Only God is real

He’s here.
Invisible. Absolute.
And he makes the
World grow fragrant.

- Rumi

In the beginning there was God. Only God. There was no Heaven and no Earth. There was only God. Everything else became and is an extension of God, but only God is real. And, God’s spirit, the expression of his selfhood, is experienced as love. God’s love is a love so gorgeous, so outrageous, over flowing, endlessly, glowing most radiantly, more powerful than a billion nuclear reactors, brighter than a million suns.

God, who is mother and father, is ultimate being, creator and creation, consciousness and wisdom. All together, this all-knowing wise consciousness is experienced in the human heart is terms of peace, power, freedom, joy and most of all as love, a love that unites bodies and souls, cohesively banding us together as God’s children, soul from His soul, his very self or image reflected deep in our being. God is both the begetter and the begotten. We find him within ourselves and find that He is us and we are all reflecting Him outward into the universe.

Since God is all there is, He is often called the Absolute, Inconceivable One, a term often used by the mystics, those brave souls who have fearlessly trekked through the soul’s dense inner forests and jungles, forded wild rapids, endured parching desert sun, fought and defeated marauding pirates and thieves until they found God high up on his throne inside their minds and fell down and worshipped, speechless in their ecstatic joy.

Don’t go anywhere,

I beg you.

The moon you are looking for

is inside you.

- Rumi

The quintessential authority on mysticism, Evelyn Underhill in her timeless classic Mysticism describes God as the Absolute. She says the mystic is one who attains union with that Absolute and not the person “who talks about it.” Interesting concept because I know a lot of people who talk about it, but few who have attained union with God. I’m sure I don’t have to describe for you the difference in results between those two. The mystic brings into the world what is in his heart. If God is in his heart, then he brings God into the world. Love is what he brings. Those who talk about God, often argue with other people who equally don’t understand. Sometimes they even pull weapons larger than words with which to argue Underhill seems to say that you can’t understand God unless you really know Him and to know him is to Love him.

That “knowing,” or in Greek “gnosis,” is what the ancient Gnostics called the real deal. You could only know God through union with Him. Union with God was real knowledge which came through an experiential encounter with the ultimate divine. The ultimate divine is the ultimate spirit so real knowledge is an experiential spiritual encounter.

Jesus said that “God is spirit. To worship God is to worship Him in spirit.” (John ) And, to worship God in spirit as an experiential encounter would mean meeting God spirit to spirit – His spirit to our spirit. And, the spirit is not in the head. It’s in the heart, to use a term that stems back to the most ancient Jewish understanding. At one time, to have to explain where to meet God wouldn’t have been necessary. But, we live in the age of the head. Technology, science, logical deductive, linear thought, setting and keeping boundaries, knowing your limits, etc. are the mark of the modern era. We set limits, we define, stereotype, categorize, and collect external data provable by the scientific method. In short, we work with the left brain.

The right hemisphere of the brain is the part of our brain that is designed to interpret abstract thought. It is the spiritual receptor center. It is the creative, imaginative, poetic part of us. Stuff that comes into that part of the brain as well as stuff that comes out is very often not definable, not consistent statistically and very often speaks to a part of us that the brain just doesn’t get. It is the heart. 

Ancient man seems to have lived out of this part of his brain. Consequently, he could “hear” God speaking, as reported in Genisis. He could feel God’s love. His mind heard, spoke and wrote on the heart level. Heart held primacy over brain and to write in "heart language" included the rich utilization of metaphor, parable and myth to describe the inner realms of the heart in external similies.  For the ancients, the world was indeed a sacrament.  They saw it as a reflected heaven, which was found principally within the human heart and projected outwardly.

So, to know God, for most of our recorded 14,000 civilized years, was not as huge a problem as it is today. If you seek to know God through your reason, through your brain, you can’t. So many miracles are incomprehensible to the brain which looks through the cool lens of science, rather than the endless creative possibilities of the heart. The Crucifixion was an act of the heart. It is nothing less than a passionate act of self surrender, of love that doesn’t make rational sense. It is the ultimate prayer to God. If it was rational, it would have been limited by our control, entirely and singularly human.  Also, the history of western civilization would be an entirely different story, one filled with self sacrificing people who would eagerly give up their possessions to feed the poor, their very lives for a more noble world. We didn’t’ understand the sacrament of Christ's crucifixion because we were looking for God through the wrong lens. Closed and hardened either by agony or by ignorance, our eyes were closed to the beauty and gift of such an ultimate example of courage, a fearless consequence of pure surrender. Today, we need to look through the lens of our hearts, where we can gain access to knowing God through our intuition.

