God
as Universal Consciousness
October
29, 2020
We can’t define
God. We can’t box God up in a construct of human words. Our human words are
finite, God is infinite. Our language is therefore incommensurate with the job
of talking about God, yet they are all we have. So we have two choices. We can refrain
from talking about God at all, or we can do the best we can with the only tool
we have inadequate though it may be.[1]
We speak of God because we must speak of God. Our lives are grounded in God.
God is our ultimate reality, and those of us who know those truths have the
urge and believe that we have the duty to share what we know of God with others
who are willing to listen. So we speak of God. As we do we must always remember
that our language is symbolic not literal and that God is so far beyond us that
we can never be sure that what we say about God isn’t woefully wrong. That
being said and sincerely believed, I’m going to talk about God here while being
fully aware that what I say is necessarily tentative and speculative.
Theological minds
much greater than mine have tried to formulate concise characterizations or
even definitions of God for a very long time. Ancient Israel understood God in
very human terms. For them God was a man writ large, or at least that’s how
their understanding of God started out. In the High Middle Ages Anselm of
Canterbury called God that greater than which nothing can be imagined. In much
more recent times the philosophical theologian Paul Tillich has given us the phrases
pure being and the ground of being as insightful ways of speaking about God.
These characterizations of Tillich’s are the starting point for the notions of
God that I present here.
Tillich taught
that God is pure being and that creation participates in that being while not
being itself pure. Everything that is subsists in God in an impure way. If God
is the ground of all being as Tillich said, then everything that is stands on
God. God holds everything that is in being. Tillich’s characterizations of God
are impersonal and philosophic. They are about ontology, the nature and source of being. While we may worship God as Creator
we don’t often worship God as the ground of being. Tillich’s characterizations
are nonetheless insightful. They help us conceive of God in a way that works
for us post-modern people.
Tillich came to
mind for me recently as I was contemplating the nature of consciousness. Yes,
some of us actually do such esoteric things from time to time. The question of
consciousness came up for me as I was wrestling with the question of identity.
I tend to think of my identity in terms of my experiences in life. I am what I
have done, what I have lived through. But it occurred to me that my identity
must be different from my experiences. There must be something constitutes the “I”
that has experienced all those things. Somehow that “I” has remained constant
throughout my life. I came to think of my identity as a particular instance of
consciousness, that is, that instance of consciousness that is a person’s true,
underlying reality constitutes the person’s identity.
Consciousness has
always been a mystery to me. I’ve often thought of it in terms of sense
perception. Scientists can explain how nerves transmit stimuli of light and
sound to particular areas of the brain. The brain then somehow experiences
those stimuli as sight and sound. But how? Nerves and the stimuli that travel
along them are merely physical phenomena. They are inanimate. They do not see
or hear. So just what is it that sees and hears? How do we explain the mystery
of physical things producing sight, sound, and the other things that we somehow
sense in conscious ways? Put another way, what is it that sees and hears, etc. I
see, but what is that I? It is consciousness. Things like sight and sound are
products of an encounter of the physical with consciousness, that is, with
something transphysical, with something that is beyond the material.
What is that
transphysical something that constitutes of location not only of sense
perception but of identity itself? It is consciousness, but what is
consciousness? We can easily find ourselves chasing our tails here. Round in
circles we go getting nowhere. I know of only one way to break out of that
circle. That way is to introduce the concept of God into our calculations. When
I do that I find myself wanting to modify Tillich’s phrases like pure being and
the ground of being to fit better with my desire to understand consciousness.
Tillich’s phrases help, but they aren’t quite what I need here.
So I have tried
to reconceptualize God not as pure being but as pure consciousness, not as the
ground of creaturely being but as the ground of creaturely consciousness. Let
me suggest that we try thinking of God as pure, universal consciousness. Just
as for Tillich God is not some entity that has pure being but is pure being
itself, so God is not some entity that has universal consciousness but is
universal consciousness itself. Just as for Tillich created being has being
because it participates in being itself, so human consciousness has
consciousness because it participates in consciousness itself. It exists in the
created world of our ordinary lives because it is grounded in and arises from a
cosmic universal consciousness that pervades all of creation.
Try thinking of
universal consciousness as ultimate reality. Creation becomes fully real only
when it becomes conscious of itself. It becomes conscious of itself most fully,
as far as we know, in human beings. Human consciousness is unlike pure
consciousness because it isn’t pure. It is however truly conscious. It is
therefore a true manifestation of human participation in the divine. In divine,
pure consciousness creation is fully real. It is fully what God intends it to
be. In human created consciousness creation is more real than it would be with
no conscious beings in it, though it is not as fully real as it is in the pure consciousness
that is God.
In a real sense
the chronological development of creation is a process of seeking ever more
fully developed consciousness. Does that eons long process end with humans? Perhaps
not, for human consciousness is not pure consciousness. It is not pure
consciousness because it is created not divine. It is created in finite
physical creatures. It depends on the physiological function of the human body,
especially the brain. It can become distorted when the body, especially the
brain, is affected by disease processes such as mental illness or dementia. Specific
instances of it, as far as we can know, end when a person dies. Pure universal
consciousness, that is, God, does not depend on a physical body. Pure universal
consciousness is never distorted by anything. It never ends. It seems
reasonable to expect that over eons yet to come creation will continue to
evolve toward ever higher levels of creaturely consciousness.
All of which leads
me to this conclusion: The “I” beneath all of my experiences, that is, the “I”
that has lived those experiences and continues to live new ones, is an instance
in a human being of God, of pure divine consciousness. What is it that sees and
hears when mere matter cannot? It is the divine within us. We have
consciousness because we are created in the image and likeness of God, who is
pure consciousness. We are not created as God, only in the image and likeness
of God. It is nonetheless our connection with God who is pure universal
consciousness that makes us conscious. It enables our consciousness and is our
consciousness. That consciousness is the underlying “I” of our identity. That
at least is how I have come to think of my consciousness. I invite you to
consider whether it works for you to consider your consciousness that way too.
[1] On
the nature and inadequacy of the language of faith see Sorenson, Thomas C., Liberating
the Bible, Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium (Eugene,
Oregon, Wipf and Stock, 2008), Chapter 3, pp. 23-28.
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