GOD AS "CREATOR"
This subject seems to crop up pretty regularly. Here is
Adi Da's take on it:
THE TRANSMISSION OF DOUBT
Part Four: The Paradox of Being-Consciousness
Chapter 24
God Is the One Who Is Being Modified as Everything
a talk by Da Free John (As Adi Da was then known)
October 7, 1980
<<<(1) MASTER DA FREE JOHN: True God-talk is Ecstatic talk. It is a form of speech and intelligence that develops through a self-transcending or Ecstatic process. The literal Divine is Realized in Ecstasy, in the transcendence of self or ego, the transcendence of the body-mind, and therefore the transcendence of this world. There is, however, a convention of popular or exoteric God-talk that speaks about God from the point of view of the ego or ordinary individual experiencing and knowing and suffering and pleasuring. The God of exotericism is offered to these unchanged, self-bound individuals to give them hope, awaken faith in them, even to generate some sort of quality of transcendence, a little freer energy and attention, in the midst of ordinary life.
(2) While there is perhaps some positive service performed by offering mankind such a God, not only can this popularly conceived God not be proven to exist, but the conception of God in these terms does not make sense beyond a certain point. When we literally enter into Ecstasy through radical self-understanding, this notion of God no longer seems to make sense. The radical Realization of the Divine tends to relieve us of the conventions of both exoteric religious consciousness and esoteric spiritual consciousness. When mankind grows beyond its primitive condition wherein the world is described from the point of view of egoic consciousness and conventions of self, then human beings begin to develop a different awareness of the nature of the world.
(3) The scientifically informed mind tends to bring even the comparatively positive notion of an exoteric God into doubt. This is one of the problems in popular society today where scientism and scientific materialism have become the dominant point of view and way of relating to things. The supports for the old psychology of religion are being lost, and this is having a negative effect on the popular mind.
(4) I recently viewed a television program in which a popular scientist was talking about God and criticizing religion directly. He proposed biological evolution as the alternative to God as Creator. He pointed out that until recently human beings looked at this world, observed its intricate complexity and order, and reasoned that it must have a cause. He used the simile of a watch. If you look inside a watch, you find it very complicated, and yet it keeps time. Thus, you conclude there must have been a watchmaker. Such a watch just could not exist without a watchmaker. It is true that such inventions in the plane of human relationships are caused in that sense. In other words, the cause is outside them. But it is not necessary or at this stage in history even appropriate to presume something similar about the total universe.
(5) Yet, there is a popular and ancient tradition for this idea of God as Creator. In fact, this idea is fundamental in the domain of exoteric religion. Actually, the notion "The world exists, therefore there must have been a Creator" is the most forceful and basic argument used by religion to attract followers. It is only after you have established a logic based fundamentally on belief in God as Creator that you can convince people to accept moral laws or supernatural possibilities without otherwise demonstrating those possibilities.
(6) The concept of God as Creator is fundamental not only to religion, but to the primitive mode of human consciousness as well. When human beings cannot logically presume that there is a Creator, they also tend to abandon everything else that is religion and spirituality. They lose the ability to relate to the Divine when they lose the logic of belief in God as Creator.
(7) Nevertheless, it is difficult for people to believe there is a Creator-God. Religion has always had to answer many difficult questions, but just as it has one basic proposition-God created the world and is Master of the world and is the One to Whom you must submit-it has always had to face one basic question. That is the question about the existence of suffering-the most difficult question to answer. If there is a God who created the world, then why is there so much suffering? And why do even those who believe in the Creator-God still suffer? Why do those who believe in the Creator-God often seem to suffer even more than anyone else?
(8) If it has never been easy for religion to attract followers and keep them content, then it is because of this matter of suffering. The proposition that there is a God who created the world was not developed on the basis of thinking about suffering. It is a proposition that followed from thinking about the fact that things exist. In other words, the notion of God as Creator was not formulated as a result of people's observation that they suffer. It arose out of people's observation that things exist. The observation that we suffer has always worked against religion.
(9) The trend of scientific materialism also involves a logic based on the observation of material events and forces, but it is tacitly indisposed toward the whole notion of a Creator. In the common world at the present time we can witness an argument between two kinds of mind. One is represented by the masses of individuals and institutions who are disposed toward the interpretation of the universe as a creation of God. These people are known as the creationists. The other kind of mind is represented by those who, disposed toward the scientific point of view, tend to be atheistic. They do not envision a Creator behind all these effects, but rather see a spontaneous, rather random, and not necessarily benign process. That is, what is positive or benign is only one aspect of what is occurring. These people are commonly referred to as materialists.
(10) And yet, fundamentally, the materialists are struggling with the same question as the creationists. The basic question that is foremost in the popular consciousness is whether or not we should feel good about the universe, whether we should feel hopeful, whether we should feel that there is something great and positive in control of the universe, or behind or at the end of it. The creationists try to communicate a dominant mood of hope, but underneath it they incline toward despair because of the observation of suffering. The materialists endeavor to generate a dominant mood of doubt by constantly pointing out the difficulties of life, the suffering and randomness, and so forth. But in their attempt to establish this mood of doubt, they are hiding another aspect of themselves that is in some way delighted by observing everything for which science accounts. If only they could find something great causing all these material events, materialists would be equally delighted by that. However, the current school of scientific materialism-which is a way of relating to the world, as is religion-is making important new discoveries about the universe, and it is creating whole new technologies that add to our amusement. And along with all that, the mood of scientism is becoming a dogmatic argument against creationism or the mood of religious consciousness.