Before the Age of Reason, people may have had less of a problem understanding God and what it meant to be compassionate, what it meant to feel for another person. As dark as those days were, it was a time before the rational part of the brain was completely dominant and people still has a sense of a movement of their hearts.  They "felt" God's love. 

It seems today that the most intelligent minds are full of data with hearts as closed as clam shells. They don’t know what it feels like to be in love with God through the movement of the Holy Spirit in their hearts. They talk about it. They teach it and preach it, but they don’t sing with it, they don’t dance, they don’t lose control, and they can’t let their hearts run free. They aren’t moved by the Holy Spirit. They can’t recognize it when it’s right in front of them. They are blind guides, as Jesus would say. If the Holy Spirit hasn’t transformed them, then they haven’t any knowledge about God. They may have book knowledge, scientific knowledge, statistical knowledge, but no real knowledge. They just know what others have said and it’s all still just in the head, not in the heart. This experiential knowing which the Holy Spirit brings is an authentic encounter that is nothing less than rapturous and it’s very hard to hide rapture.

“Not to know about, but to be, is the mark of the real …. conscious union with a living Absolute, the uncreated light in which the universe is bathed …eternally generated in an eternal Now (and is) the face of Perfect Love.” (2) p.72 Mysticism.

Underhill says that “knowing” seems to “well up from another part of the soul that whispers to understanding.” (3) The rational part of the person senses they’re missing something else, but that something else is nothing less than “the secret plan of the universe” expressed through the imagination in visions, symbolizing that which is most ineffable. Since we don’t have much language that suitably captures or conveys this secret plan, symbols, poetry, parabolic language, myths have to suffice and are the stuff of all the world’s sacred scriptures.

“It is an intuition of the real, essential life, the world in which the free soul dwells,” Underhill says. (4) p. 74 “His soul is always set on the changeless One, arriving there by the mystic way.”

Elaine Pagels, in Beyond Belief, says the Kabbala, Judaism’s mystic branch, tells us to “seek to know God not through dogmatic theology but through living experience and intuition.” (p.94)

Al Ghazzali, a respected Sufi teacher in 1058 C.E., who once claimed that he had experienced “the deliverance from error,” wrote in his Alchemy of Happiness that “Sufis are men of intuition and not men of words.” (p. 493)

“The heart of man has been so constituted by the Almighty that, like a flint, it contains a hidden fire which is evoked by music and harmony, and renders man beside himself with ecstasy,” Ghazzali wrote. (p. 57)

Ghazzali suggests that inside the human heart is a reflection of God and that reflection is alive, flickering like a flame, purring like a distant motor, and when it is uncovered, it enliven them, gives them meaning, strips away their burdens and out of that new condition, they lived fearlessly and joyously.

God is God of the living. He is alive, as we are alive, and we can’t live in our heads; we live in our lives. God invites us to live out that encounter experientially rather than only in our dry rational intellectual mind. It is in our hearts where we engage with God, ourselves and others in express that encounter in a kind of dance or song together. That is life.

In Gnostic The Gospel of Truth, Valentinius writes, “The gospel of truth is joy for those who have received from the Father of truth the grace of knowing him.”

Drawing from much of what is in Genesis, Valentinius describes in this gospel a cosmology and mythic beginning about what went wrong. He says that in the beginning we, the “totality,” were together with God in paradise. Then, we separated from God and have been looking for God away from God, searching for home but getting further and further lost in the fog. All we ever needed to do was turn around and return to God. But, in the long time since we became lost, we have further split apart, splintering and in the process using our creative abilities to miscreate. Cut off from the power source of God’s love, we grew spiritually homesick.


(The above was written a few years ago and is the first chapter in "New Heaven, New Earth."  It felt relevant to much of the multi-religious/cultural/ theological conversation  today.  There is truth in all religious traditions and faith, and to find our common ground, we may have to go all the way back to the beginning and cherish that single source, who is our creator, lover and God.)