxley’s description of this point is simply a restatement of the traditional Christian assertion that “the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” This has given my life a meaning that it lacked. As Huxley said, knowledge of God is the final end. I do not seek it with something else in mind; rather, everything else that I seek is sought with it in mind.
Regarding God’s nature, I count myself among the many who maintain that we can know nothing about Him. I don’t mean that we cannot know Him, but to know and to know about are two different things. We cannot know about God because He lies by definition outside the realm of our ability to conceive or describe. As I found in my own inner exploration, the fact of God’s location at the center of our being precludes our being able to directly apprehend Him. In the Bible this is expressed in the rhetorical question, “Who has known the mind of the LORD, that he may instruct him?” and in Isaiah’s recognition that His ways are not our ways (Isaiah 55:8,9). Throughout the Bible there runs a current of understanding that God is beyond the capability of our mind.
Other religions have a lively grasp of this as well. Hinduism, for example, has taught this truth for thousands of years. In the Upanishads we find the following:
If you think you can know God, you are wrong. All you can know are ideas and images of God.
I do not know God, nor can I say that I don’t know It. If you understand the meaning of “I neither know nor don’t know,” you understand God.
Those who realize that God cannot be known; truly know; those who claim that they know, know nothing. The ignorant think that God can be grasped by the mind; the wise know It beyond knowledge.
The use of the word “It” in that passage, not to mention the bringing in of a non-Christian reference, raises the issue of religious pluralism and God’s truth. I will not attempt to address the issue in any kind of depth, but I would like to say something about the conflict between theism and pantheism. Theists claim that God is personal. He is, in fact, the original Person, of whom we are duplicates in miniature. The very use of a personal pronoun keeps this idea ever in mind. Intelligent theists do not hold that God shares our physical form, or any physical form at all. It is in our consciousness, or, to use traditional language, in our souls that we are made in God’s image. Pantheists, on the other hand, claim that God is not personal, as seen in their use of the impersonal pronoun. God is spirit, God is force, God is creator, but It is not personal. It does not speak and listen like the God of the Bible. Theists have traditionally regarded pantheists as deluded blasphemers against the very essence of God, worshipers of the creation rather than the creator, while pantheists have regarded theists as childish in their need to worship something comfortable and familiar.
Something interesting happens when we try to use intellect to understand God: We see a reflection of ourselves.
Both sides merit some criticism, in my opinion. Historically there has been no deficit of theists who have worshiped an imaginary Big Man in the sky, complete with flowing robes and white beard. Neither has their been a lack of pantheists who have worshiped the material universe alone, and so have denied the true divine Reality and found themselves without a defense against the onslaught of scientific materialistic reductionism.
But there have also been those few people who have seen that the entire issue is an argument about two sides of one coin, and when I reached my recognition of God, I understood for the first time what they are saying. In a nutshell, the answer is that God is both personal and non-personal. For this second, the term “supra-personal” is perhaps best (the word “impersonal,” which has been used at times to describe the God of pantheism, carries the wrong connotation). Vital to this solution is the understanding that these terms really do not say anything about God’s essence. Rather, they describe our mode of relating to Him. I have already said that God is unknowable by the human intellect, but something interesting happens when we try to use intellect to understand Him: We see a reflection of ourselves. We turn our attention to something that categorically eludes our understanding, and we inadvertently scale it down to something we can understand. The divine Reality takes on the appearance of a personality when we approach it with personal expectations. This is what we should expect, if It is indeed located within us, and is as slippery to grasp as I found It to be.
This does not mean that the God encountered in this mode is ultimately false, a mere halfway house for those who can see no further. Like Jesus, it contains the fullness of deity, and like Jesus, He reveals the truth to us. All the passion, anger, love, joy, and protectiveness of the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim God is in Him. He is as real a person as you and I. And/but this means that His existence is structured in the same way that ours is. We know that when we say “we” or “I” we refer to just a small portion of ourselves. Our conscious, personal lives ride like the crest of a wave atop a massive ocean of extra-consciousness (“extra” in the sense of “outside”). This ocean includes both our physical existence, which came about long before we achieved personhood in the strict sense, and the many layers of consciousness outside those which we normally inhabit. In strictly analogous fashion, God is the same. His personal aspect is a gateway to realms which cannot be contained within the merely personal. Strangely, wonderfully, this means that the very essence of personhood is to go beyond personality.
