The benefits of letting go of God can include coming closer to God

[The following is taken from a larger conversation originally conducted elsewhere. It has been edited for congruity and sensibility, including some new text, but the integrity of its original meaning is left intact.]

People sometimes mention letting go of God. But what does that mean? Was God in your pocket? Maybe on your iPod? Did you set God out with the trash? What you let go was an idea about God. A conception of God. A way of relating to God.

People will often keep struggling to hold on to this perspective, but intellectual honesty often wins out because there were things that didn't work with their expectations and assumptions, including their interpretation of what God and religion is supposed to be and what is valid or invalid in assessing such requirements.

I cannot go into everything I've written on the matter, but I went through the same thing, as have thousands of others. For whatever its worth, here are a very few of the things I have encountered and pondered along the way:

1.  It is possible logically to believe in God, but God's existence is not dependent on our belief or what we consider to be logical. God is the "no-thing" which serves as the source and sustainer of existence, exploding our limited categories such as "person"/"non-person" and "subject"/"object".


2. God is not a link in the grand causal chain of existence, even the hypothetical first link. God is the steel of the chain and the shape of the steel and that in which the chain exists.


3. From our limited perspective God can loosely be considered the foundation of reality, the only real thing that exists. From our point of view It precedes, coincides with, and follows everything.


4. What we can choose to accept or reject is not God, but our extremely incomplete and distorted intellectual notion of God. To truly reject God is to reject the most fundamental and essential aspect of ourselves.


5. Some atheists then could be moving towards God and a beginning of an awareness of the Divine when they reject beliefs that for them lead to ignorance and oppression.

I don't write any of this as a challenge to or an attempt to convince anyone of anything. But it does give a glimpse into the fact that wherever you are now can't be assumed to be the end of your spiritual journey. This includes atheism.  In fact, it was only after such a thorough and wrenching purging of my old beliefs that I was able to begin the real journey.

No watered down deity

People sometimes start by going for a more nebulous and softer view of God.  My own experience and that which I have come across from several others is that often such an exercise is just "watering down" the version of God you have been clinging to all along. It seems that is often necessary to wipe the slate clean, to completely expunge all previous expectations and assumptions, to be able to move on to any substantial and credible alternative. I encountered people who had views similar to what I came to believe later in my journey as well as what I believe now. But I wasn't ready for it. It would have just been borrowing something I hadn't really worked out for myself. That's just part of the process. And while some broad outlines are similar for many people, the journey is still a personal and unique one.

God doesn't technically "exist"

From a certain point of view, I don't believe in "a" God. Nor in the "existence" of God in the mundane sense of existing (with God as a thing alongside other things, even the biggest and best thing). I recognize what one might call the insight of God. What mayhap the ancients referred to as the wisdom of God. This is one of the concepts I wasn't ready for. I assumed that there were different versions of God referring to depictions of individual beings or different versions of the same generic being, and so I also spoke the same way. One way of expressing it I came up with is that God, when discussed as a concept, is best thought of as a particular orientation to existence. Because of various historical cultural influences, we tend to think of God as either a mighty super-being or as a vague impersonal cosmic force. Neither of these is accurate, and worse, neither comes as close as we actually can to describing God. In the end, that which is patient, aware, empathetic, and compassionate is the clearest recognition of God.

It isn't that God is "out there" or "in here", baking up batches of goodness or mercy that we can then receive and pass out to those in need. The fact that existence is possible is a quality of God (the source and sustainer of existence, the essence of reality). The fact that there is something which can give rise to what we experience as love (and not just the warm fuzzy feeling produced by chemicals like oxytocin) is an attribute of God and hence an aspect of our existence woven into reality. It isn't some "add on" mixed into existence. If someone says "This happens because the laws of physics gave rise to a universe in which this is possible", then you have a sense of my meaning. 


God as "no God"

So, to paraphrase Fr. Thomas Keating and the philosopher Paul Tillich, sometimes people need to know God as "no God". But that's OK. That's often more accurate and more holy than the conceptual experience of God they had been saddled with before.  I still maintain that many of those clinging to the certainty of their shallow and limited notion of faith, in this case of God and Jesus, would be better off if they spent some time as skeptics.  I think many of them would be much closer to God if they were agnostics or mild atheists.  It would probably be better for a number of them spiritually than the view(s) they have now.

