Before we set out on the spiritual path, our concept of God is necessarily inadequate. This is because at the beginning of the path we are beings with limited, finite perceptions and have no way to grasp the totality of an infinite being like God either intellectually or experientially. But because the spiritual path is such a long undertaking that may have extended periods with little clarity or external result, it is important to have some sort of mental or philosophical understanding of the nature and workings of God that can support our endeavor before the have direct knowledge of God; we need to come to some provisional understanding of who or what God is if we are to seek him out. For some people it is enough to simply know that there is a God, that he can be reached, that he loves us and that he can be loved—this knowledge is enough to provide them with the support they need to continue. Others enjoy the process of a more intense philosophical speculation which involves understanding the details of the metaphysical structures and justifications left by the sages who have come before us.
Suppose we take a pragmatic approach—what if we don’t necessarily need to know everything, but we want some solid enough foundation with which to proceed? Then we ask, what is it can be said and known about God? What are the basics? The overview is as follows: God is an infinite being, transcendent of space and time while manifesting himself as immanent within the space and time of our universe. To say that God is infinite means that he extends beyond all possible limits of time, space, energy, and possibility that we understand. In particular, he transcends every mental representation we could make of him: every concept, word, image we could have of him is only a partial understanding because of the finite nature of our minds in contrast to the infinite nature of God. God is eternal, not confined by time: there was never a time before God’s existence, as the notion of time makes sense only relative to the physical universe; yet he is present at each moment of universal time.
Similarly, this vast universe spanning billions of light years illustrates God’s expansiveness; but he equally inhabits the smallest microbe or dust particle. Though God in himself is neither big nor small, perhaps the most common size to imagine God is being as big as the evening sky, which is something our mind can handle; it would stretch the mind too much to imagine something large as a nebula, which is much larger than our entire solar system, or even as large as Jupiter, whose Red Spot storm is more than twice as wide as our entire planet Earth—but all these and the universe itself are just so many small lumps of his matter compared to the infinitudes he contains. God is not comprised of any particular substance, like rock or dirt. However, even the hardest metal has only a relative hardness which is a construction of our minds and is insubstantial compared to the reality of him. But the physical universe is also one relative manifestation of God, and there is an aspect of him that is greater than and independent of this physical reality.
God does not only have a merely static, inert existence, like an neutral gas, large, and aloof; God maintains a state of infinite energy and potentiality. Einstein’s famous equation showed that an immense amount of energy lies within each atom, and subsequent scientists devised methods to release that energy for the purposes of both electric power as well as mass destruction; the presence of these huge forces gives a hint as to the amount of energy that is contained within God’s seemingly inert state. The burning of the suns, the heavings of the tides, the psychological forces motivating billions of humans to wake up each day for their daily work, and the biological urges that propel animals like sharks and whales throughout the the ocean for their hunts are all manifestations of God’s energy. Everything in this universe was created by God as a manifestation of his energy—everything that we have seen or conceived of is a portion of the mind of God: tropical birds and spiders; oceans; giant retailers like Walmart and Costco; mouse burrows; philosophical treatises; nebulae; and on and on—and that we have thought of but not yet seen is a latent potentiality within him as well.
But God is not simply a bodiless energy definable by nuclear equations, nor a library of ideas: God is an entity, and a conscious entity at that. God is not a human being, that is, a being of the same physical and biological type as us, but he shares with us the nature of a conscious being. Consciousness for us means faculties like awareness and perception, but his consciousness is perfect awareness, perfect perception, perfect omniscience of everything. Conscious beings can communicate their inner states, so in particular this means is that we may communicate with him, much as we communicate consciously with humans.
And the nature of his being is to have all possible positive qualities. Anything known to the human mind as “good” in any way is brought to its maximum in God. In human life, we know the quality of goodness by how we see it manifest in human deeds and personality qualities; God is the most good being of all. So is love known to be one of the highest things known to us in human life; in God we find Love’s source and zenith. In human life, power and glory are known by the achievements and conquests of mankind; immeasurably greater are the power and glory that belong to God.
