Inside Of God

Hi Robert. I’ll try to be brief. After 15 years of being a seeker, I had a transformative experience. While hard to describe, here are the thoughts that arose: OMG. I am INSIDE of God. Everything is inside of God and there is no outside. There is no separation. In Him we live and move and have our being. I have always existed and will always exist. In conjunction with these thoughts (felt like direct knowing) were the feelings of joy and fearlessness. It was the most exquisite state I’ve ever experienced. It faded about four hours later, which felt pretty devastating. I’ve spent the past 7 years diving into Advaita, trying to figure out what that was that happened.

My problem is, I can’t let go of the idea that the state I experienced should become permanent. Which makes me think I’ve done something wrong. I still “know” the truth of the realization (no separation, etc) but it’s no longer a felt experience. I guess I just ride this drive to find that place again until it exhausts itself? Can you tell me- is that state more or less permanent at some point, or is the realization that I had during that experience “it”?

Thanks for any insight,

Kathy.

Hi, Kathy. :)

If you have been reading my replies to others, you probably know that I do not mince words. I just say what I see without regard to how that might be received. Without that, my need for candid expression would feel compromised. I never want to hurt or insult anyone, but I don’t let that hinder speaking truthfully.

I wanted to start with that because while reading your question, I began to feel that my reply might emerge in a way that could feel a bit rough to you.

In the first place, I don’t know anything about the “God” in your question. That word can mean so many different things. You say that you felt yourself to be “inside of God,” but I think it much more likely that “God” is inside you, a package of images and ideas put in your mind at least by mass culture, if not intentional inculcation, at home or school, possibly coercive. To many people “God” is a fantasy they only imagine is real, and you may be one of them.

To me, “God” may be a fantasy, but not an attractive one in the least. I see the God-notion more or less the way the late Christopher Hitchens saw it. For him, “God” was either a dictator, or a totalitarian, or perhaps both. He meant the God who is always watching, so that you never have a moment’s privacy, even to masturbate or think “unacceptable” thoughts (because “He” is always watching and listening).

“The essential principle of totalitarianism is to make laws that are impossible to obey,” Christopher wrote in God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, which I recommend most highly.

It’s been a while since I went into this topic. So a brief rant feels good. The last time I said that "God" might be in you rather than you in "Him," someone wrote to me saying:

“Robert, God is holy, not human. You ought not to question him but trust him completely. He made the heavens and the Earth, and he made us, so he knows what’s best for us, just as I know what best for my children who do not see pitfalls in ordinary situations where the danger is obvious to me.”

So that pretty much says it all: unquestioning reliance on dogma plus an overwhelming desire to be infantilized forever. So let’s leave “God” out of it. That word is fraught with associations both conscious and unconscious that in my opinion, are noxious and deadly to what I call “awake.”

For those who say, God is just another word for “All And Everything,” or “The Universe,” I reply, “Well, say that then because the G-word fucks with our minds, whether we recognize it or not, and when “God” is shaken together with so-called “nonduality,” that is a poisonous cocktail in which so-called “Universal Consciousness” is axiomatic and human consciousness only a pale reflection. It might very well be the other way around, you know.

OK, with that off my chest, you say, “I have always existed and will always exist.” Really? And you know that how exactly?

Even stars that last for billions of years, or even trillions (the smaller ones last longer) eventually go nova and burn up. Nevertheless, “I” will always exist. Really? Always is a long time. A long, long, long, long, long, long time.

How can it be that some feelings that faded away quickly, leaving only a memory, could convince you of your eternal immortality categorically and without a doubt? Or do you have doubts, and try to banish them with vehemence?

That categorical belief that “myself” is not a conscious and quite mortal animal whose consciousness dies when the brain does, but an ever-lasting, undying “I” inside “God” which you say is a “direct knowing” (whatever that means as opposed to just ordinary knowing)--is likely the kind of wishful thinking that biases against seeing human limitation--“direct knowing” or not--the way rose-tinted specs distort one’s perception of color.

OK, so you had this mind-blowing experience and that was the great moment of your life, but after a few hours it faded, so you dove into Advaita for explanations (they’ve got plenty of them).

You learned the dogma, but cannot recapture the feeling, which you want back, but this time in permanent form. I think I have that straight, and if I do, it’s a sad tale so far.

Now your question was worded in an oddly ambiguous way, so I may not have this straight, but as I understood it, you were asking if your present state of intellectually grasping the so-called “Truth” of nonduality but having to live without a fulsome experience of “oneness” is par for the course--or was that very brief cosmic consciousness thingy the real destination of all who desire liberation so that you are still on the road seeking to feel unceasingly at one with so-called “Source,” or “Universal Consciousness” or whatever term is used.

If that is the question, Kathy, it has a simple answer, but this is just my way of seeing these matters. I know nothing whatsoever about “Universal Consciousness,” or “oneness.” I know of only one “liberation,” and that is to be all that a human primate animal really can be—yourself, just as you are right now.

All you can know, I say, is your own mind which is not “in” anything, and may be entirely impermanent. You don’t really know if anything you seem to remember even happened. Even if it did in one way or another, memories have no permanence, nor do fantasies of future attainments have even a ghost of reality. All you can ever know is your own mind right now.

If your own mind includes “God,” well, it just does. If your own mind includes nostalgic longings to reexperience a previous peak experience, but this time permanently, well, from my point of view, that’s rather sad, and let’s hope such fixations lose their appeal and fade away.

But yes, you will have to put up with yourself—your own mind—right now and for every waking moment until you die. Perhaps seeing that might make living forever seem a bit less alluring.

I wish you well.