It occurs to me that what I share here doesn’t have to be 100% original. I have very few original ideas anyway, so that realization comes as a relief. Moreover, I think this might be valuable for those people who, unlike me, don’t spend almost 2 hours a day in spiritual discussion, reading spiritual books, or listening to spiritual podcasts. Maybe the rest of you would just like to receive the Cliff notes, and some limited commentary.
Often, when we talk about God (or faith, or one-ness, or enlightenment), it seems like the implicit promise is that God is all we need. If only we could let go of everything else in this world and become one with “Him,” that would solve all our problems and be a proper, righteous life. That’s the implicit message I got in my Christian upbringing, as well as my Buddhist college days. It’s all about non-attachment, maaan.
But, that’s also kind of bogus. I don’t think most of us are meant to drop all of our responsibilities, and retreat from society to pursue God at the expense of everything else. Didn’t God make us to do things, have relationships, fall in love, raise kids, create things, and have a life? My own experience has been that as I expand, have more of a life, have more relationships, have more connection with the world around me, do more work, have more fun, have more adventures… I get happier, more emotionally and spiritually whole. In fact, I’m more “in touch” with God than I ever was before, in my life of relative isolation.
My theory of the universe is this: everything is God. God was once a singularity, a undefined point of limitless potential. Then, that limitless potential was turned into physical reality over several billion years. Unknown, unknowable “possibility” collapsed into knowable “actuality.”
Why would God do this? Because it’s real. “Potential” isn’t real. But Reality is. “Potential” can have not relationship with itself because it isn’t willing to be anything specific or finite. Reality, however, can be something specific, and hence have relationship with everything else that exists. One piece of reality can interact with other pieces of reality. As Carl Sagan said, “we are also a way for the universe to know itself.”
Thus, God isn’t “out there” apart from us. God is all around us, interacting with us. The entire universe is God interacting with Itself. This is also why we have Free Will, because you can’t really have a relationship with something that can’t assert its own prerogative. If try to judge and control another person, you aren’t really able to have a relationship with them. You’re just a creating a limited extension of yourself, denying them from doing or saying anything that might challenge, surprise, or delight you. You’re robbing them of the freedom to be themselves.
And now to share the thing. In Episode 10 of the Exodus Roundtable Discussion, Dennis Praeger made a fascinating point. Because in the book of Genesis, when God is about to make Eve, he says to Adam, “it is not good for man to be alone.” Praeger points out that the implicit message in that is that “God is not enough.” This is before anyone ate “the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” Theoretically, at this point, Adam in his relative unconsciousness was capable of constant, total oneness with God. This is the state that so many people strive for throughout their spiritual journeys. And yet, right there, very early on in the Bible, is this message, “God is of the highest importance. But God, by Himself, is not enough.” Oneness with the totality is not enough. Yes, service of the great oneness all around you, of the highest principles, of the deepest unity. That is still the Highest, Most Important Thing. But sometimes a little separateness is ok. And actually, in being separate and different from each other (as men are different from women), we can have deep, intimate, powerful relationships.
Imagine how easy your life would be if you didn’t need and interdepend on other people. What if you never had to deal with rude people on the road, unpleasant servers in restaurants, but also never felt lonely, never needed a shoulder to cry on… It’s not really “life” at that point, is it? Isn’t it a boring, hollow experience, devoid of real connection and the necessity for growth? We need challenges, temptations, struggle, and separation, just as we need joy, love, fellowship, and intimacy. Not just so that we have a rich range of experiences, but so that we can have a real relationship with the world around us. Moreover, so that we can have a good relationship with the world around us. And other people are a really big part of that. We are all little facets of God, interacting with all the other zillion facets of God. Nowhere do we find the potential for a deeper connection than we do in our romantic relationships.
These relationships can be so challenging because they have such high stakes. Presumably, there’s a chance that you could be stuck with this person for your entire life, powerless to fix their flaws for them. That isn’t just a minor foible, that’s a slow, steady drip that gets louder and louder until it drives you insane. Potentially. Relationships are relationships because it is possible for two people to be different, separate from one another, each occupying their own space, having their own thoughts, feeling their own feelings. If they were identical, there wouldn’t be a relationship. There’d be a one-ness. And one-ness is not enough. We are here for the relationship.