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These pointers and paradoxes are so many hints that give us an initial idea of God. And for some, these might be all the ideas that are needed to support a sustained and sincere practice. But another paradox we must understand is that God is beyond any mental representation. God cannot be described or limited by any possible word, image, or idea—and that includes the words and ideas given above. This is one of the reasons that there are so many names for God in all the cultures, religions, and traditions that have tried to know him—no one word is sufficient to convey everything that needs to be conveyed by the term “God”. Yet, because as humans our main faculty of understanding is mental representation, we need to start understanding God through finite mental representations like the ones in the preceding paragraphs. These ideas are provisional. The eventual goal of the spiritual path is to experience God directly and to live his truth in the world. But it’s important to remember that they are like signposts or a railing to guide our way.
But even if we accept these descriptions, something is missing. The indications given so far indicate an unimaginable, far off entity. But how could a God so immense and grand be understood as relating to our actual lives? To illustrate my concern, look out at the landscape visible in the nearest window. Perhaps you will see houses, telephone wires, clouds, a blue sky if you’re lucky—while these may be the works of an omnipotent creator, in the understanding given above, the creator himself is nowhere to be found in the view. And he cannot be found—he cannot even be seen—because he is incorporeal, distributed across all space and time. How is such a God, too grand to even be concretely imagined, supposed to be of any use or relevance in our actual lives? How could we come anywhere near him without the risk of being annihilated by his huge forces, or perhaps even overwhelmed by his love?
When we consider the total absence of the immensity of this God in our human-sized experience, we see that there must be an equally immense separation that we must have from him. And in the context of so much immensity and separation, the practices that are commonly known to have spiritual benefit would seem to be impotent. Why would praying, meditating, or doing spiritual service get us any closer to this God, any more than running on the treadmill, walking the dog, or climbing a tree? Rather than attempting to understand the infinite directly, the way to come to a better understanding of God is to start in terms that are closer to our actual experience .
Metaphors for God
Metaphors are one way to make the unfamiliar familiar. A metaphor is a figure of language or thought that transfers meaning between two unlike ideas. Metaphors are perhaps most famous from high-school English class, but as Lakoff and Johnson have shown in Metaphors We Live By, they can be seen universally in human cognition and communication. Notably, we see the frequent use of metaphor as our world adapts to technological change. For example, at the time that automobiles were first introduced, the horse was a major power source used for long-distance land transportation, frequently used as a locomotive power source to drive carriages. Automobiles were therefore called “horseless carriages” at first, as a way for the public to understand the strange new machines in familiar terms: horse-driven carriages were a well-known phenomenon, and the new automobiles were similar to them except they did not need a horse due to the new mechanical engine. The metaphor here being that the new technological invention was likened to an older, familiar invention that worked by very different principles but had a similarity that the mind could comprehend.
Another source of examples comes from the computer world. When computers were first invented, they were giant machines that represented data using punch cards and vacuum tubes with metal frames that took up the space of entire rooms, and they were mostly used for highly technical data processing work. But innovate technologists came up with a great many metaphors to allow humans to interact with these new machines in ways that they were familiar with: the “program” was like the familiar multi-step routines of bureaucratic offices, the command line interface allowed users to “talk” to the computer and “tell it what to do” in a specialized language, and the “window” concept allowed users to visualize the process of shifting between different computer programs. Interface innovations relying on metaphors like these made the abstract world of 0s and 1s accessible—a process which continues with each successive wave of technological change.
But metaphors were used to adapt man’s mind to the unfamiliar and unknown long before the development of digital and industrial technology. The poets have always used language to cast new and unfamiliar things in terms of old and familiar things. For example, the sea was known as the “whale road” to poets working in Old English, the archaic version of our current language. The sea was then known as a huge, unfamiliar expanse. Even today we don’t have a complete idea of all the life forms and geological phenomena that might exist under the sea in the largely unexplored depths of the ocean which dwarf the familiar dimensions of our towns and cities. But the old Anglo-Saxon people were presumably familiar with whales, perhaps hunting them for their resources, and were also familiar with how humans use road systems to get around. So the phrase “whale road” made the colossal sea understandable: the metaphoric phrase says that the sea is a place where huge animals like whales commute to do their various activities, just as humans commute along roads on land for the activities of human civilization.
From our earlier characterization of God’s essential nature, we know that God is something that is too large for our mind to comprehend. God is something infinite, and therefore not fully comprehensible by our finite minds; more than that, his power, immensity, and love are outside the range of our daily, mundane experiences. In our daily lives, we are familiar with the world of tables, chairs, telephone poles, and salt shakers, not transcendent worlds of power and bliss. But as we’ve seen by considering the use of metaphor, God is not the first concept that we have encountered that lies outside the usual range of our experience. And just as with the other concepts, its possible to use metaphor as a tool to help us wrap our minds around the expansive nature and reality of God in terms of other aspects of our reality that we more fully understand.
