I have had a strong or recurring belief that whatever divine spark exists in the cosmos, exists within and throughout it. This is a much more natural and powerful idea for me than that of an external, anthropomorphic creator being. The concept of God only carries the weight it connotes and makes sense to me if nothing exists beyond it. A superhero type being that gets jealous, has chosen people, excludes those with other spiritual faiths, metes out eternal punishments and rewards, and that kind of thing, hardly seems worthy, for my tastes, of the status of God. My idea of God is much bigger, all encompassing, nothing would be outside it, it would be woven all through reality and the cosmos. Everyone would be a piece of this sacredness. Every animal and plant, and the Earth from which we all spring. The biosphere. All the processes of nature. Evolution and Chaos and all the unimaginable stuff that exists out there. All of this is God, and everything else too.
This idea is nothing new. It’s called Pantheism, and it’s the original Old Time Religion. Maybe people couldn’t deal with it because of the responsibility it requires. To accept it you have to accept that we are all, each and every one of us, sacred. There would be no justification for sexism, racism, or classism. People wouldn’t accept witch-burning, genocidal movements, or persecution of non-heterosexuals. Patriotic Nationalism would never have acquired all the overblown militaristic puffiness that it has; and, we couldn’t have decimated the raft of species or the aspects of the planet that we have so thoughtlessly done. We would have been obliged to have gotten along, to have found ways to respect each other even when we disagreed, even when we were different from one another. It’s easier, I guess, to have personal, cultural gods so that we can justify our hatred of one another, the ravaging of our planet, and hope for (or even believe in) a heavenly plane where we can appear our idealized best for all eternity. Well, not all of us have Fallen for that one. I can see having a slew of local, personal gods, entities that are associated with various specific aspects of nature (since the cosmos is way too big for us to comprehend in its entirety), but then they would each need to be acknowledged as one of many, various, small g, gods, not the Big One, not the All.
What might a notion of Pantheism imply? That we are each a human being, sensible body and consciousness, experiential node in the God-complex, each with a specific, unique, embodied perspective. That everyone’s experience, his or her thoughts, feelings, sensations, desires, would also be the experience of God. I think that the potential for experience, and consciousness too, exists coiled inside the potential for life which infuses every cell, every atom. They have to be assembled into the right kind of functioning aggregate, but the possibilities are unlimited. (Just look at all the craziness that has sprung up here over the last so many millions of years, and this must be only a drop in the bucket of potentiality). Imagine how the experience of All would vary with internal states of strife and killing or internal states of cooperation and joy. Our conflicts with one another would be a cancer or disease within God.
Of course, human beings are a flawed species, and maybe we can’t help it. And tension, difference, dynamism permeates the All, keeps it going. And we are each born and have our day and then die, like every other countless number of specific entities. Life to Death to Life to Death to Life to Death…
I look out the window and watch the trees blowing in the breeze, breathe and let it go…