Take for example this popular quote from an essay by Robert Ingersol:

When I became convinced that the universe is natural—that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood, the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom.

The walls of my prison crumbled and fell, the dungeon was flooded with light and all the bolts and bars and manacles became dust. I was no longer a servant, a serf or a slave. There was for me no master in all the world—not even infinite space.

I was free. Free to think, to express my thoughts. Free to live my own ideal. Free to live for myself and those I loved. Free to use all my faculties, all my senses. Free to spread imagination’s wings. Free to investigate, to guess and dream and hope. Free to judge and determine for myself. Free to reject all ignorant and cruel creeds, all the “inspired” books that savages have produced, and all the barbarous legends of the past. Free from popes and priests. Free from all the “called” and “set apart.” Free from sanctified mistakes and “holy” lies. Free from the winged monsters of the night. Free from devils, ghosts and gods.

For the first time I was free. There were no prohibited places in all the realms of thought, no air, no space, where fancy could not spread her painted wings, no claims for my limbs, no lashes for my back, no fires for my flesh, no following another’s steps, no need to bow, or cringe, or crawl, or utter lying words. I was free. I stood erect and fearlessly, joyously, faced all worlds.

And then my heart was filled with gratitude, with thankfulness, and went out in love to all the heroes, the thinkers, who gave their lives for the liberty of hand and brain, for the freedom of labor and thought, to those who fell on the fierce fields of war, to those who died in dungeons bound with chains, to those who proudly mounted scaffold’s stairs, to those by fire consumed, to all the wise, the good, the brave of every land, whose thoughts and deeds have given freedom to the sons and daughters of men and women. And then I vowed to grasp the torch that they have held, and hold it high, that light may conquer darkness still.

I will break the analysis down into three parts.

1. Obviously there is more than a little repressed hostility here leading to absurd over-exaggerations. It is best summed up by Albert Einstein, who wrote, “The fanatical atheists are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who — in their grudge against traditional religion as the ‘opium of the masses’ — cannot hear the music of the spheres.”


2. Moving past the hostility, there is a question here. Are limits always a bad thing? Is complete freedom always best? Or is there some value in restraint. Let us agree that corrupt uses of limitations for the sake of power and in the service of ignorance are contemptible. But is having a basic metaphysical framework rooted in a particular historico-cultural context not necessary for any kind of thought? After all, isn't decreeing that the world is limited to what we can empirically study about the material aspects of the universe also a form of limitation? And is it fair to lump all religious perspectives together as "sanctified mistakes" and "utter lying words"? Especially when so many people who fought and died for freedom of thought and expression did so working from an explicitly religious frame of reference? Or should we understand such a critique to refer to a specific person's experience of a particular thread of religion?


3. Let us now turn to the remaining element of the Ingersoll quote:

I was free. Free to think, to express my thoughts. Free to live my own ideal. Free to live for myself and those I loved. Free to use all my faculties, all my senses. Free to spread imagination’s wings. Free to investigate, to guess and dream and hope. Free to judge and determine for myself... There were no prohibited places in all the realms of thought, no air, no space, where fancy could not spread her painted wings... I stood erect and fearlessly, joyously, faced all worlds. And then my heart was filled with gratitude, with thankfulness, and went out in love... And then I vowed to grasp the torch that they have held, and hold it high, that light may conquer darkness still.

This imagery comes right out of the liberation of the Hebrews from Egypt, or from Babylonian captivity. It echoes the imagery of the Gospel of John of the light that was coming to free the world from darkness. It rings with the voices of the prophets of ancient Israel and the joy of those writing about members of the early church who found new life in Christ. It resonates with the various teachings of the Buddhas, including the historical Shakyamuni and the timeless Amitabha, Buddha of Infinite Life and Light.

It is the same taste as various other insights and parables from sacred traditions around the world. In this sentiment something remarkable is revealed. We have what can be considered a description of an encounter with God. Not the deity that sits on a throne in the clouds, but the God that is above and beyond all "gods". A poetic account of a small step towards a greater awareness of the Divine.