1. God is a Creator
One of the most useful and widespread metaphors for understanding God is the idea that God is the creator of the universe and everything inside it. In our everyday lives, the idea of creation or creativity is most associated with creative artists such as musicians, painters, filmmakers, and novelists; when we hear the word “creativity” we might first picture Da Vinci in his studio working out colors and forms on canvas to match the vision seen in his mind. Artists provide a very clear example of the act of creation because the creative work in these cases has no separate functional purpose other than appreciating it for its beauty—art seems to be a case of “pure creation” . We rightly celebrate and admire these expressions of creative energy.
But this can obscure the fact that objects like tables, chairs, bottles, and cups from the mundane world are created objects too. In fact, every physical object in the world has been brought about by a process of creation, going from a vague idea to a detailed design to a physically constructed object that you can interact with. This is true of complex pieces of machinery like cars, which go through multiple stages of creative effort involving both mechanical engineering and aesthetics in a process of design, followed by construction and assembly where individual parts are created all over the world and then assembled in factories; it is also true of household implements like forks and knives whose basic design has existed for millennia but are still changing in form as they are created with modern materials and processes; and it is true of the dwellings we work and live in themselves, which are architected and then put together physically beam by beam.
It’s not just physical objects that are created through a process of design and construction. The organizations and institutions that our lives consist of— governments, businesses, schools— are creations as well. It can be easy to forget this because it seems like they have always existed, but these institutions that operate according to ideas, plans, policies and procedures defined by humans to achieve specific ends. We see that, in fact, creation permeates our lives, from our environments to our institutions to, yes, our art galleries; further, everyone exercises creative energy their work and home life, if not through working to ideate or construct, then daily acts like cooking, interior design, or self-expression.
While we just attempted to show the ubiquity of the creative process, the example of the creative artist does provide one helpful distinction for the clarity of the “creator” metaphor for God: a clear separation between the creator and creation. When Georgia O'Keefe creating nature paintings, it’s clear that a single person is the creator and the painting is the creation. There is no single creator for a shiny new Ford sedan, as the creative process long and complicated one involving coordination between hundreds or thousands of people. However, we could perhaps say that the Ford Motor Corporation created the car. So we can say that everything we see here in our world was created by a person, or an entity (like a company), or perhaps by a complex process (like a supply chain).
We see, then, that creative acts and creative entities are ubiquitous in our universe. And we can use this understanding to consider the metaphoric extension that helps us to understand God: every object, whether artwork or implement, in our awareness, had a creator. The universe, too, is a created object like the familiar objects of our world. Just as those objects have a creator, we can imagine the entity that created the universe, and consider that entity as God. This leap of thought allows uses the familiar relation of a creator with a created object as a way to understand God as the creator of the entire universe.
There are a few standard philosophical puzzles that this might seem to lead to. First, if the universe must have had a creator because it is a creative object, then wouldn’t the creator need a creator as well? Second, this metaphor may remind some readers of the classic “watchmaker” argument, which asserts that the universe must have a creator because anything so complex as a universe or human intelligence must have been deliberately created. For the advanced metaphysical studies that I alluded to earlier in this essay, these sorts of arguments may have their place, but they are not relevant to this discussion. I am not arguing that the universe *must* have had a creator, whether on account of its complexity or just the bare fact that it has been created at all. There are philosophical arguments for or against these ideas which I am not addressing, as I’m not addressing the *existence *of God here. Rather, the purpose here is to show those who are open to the existence of God how to use metaphor of creator to understand what God is.
And those who are willing to entertain this thought may find that it can bring you into relation with an entity or force that has this sort of relation to the universe—the relationship that a creator has to a created thing. So if you are willing to, simply allow yourself to entertain the concept of this first metaphor to understand God—that God is the creator of the universe. As Victor Hugo was the novelist who created the novel Les Miserables, or Frank Lloyd Wright was the architect of the Guggenheim Museum, so we can understand God as the one who created the material universe, which includes our own lives and everything we see in our surroundings. If we can look around at at our material and social environment and see the handiwork of God, we have understood what it means to say that God is the Creator.