Thus God in His ultimate, unknowable aspect, the God of (some) pantheists, is not “better” or “higher” than the personal God, nor is it a sign of greater spiritual insight or prowess to worship It. Rather, it is simply a strange reality of life that some people are inclined toward worship of the one, and some are inclined toward worship of the other. The important thing is to realize that there is really no difference.
At this point my organization begins to get fuzzy, and I am left with little time to set down the many thoughts that have crowded through my mind in the wake of my small illumination. I will simply record them as they come to me, and hope that someday I will have the time to organize them.
A. Christianity
Soon after I discovered God, I began to find that the dry bones of my childhood religion were beginning to gain muscle and blood. Now I know why Luke 10:20–21 has long been one of my favorite biblical passages, even back when I didn’t understand it. In it, Jesus tells the Pharisees, “The kingdom of heaven does not come with your careful observation, nor will men say ‘here it is,’ or ‘there it is.’ For the kingdom of heaven is within you.” And I know, in my own small way, what he is talking about. The Jews had long expected Yahweh-Elohim to intervene physically in history to set up his kingdom on earth, with the Jews placed in charge. The Pharisees’ question “When will the kingdom of heaven come?” was a reference to this belief. Jesus told them plainly that God’s kingdom is not something to be looked for externally, like the rise or fall of a political system, but is internal.
Jesus’s entire message had this at its core. In the midst of a people who had long prided themselves for being the only ones to possess God’s law, Jesus shocked them by telling them they had misunderstood it all along, or at least not understood it fully. The commandments not to murder, commit adultery, or steal are not solely, or even mainly, concerned with external behavior, he said. He pressed the law inward and told them that what goes on inside them is as important, or perhaps more so, than what they do. If you hate someone, you have murdered him. If you envy someone, you have stolen from her. To make sure they got the point, he attacked another sacred cow and stood their age-old idea of ritual cleanness and uncleanness on its head. You are not made unclean, good or bad, by what you do, he said. Just as the quality of a tree determines the quality of its fruit and not the other way around, so does the quality of a person determine the quality of his or her life. “The good man,” he said, “brings good things out of the good stored up in him, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in him” (Matthew 12:35). What? Good and evil coming from inside people? Most of them didn’t know what to make of it. Nor did I, until recently.
The foundational truth is that truth resides within us. Lest anyone think this idea opens up the danger of everyone “doing his own thing” at the expense of others, let me say that I am convinced that an understanding of this truth leads to more desire to do good. As Jesus said, he did not come to destroy the law but to fulfill it. Are we more likely to do the right thing out of the threat of punishment or out of love? In other words, what is the stronger motivator, external or internal compulsion? Cynics notwithstanding (and I used to be one), I think the second is clearly the case. If I abstain from theft or murder because I am afraid of getting punished, what of any value have I done? “Do not even the pagans do this?” But if I have an internal motivator—say, the idea that I and other people have something in common, that in a very real sense we are one with each other, bound to each other in the most intimate way conceivable, at the very core of our existence—then I am likely not only to avoid hurting them but to act in ways to help them. To view morality this way is in keeping with Jesus’s teaching, mentioned above, that we do good things because we are good, not the other way around. We know that we are children of God, Who is love, so we express this love to others. Paul stated the heart of this approach clearly and simply: “Only let us live up to what we have already attained” (Philippians 3:16).
Jesus told them plainly that God’s kingdom is not something to be looked for externally, like the rise or fall of a political system, but is internal. The foundational truth is that truth resides within us.
