Between Gods

It’s 3:00 AM and I awake with an awareness about God that seems to apply just now. It bubbles up as if out of a dream and feels important. What I notice in my recent wrestlings about the roles of Jesus Christ and God in my life, my so-called personal relationship with Jesus Christ, is that my external relationships with God or Jesus Christ of younger times, built on the dualistic level of consciousness that separates, have disappeared and the internal relationship with God, or Source, or The One that includes me as part of the All, the experience of What Is from the unitive state of consciousness, has not yet landed for me. I seem to be between “Gods.”

But there has been a shift. In my wrestlings of late there seems to have been a kind of urgency for resolution, a not being OK with this in between place, a fearful place while I hang out in the desert of not-knowing before the promise of Knowing arises. While this in-between-Gods was my Truth, I was not letting my Truth of unknowing be enough. I was tempted to rush back to earlier times and look once again for God there, the God outside of myself, the God I knew all about. After all, that has been the God most taught to me, the God who got me through my parents’ death over 35 years ago, the God people in churches I have attended worry about my not being in relationship with and hence the God who instills a fear in me of my going to Hell. I can feel my rebellion against going back to this God out there.

But is it rebellion or simply my Truth just now? It feels much more that going back to the God out there is simply not my Truth, that it is not being faithful to what is True for me now to me to go backwards. So here and now, in an act of faith, I close that door on going backwards. And I realize that I am not in rebellion!

And what happens as I close the door to the God of my past, the God out there, or the Jesus Christ of my past, the Jesus Christ out there? Relief! Going backwards brought a lot of FEAR (Is this story about God-out-there really True and not believing in this God-out-there going to result in my going to Hell? Are my more Christian Fundamentalist friends right after all?) or GUILT (Guilt over being rebellious. Guilt over not being the returning prodigal son. Guilt for being unfaithful to the God-out-there God of my youth.). Going forward into the unknown has lost its scariness. I can hang out here and let whatever is True arise in me. This is my version of standing at the door and knocking. Pause and take this in, Gary, this is big.

Rushing for an answer I am not yet ready to experience from my current state of waning dualistic consciousness only puts me back into FEAR and GUILT. It is busily, even frantically, looking here and looking there. This rushing would have a forcing current, an urgency feel. Now I see that my rushing ahead (or back) would be rebelling against what is True for me just now. Unknowing is what is True for me. AND what is new is that I have lost my fear of unknowing.

Suddenly I see that of course unknowing is progress along my journey. Of course what is Source or God is by definition beyond my capacity to grasp. I laugh out loud at my demand to know God! Just be, Gary. Be still and Know God. There is no other path but the path of stillness.

But what if this God as Source, too, is illusory, just like the God out there? Well now, how would I ever “prove” that it isn’t or is true? Part of hanging out in the unknown is to risk this, to risk that possibly there is no God, that atheism is the ultimate truth of What Is. But all of this is beyond my mind figuring out and then deciding. In a way, “God” as a word or idea is a placeholder for all that is beyond, for Mystery. Part of what surprises me is that I can hang out in all of this unknowing in GREAT PEACE. A peace that is beyond understanding, because a peace based on figuring truth out and then accepting it is never going to hold up in the trials of life. Only Knowing will hold up. And the Peace I seem to be in just now feels to be from this deeper space of Knowing. Peace that comes on its own in this Unknowing place is truly beyond understanding. Wow.

And this does not make my earlier God-out-there wrong either. It simply was the only concept of God I could experience back then. And my God-out-there served its purpose at that level of dualistic consciousness and may have been more nearly correct than what went before. I can be grateful for what was True for me in earlier times. All this God and Jesus Christ stuff is an unfolding, and what will unfold is Mystery. No need to force answers! And, this morning, I find myself quite relieved and at Peace in this Mystery of Unknowing.