2. God is the Heavenly Mother/Father
Closely related to the metaphor of God as creator is the metaphor of God as parent. At first, it might even seem to be a special case of the previous metaphor, because parents can be thought of as the creators of the child. But actually, the similarity stops there, as the relationship between a parent and child has quite different character from the general or abstract idea of creation. Parenting is about more than a single act of creative energy. It’s a process that involves supporting and teaching a child as it goes through the stages of life, from a helpless infant who is totally at the mercy of physical protection and nourishment of the family, to a child who goes through an intensive social and cognitive learning process, to an adolescent who starts to form his or her own identity but still needs guidance, to an adult who participates in an ongoing mutual relationship with the family. For a parent to look at their child and feel that they are a primarily a “creation” would feel dehumanizing; the parent-child relationship is a long-term relationship characterized by guidance, protection and love.
The character of this relationship is so fundamental that it can be seen as a metaphor for many relationships and institutions in our society, even where it is not used as an explicit model. Any teacher-student relationship is modeled on the parent-child relationship to some extent, as a schoolteacher assumes partial responsibility for the child’s growth and welfare for a portion of the day; in a therapist-patient relationship, the therapist is aware that the therapeutic process will bring up parent-child attachment dynamics; even the relationship between a government and its subjects or citizens is tinged with the resonance of this relationship, as a government provides essential services for adults in a similar way to the way the family provides an environment for its children.
The parent-child relationship is an important metaphorical model both at a theoretical level as well as a psychological level for thinking about a variety of relationships. So it’s not surprising that it is one of the most prominent ideas that structure man’s relationship towards God. Metaphorically, God can be thought of as being like our father or mother, but in a spiritual rather than in an earthly sense. The earthly parent shows us how to navigate a complex world through example and direct instruction; God as spiritual parent provides us with the outer experience we need to grow and the inner intuitive guidance we need to make the right choices. The earthly parent provides support and consolation; God as the spiritual parent provides the consolation and strength needed to face the world if we are willing to lean on him or her. The relationship has is an element of seniority as well: having gone through the experience of adult life, the earthly parent is older and wiser than the child; so is God as a spiritual being wiser and more knowledgeable than us, even when our mind and ego think that they should know better. Since we have all had parents of some sort, whether natural or adopted, we all have an idea of what a parent-child relationship should look like, and so we can model our interactions with God on this relationship that we already understand.
But using this metaphor is not without its difficulties. Even though we have all experienced the earthly parent-child relationship, we have all also experienced some sort of problem or pathology in this relationship. Even the most well-adjusted family inflicts the shadow side of its parents onto the children, and the stressful circumstances of life invariably add to this strains. There are also more severe issues that can happen such as parental abuse or abandonment or voluntary/involuntary separation from the children.
Still, the metaphor is meant to serve an initial jumping off point, a way to structure a relationship to God in our understanding. Even if there were flaws—even grave ones—in our earthly parental relationships, we can still understand the way in which our parents enacted the fatherly and/or motherly function, or at the very least understand by contrast what a father or mother should have been through understanding their failure. And we can extrapolate the nature of a spiritual parent from there. The flaws in our personal psychological relationships with our earthly parents can lead to issues coloring our relationship with God, but these can be healed as we deepen our relationship with God over time.
So far I have discussed the metaphorical idea of God as Divine parent as being either mother or father with no preference or even difference implied. But there has in fact been divergence in these conceptions historically, and there continues to be a difference as a practical matter of spiritual practice. In the West, the conception of God as Father has been dominant for many centuries, with the unfortunate result of the suppression of the feminine aspects of God going hand in hand with the social and political oppression of women. But God as the Divine Mother has also been worshipped in cultures throughout history and has many faces, including Quan Yin, the Buddhist Bodhisattva of Compassion, the Virgin Mary honored by Catholics, bestowing mercy and grace, and the Hindu God Kali, a figure of terrible Divine strength; even the modern idea of Mother Earth or Gaia can perhaps be seen as a figure of the Divine Mother, being a secular or religious expression of reverence for the interconnectedness of life revealed by ecological science.