When I began to study the Bible with my new understanding, I was surprised to discover how directly and plainly Paul and the author of John’s gospel address the issue of mystical union. The author of John has Jesus repeatedly emphasize that Jesus is in God and God is in him. Later, in a beautiful prayer, Jesus lays out the very essence of Christian mysticism:
My prayer is not for [my disciples] alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. (John 17:20–23)
Paul makes the same point with equal directness, referring to Christ as “him who fills everything in every way” (Ephesians 1:23) and God as the “one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all” (Ephesians 4;6). Paul’s first letter to the Corinthian church contains one of the most truly remarkable passages I have ever read, a passage I became quite excited about when I first encountered it. In it, he spells out the significance of the Christian doctrine of the Holy Spirit by contrasting it to the ancient Hebrew notion of God’s utter transcendence and inscrutability. “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him,” he quotes from Isaiah 64:4, stressing God’s absolute unfathomability. But then he launches into a description of the most common experience of life, that of knowing only one’s own thoughts and not anyone else’s. Likewise, he says, only God knows God’s thoughts. But instead of leaving it at that and concluding that we cannot know God, Paul leaps ahead and declares that we have God’s spirit, His own mind, within us, and can thus know Him firsthand. He quotes again from Isaiah (40:13), “For who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct him?” And he answers plainly: “But we have the mind of Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:16). Paul’s hope lay in his faith that he shared in Christ’s union with God. Paul did not make the mistake of worshiping Jesus, the man, as so many Christians do. His adoration was reserved for Christ, the eternal Son by whom we are all sons of God.
This brings me to my next point, which is to declare that I think the orthodox interpretation of Jesus Christ is slightly off-base. The generally held view, the one I grew up with and still encounter almost daily, is that Jesus alone was God’s son. God chose to incarnate in a fleshly body in the person of Jesus of Nazareth to pay for the sins of the world. It is through Jesus’s death and resurrection that we are absolved of our sins and made acceptable to God. The wages of sin is death, and God himself paid the debt for us, carrying sin down to the grave as it required and then rising victorious to tell us all that we are freed. It is a beautiful story, but depends on holding a conception of sin and God that is utterly foreign to us who live at the end of the twentieth century. It is a historical fact that Jesus of Nazareth was put to death by the Romans (and personally I believe it is just as much as fact that he resurrected himself). Most of his followers were Jews who came from a centuries-long tradition of blood sacrifice for the atonement of sins, and they naturally interpreted what they had seen and experienced in light of this theological framework. Jesus, who was God, had to die, they said, because he was the ultimate sacrifice, the one that culminated and fulfilled all the others that had been performed by men over the years.
This idea has been carried down into the twentieth century, and I find it increasingly off-putting that so many people today spend their religious lives trying to perform the impossible and unnecessary feat of compressing and molding their modern minds into a facsimile of the mind of a first-century Jew. We must understand Jesus anew for ourselves, keeping the essence of the message and expressing it in terms that speak to us today. We must also realize that our understandings will not (or at least should not) be clung to by our descendants.
I find it increasingly off-putting that so many people today spend their religious lives trying to perform the impossible and unnecessary feat of compressing and molding their modern minds into a facsimile of the mind of a first-century Jew.
For me, this overhauling of my frame of reference begins with the realization that Jesus, the man, was a man like me. In fact, it is this that gives me hope, for I know from him that I can share the same union with God that he had. Jesus did not equate himself with God as so many people do nowadays when they use the words Jesus and God interchangeably. The lesson of his life is that he abased himself and was so empty of self that God shone through him like the sun through a window. He wouldn’t even take credit for being good. When the rich young ruler approached him with the words “Good master!” Jesus shot back at him, “Why do you call me god? No one is good—except God alone” (Luke 18:19). The author of John’s gospel has Jesus emphasize that his own will is put down in favor of God’s will: “For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me” (John 6:38).
The Christ, to me, is the principle of God by which all of us, not just Jesus, are united to Him. As far as I can tell, the idea that Jesus wanted us to worship him is unwarranted. Not that it has been made up by people out of thin air; there is plenty of direct reference to such an idea in the gospels. But since it contradicts the basic principle of other things that Jesus is reported to have said, and since these other things mesh perfectly with my own experience and that of countless other witnesses, I have concluded that the idea of Jesus as an object of worship is incorrect. As I write this, I am aware of C. S. Lewis’s scathing criticism of modern New Testament scholars who make themselves ludicrous by thinking they can understand Jesus better than did those men who knew him personally and shared his cultural frame of reference.
When I consider the crucifixion, I can only understand it not as a “payment” to a wrathful God, but as a demonstration of divine love. One of the qualities most commonly attributed to God is His immutability. He is the same now and forever. Thus, His forgiveness is not something new. It has always been the case. To suppose that Jesus’s death actually changed something is to muddle the distinct line between eternal and temporal. Our idea of sequence and change depends on the existence of time. For God, who exists outside of time, there is no sequence. From our point of view, this is equivalent to saying that everything eternal exists all at once. And if this is the case, then throughout history anyone who has accessed God has accessed the whole of His truth, the same then as it is now and ever will be. This means the significance of Jesus’s death is not that it brings about forgiveness, but that it is a manifestation of it, a kind of demonstration. He suffered one of the cruelest executions ever devised and was still able to say, “Father, forgive them.” Such love is nearly incomprehensible to us, yet a demonstration of such magnitude ensures that the point will not be lost on us.