The reason for the special importance of the mother metaphor are clear. The earthly mother is the figure that gives birth to the child and provides a supportive, loving environment for him or her; there is a conception of the Divine Mother that holds that she is the very matrix and possibility of creation, in the same way that the mother’s womb gestates the child and the mother’s support provides the necessary psychological environment for the child. In the midst of difficulties the earthly mother consoles, as does the Divine Mother. The earthly mother provides encouragement and strength to face the difficulties of the world, and so does the Divine Mother. We turn to this form of God with affection and tenderness, sometimes in severe contrition, and sometimes in awe of her strength and power.
There are overdue and necessary critiques of masculinity in our society that may well need to be extended to our theological conceptions as well; overemphasis on the masculine or father concept of God has led to the concept of Divine strength being perverted into needless aggression, and Divine wisdom being perverted into unfeeling, compassionless logic. But even if the concept of masculinity and fatherhood is critiqued or reformed, it is not likely to be destroyed completely; fatherhood itself has not gone away, at least for now. If our understanding of the meaning of fatherhood changes, then our conception of how the metaphorical spiritual father may well change as well. But so long as the idea and institution of fatherhood is still relevant, the conception of God as spiritual father will continue to be relevant. And perhaps waking up to the negative effects of “toxic masculinity” may help us to discover the grace and power that can come from a closer relationship to the father aspect of God.
3. God is the Ruler of the Universe
Who is in charge of affairs here on Earth? When asked this question, we do not immediately think of God in his timeless and spaceless infinity: it’s obvious that it’s the rulers of the world are the presidents, prime ministers, ayatollahs, chancellors, and members of parliament who are in charge of governments along with those who are in charge of various aspects of functional power—bankers, industrialists, CEOs, cardinals, bureaucrats, military commanders and so on. These are the people who make decisions who affect our lives, who command military campaigns, scientific initiatives, and industrial production. They create the policies and regulations that define the structures of our world, manage the flow of supplies, control where resources are allocated, and determine how coordinate complex endeavors and react to unexpected events.
The concept of power and control is also seen at smaller scales than the worldwide. A governor of a US state is less powerful than a president, but he or she still has control over many aspects of the state’s affairs, including its public school system. As an agent in this system, a principal of a school is responsible for the work of dozens of teachers, hundreds or thousands of students, and must deal with issues affecting the students’ parents themselves and the entire community more broadly. And at the next level down, a teacher is responsible for the classroom experience of twenty or thirty students and their learning throughout the year. They need to make decisions about disciplinary actions and grade assessments and are empowered to do so, leaving marks that stay on the student’s educational record for years. And the next level of power, the student is responsible for their own school career—they may study or procrastinate, figure out how to balance the workload of their classes, and perhaps choose to participate in extracurricular activities. Power, agency, and control can be seen at every locus of human activity, including every human organization of any size and scale, and every individual human being and his or her affairs.
The metaphor we explore here uses the aspect of power that is seen in human affairs to understand God: just as there are human leaders in charge of earthly affairs, from the world-wide to the local, so can we understand God as being the one who rules the Universe. God manages the affairs of the world with his or her executive capacity just as a great CEO or a President would manage the affairs of a company or a country. He manages both the big picture and the details, allocating the required resources and determining the ends to which they are put. We bow down to this aspect God in awe of the ability to coordinate such a complex endeavor as the management of all universal affairs. A starting point for relating to this aspect of God is to relate as we would a revered human leader, doing what he thinks is best and trusting in his judgement as he fits our work into the whole.
As with the previous metaphors, it’s important to remember that this is a metaphor that reveals one aspect of God and should not be taken literally or absolutely. Like with the case of the earthly mother and father, all of our human leaders on earth are imperfect and make imperfect decisions; we only use them as an imperfect version of leadership and power to help us understand what Divine and perfect qualities of leadership and power would look like. Further, this metaphor is certainly not meant to encourage a blind worship of earthly power and authority—the days of Pharaohs being regarded as incarnations of God or of the doctrine of Divine Right of Kings are long gone, as we have seen the problems that this leads to.
Power is also not the only Divine principle, and God is not a figure of overpowering brute ruling strength alone. One example to consider is how much of the advancement of morality and justice through the ages has been by working against the existing order in power; justice is another Divine principle, even though it sometimes conflicts with power, and time and again those with limited political power but justice on their side have counted on God. And, of course, besides justice, there is the Divine principle of Love, which may sometimes align with Power, but as often as not seeks its own quite different ends.
It can be difficult to accept this metaphorical idea of God as ruler because it brings up difficult questions—namely, if God is in charge of everything that happens on earth, is he also responsible for the pain, disaster, and suffering here? There are explanations and answers that can be given—for one, it must be considered the material with which he starts and the eventual aim of his works to be able to evaluate his results, and God has started from the raw unconscious matter and is attempting over aeons to evolve a Divine working. And if it is difficult to imagine a benevolent God in this universe of suffering, surely it would make even less sense to imagine a God that was not in control of the universe, one who was somehow usurped by a malignant force that was greater than him. These arguments may or may not be convincing; but the person who finds them absolutely too discordant simply may not be able to countenance the existence of a benevolent God at all, much less one who rules over the universe.
The simple truth is that the way of God’s working in the world is extremely complex and it needs a great deal of spiritual maturity and wisdom to begin understanding it. And a full understanding and accounting of this working is beyond the scope of this essay. But for those are willing to entertain the possibility of a benevolent God supporting the universe and who wish to understand his workings in the universe, this metaphorical idea presents a departure point: to imagine and to understand God as the ruler of the universe. Like those who wield power on earth, God creates the conditions for our world and for our lives; God sets our course; as a leader and ruler, God is just, wise, and powerful.
4. God as the Higher Self
So far we have been looking at the outside world to gather material for our metaphorical understandings of God. Most of our usual experience consists encountering and interacting with the world outside ourselves: the objects of the world, small and large, occupy our field of vision and bodily awareness; we are absorbed by our daily routines and activities; our lives and experiences take place within the context of social structures, some of which are close and immediate, others which are larger, more widely distributed, and are controlled by people outside of our immediate sphere. But there is one relationship that is even closer than all of the these—and for that reason is harder to see: the relationship with ourself. Our eyes point outward and it is easier to see our surroundings than the contents of our inner world. We never get to see the outside of our own face, except in the occasional glance in the mirror. As our outer appearance is paradoxically hidden, so is our inner experience. Even though we are submerged in a 24/7 stream of internal thoughts, emotions, and sensations, for that very reason we lose the view of the essence of our own consciousness and our consciousness tends to stay fixes on “outer” problems: worries, concerns, mundane occupations, TV shows, social discourse, and sometimes even addictive behavior.
But no matter how distracted we are, we all ultimately have a relationship with our own selves, and it is the most intimate relationship we know, or could even conceive of. In fact, all our relationships with others are wholly insubstantial in comparison. No matter how close you are to a best friend, a parent, or a lover, no matter how completely and totally you think you understand them, you will never know what it is to actually be them and feel like them, no matter how close you get. And there are inevitably periods of distance and alienation in even the closest relationships where one is able to apprehend the difference and separation one has from any other person. The experience of being a human, the very experience of all we know about being alive in the world— is ultimately experience of being oneself, an experienced which cannot be shared or even communicated in its fullness.
We all have a deep understanding of what it is to be a self—an understanding that is informed by decades of experience being our own self. And a powerful way of understanding God is that God is the higher version of our own selves. Like us, God is a conscious entity who deeply knows its own consciousness because its own consciousness consists of the entirety of its experience. Like us, God is an entity who has a form but also has an existence that is beyond form, defined by abstract consciousness.
But isn’t it self-aggrandizing to to say that the best way to understand God might be though ourselves? And if we must liken a human to God—perhaps a dubious enough idea for those who don’t believe that man could rise to the level of God—shouldn’t it be someone with known and admirable qualities, like a religious leader, perhaps the most admirable, moral human we know? We know our own flaws too well to believe that we could learn anything by a direct comparison.
But like the example of the mother and father and the ruler, the point is not to deify our actual flawed selves any more than the previous metaphors were about deifying our existing and flawed parents and rulers. Rather, the idea I ask you to understand here is to use your understanding of your relationship to yourself to understand God, just as the previous examples involved understanding your relationship with others to better understand God. And just as those examples prove to have a unique aspect of God that is hard to understand otherwise, so it is with the idea of the metaphor of God as the higher self. The point is not to assert that we ourselves, with our human limitations and defects are literally God, but to point out how we can conceive of God by using our understanding of our own self as a starting point.