B. Time, Eternity, and Human Consciousness
Human consciousness is the intersecting point between time and eternity. Our ability for self-awareness makes this so, since at the deepest level to be aware of self is to be aware of God. The correct understanding of time is not that we are moving through it but that it is moving past us, like a river. We stand still like stones in the stream, or like watchers from the bank. We can know this by verifying it for ourselves. We are able to mentally “step back” from our lives at any given moment and watch it like a movie or play.
C. Cultural Relativism, Truth, and Absolutism
Our only obligation is to the truth. We are not obligated to arbitrate how, when, and in what forms the truth manifests itself. The problem with fundamentalism of any type is that it mistakes its experience of truth for the only experience of it. How are we showing love when we demand that a person desert his or her entire cultural heritage by ostentatiously “buying into” a belief system that he or she is not equipped to understand? How much more beneficial to let our own experience of the truth be known, and to listen with sensitivity and respect to the experiences of others.
D. Prayer
The proper attitude in prayer is to direct attention inwards while realizing that what is being prayed to is separate from oneself. However, if certain mystics are right, then eventually the locus of one’s identity will be pushed far enough back into the roots of consciousness that one will live with an ever-present experience not only of union, but of identity with God. Intuitively, it seems to me that this must be the case.
Part 5
“Your search among books, sifting and shuffling through other people’s words, may lead you to the depths of knowledge, but it cannot help you to see the reflection of your true self. When you have thrown away all your conceptions of mind and body, the original person will appear, in his fullness.”
—Dogen
When I look back over all that I’ve written here, I am somewhat embarrassed at how impressive it sounds. From reading it one might infer that I have achieved total enlightenment, which is not the case. Most of the things I have written about still exist on the level of intellect, albeit with greater clarity than I have ever known. My few real experiences of God have given me much food for thought, and I expect these thoughts to be fleshed out with even more experiences someday. Hindus speak of three ways to God: the way of knowledge, the way of love, and the way of devotion. All three are intertwined, but they can be seen as distinct. I am definitely embarked upon the first. May God see fit to lead me to the others as well.
Finally, a brief comment to those who would tell me that my experiences are all subjective nonsense: It is undeniable that I have no way of proving what I have said. When we use the word “proof,” we generally mean a logically, objectively incontrovertible demonstration. The truth I have encountered lies buried within subjectivity, and hence away from logic. As I have described, however, this subjectivity turns to objectivity when a certain barrier is passed. God cannot be proved, but He can be known. Without this knowledge, there is no such thing as proof. There is only people shouting at each other past self-imposed walls. I speak from experience.
“[T]he modern condition begins as a Promethean movement toward human freedom, toward autonomy from the encompassing matrix of nature, toward individuation from the collective, yet gradually and ineluctably the Cartesian-Kantian condition evolves into a Kafka-Beckett-like state of existential isolation and absurdity—an intolerable double bind leading to a kind of deconstructive frenzy.
“Yet full experience of this double bind, of this dialectic between the primordial unity on the one hand and the birth labor and subject-object dichotomy on the other, unexpectedly brings forth a third condition: a redemptive reunification of the individuated self with the universal matrix. Thus the child is born and embraced by the mother, the liberated hero ascends from the underworld to return home after his far-flung odyssey. The individual and the universal are reconciled. The suffering, alienation, and death are now comprehended as necessary for birth, for the creation of the self: O Felix Culpa. A situation that was fundamentally unintelligible is now recognized as a necessary element in a larger context of profound intelligibility. The dialectic is fulfilled, the alienation redeemed. The rupture from Being is healed. The world is rediscovered in its primordial enchantment. The autonomous individual self has been forged and is now reunited with the ground of its being.”
—Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind
“But while the son was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him. [The father said,] ‘Let’s have a feast and celebrate. For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ So they began to celebrate.”
—Luke 15:20,23–24