God is the highest possible version of oneself, containing all the possibilities and potentialities that we can understand for ourselves and many more; he or she has a pure consciousness that expresses the essential essence that we know by experience as our self. God has goals and motivations; and he or she also has a state of pure being aside from any goal or motivation. Of course, these goals and motivations will be pure and from the highest part of yourself, not from the selfish motives of the lower self. This “highest self” can only be perceived as an essential consciousness and is far beyond the grandest ideas of what we can hope to be here on earth; the actuality may not be achieved for a long time. If you have a long-term goal of being in some respected position in your career, or of accomplishing great deeds, or experiencing some deep happiness, that future vision of yourself will be closer to expressing a part of this “higher self”, though it still will not be exhausting all the potentials of the higher self. If you project this higher self it forward far enough, into greater levels of consciousness, it merges into the general idea of God, because God is the essence and source of all consciousness and spirit; but even in this highest vision of self, you can still detect a part of it that is identifiably “you”, like the color induced by a tinted lens.
The idea that we ourselves can have the same state of consciousness as God is an idea that rests on a metaphysical assumption that God is one with our present nature and there is a way to grow into that nature. And there are forms of spiritual discipline which seek the highest realization of this idea through learning to see how the purest form of one’s own awareness is, in fact, the awareness of God. If this idea seems sacrilegious to you—if it doesn’t make sense to compare yourself to God in any way, even as an exercise—you may wish to simply understand the idea that there is a higher, spiritual version of oneself that can be closer to God. In this way of understanding this section’s metaphor, God is another self that is like us, and we understand God as another being that has a self just as we do. But the fuller sense of this metaphor does in fact suggest what may be seen as self-aggrandizing or heretical to some perspectives: that there is an aspect of God which can be understood as being the highest form of our very own consciousness.
What do we do with all these metaphors?
The goal of the spiritual path, or the spiritual life in general, is to advance towards God. But in order to do this, we need to have an initial understanding of what God is in order to understand just what we are pursuing and why we should pursue him. But we find that the most general or metaphysically correct description of God proves to be something too expansive, too abstract the mind to concretely seize. This led us to consider several metaphors that allow us to extend knowledge of the world and familiar human figures and relationships within it to a knowledge of God, and perhaps the beginning of a relationship with him.
But the variety of these metaphors and their worldly character has the potential to be confusing as well. Is it really possible for God to be so many different things—both mother and father, ruler and heavenly artist and more? What do these many forms, models, and aspects of God have to do with God himself? One must first understand that there is no contradiction between these various concepts. God is complex and multifaceted; each aspect of truth that we shared can be understood more deeply in itself, and there are many more possible aspects to learn and consider. Each spiritual or religious tradition is filled with at least one novel conception about God. God is an entity that is beyond any finite mental description or conception; but this means that there may be multiple mental conceptions used as provisional guides as long as we understand that they are partial and do not contain the entirety of God’s truth.
Further, no matter what concept of God you start with, if it has some degree of truth and serves to connect you to God, it will converge with all other concepts in the end; there are no true contradictions in the nature of God. Whatever symbols or metaphors you use to understand God, the relationship will grow deeper and deeper, displaying newer and more subtle facets, as you continue to relate through them. A true symbol is one that continues to reveal deeper and deeper levels of meaning, in the same way that a personal relationship with a friend, spouse, or child can continue to grow for years or decades while deepening in meaning and richness. But it is also possible is that to be drawn to many different forms and symbols over time, always learning to see new aspects of the Divine. We can see this process for humanity at large if we look at the the history of spiritual and religious symbolism: different symbols, forms, and figures held resonance with the human spirit in different cultures and time periods.
If some of these metaphors, images, or ideas are not helpful, not appealing, or seem to contradict other ideas, one can simply choose to disregard them—if the conception of spiritual parent hits too close to home, or if the conception of Divine ruler seems too harsh, for example. Or if all of the above ideas are helpful at different times, one could simply live with the contradictions and think of them as just so many incompatible ways to think about God; there are different seasons of the soul, and each may accommodate different clothing and attitude with its different weather.
Ultimately, any structures that you use to relate to God will be provisional understandings that may have to be revised as you deepen in spiritual knowledge and experience. God has infinitely many aspects and a unique relationship with each person, so each person needs only to find the way of relating that works for them; the four ideas shared here are just a few initial templates. The important thing for those who are interested is to try to use these ideas to come into contact with a concrete reality, not just a mental abstraction.
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