(11) What I want to point out about this is that in the history of mankind there have not only been believers in God, along with atheists and scientists, there have also been Realizers of God. God-Realization is as much a potential in this age as in any other period, but it has nothing to do with interpreting the universe according to the model of the egoic body-mind. To enter into this process of God-Communion and God-Realization does not require belief in God as Creator or an interpretation of the universe according to which we conceive of a Creator-God and the universe as the effect of that God. Such a description of God and the universe belongs to a naive egoic consciousness, whereas the purpose of the process of Transcendental Spirituality or God-Realization is the transcendence of the egoic body-mind. In the language of transcendence of the egoic body-mind we also speak of God or the Divine Reality, but in Ecstatic terms. We speak of God in terms of self-transcendence and in terms of what is Realized or made Obvious through self-transcendence and therefore world-transcendence. In other words, God-Realization utterly transforms our understanding of personal existence and the existence of the world.
(12) While the process of God-Realization does not necessitate or imply a negative strategy of life, at the same time, it necessarily transcends the whole affair of life. The fullness of Realization necessarily involves utter transcendence of this world. In the meantime, however, we need not be involved in a negative strategy relative to life, which in itself is a kind of egoic disposition. Nonetheless, the process of God-Realization is one of self-transcendence wherein the Transcendental or Divine Force Transforms and Transfigures our entire relationship to experiential events, and ultimately dissolves them all. By entering into the process of God-Communion we are entering into a process wherein we Realize That Which transcends self and world, and That Which transcends self and world is God. That Which a person Realizes, having transcended himself or herself, is God.
(13) That God or Divine Reality need not be viewed as the Creator of you or the world. When "you" are the point of view for seeking happiness, fulfillment, and salvation, then insofar as you choose a religious orientation as the solution to your self-problem, you may need the logic of God as the Creator. There is no great harm in thinking in those terms temporarily, conceiving a metaphor that works well enough from the point of view of conventional consciousness. Ultimately, however, this is a view of God-a logic about God, self, and world-that is to be transcended. Just as the self and world are transcended, the God who is conceived to relate to selves in this world is transcended.
(14) We could say there are only three fundamental concepts that ultimately summarize our conventional experience of existence-there is the self, me; there is the world and all beings; and there is the God we think of over against self and world, the Creator or Source of everything, or That toward Which we associate ourselves through hope while alive. All these categories are transcended in Realization of God. They are transcended in Communion with God. True God-talk transcends all common or conventional talk about God just as it transcends self and world.
(15) That the logic of God as Creator is seriously placed in doubt by scientific investigation only interferes with the popular notion of God based on the ego-principle. This may cause some egos to despair, but it does not eliminate the spiritual process. It just eliminates a certain logic or frame of interpretation that belongs to the un-Enlightened dimension of human existence. The God we talk about in our Way is the God that belongs to Ecstatic speech, the God Realized through self- and world-transcendence and the transcendence of all God-ideas. The conventional notion of God as Creator or Parent is transcended in true God-talk. The idea that God is the Parent of mankind is only an idea held by egos.
(16) Those who transcend themselves through surrender to the Reality intuited to be magnified in all of existence speak more paradoxically about God. Some do not even speak about God, because just to say the word "God" automatically implies something limited to the popular mind. The word "God" belongs to the category of language that is associated with the ego and conventional self- and world-consciousness, self- and other-consciousness. But in our Way, we freely use the word "God" and other references to the Divine, such as Radiant Transcendental Being, because we are obviously directly associated with the higher process of Realized existence, and whenever we talk about God we intend to take the time to fully develop the consideration.
(17) DEVOTEE: Master, I was thinking that when you say, "There is only God," you confound both religious and scientific people. It is an Ecstatic way of presuming God.
(18) MASTER DA FREE JOHN: Yes. I, along with the scientific materialists, do not believe in the Creator-God. (Laughter.) The notion of God as Creator holds only as long as "I" am the principle of my consideration about God. But as soon as I transcend myself in God, I see that God is a greater profundity than this Creator or Parent idea supposes. I see that God is the One Who is being modified as everything. There is only God. But it is not just the conceived God Who created the world, the God Who is apart from the world. There is not me, the world, and God. There is not one God. There are not many Gods. There is only God. As soon as we transcend our separate position, this becomes Obvious. That One Who Is cannot be rightly understood as the Parent of Man or the Creator of our conditions of existence.
(19) Our conditions of existence and our psycho-physical selves are better understood as a mechanical process in which we are irresponsibly involved. In fact, the significance of the Realization of God is that it expresses self-transcendence, transcendence of the body-mind, transcendence of the mechanics of the apparent universe, transcendence of this world, and transcendence of conventional God-ideas that are supports for self-existence.
(20) It is not the case that God is not obvious. God is the only Thing Obvious. God is the Obvious. It is not that God cannot be seen in the world. God is Obvious in the world. God is Obvious as everything and everyone. All this is the Vision of God, not just some internal phenomenon that is the Vision of God. There is only the Vision of God. This is not the effect of God. It is God.
(21) We must Realize That Which is appearing to be transformed as all beings, as all worlds, as all possibilities, That Which, in the event of anything, is being modified as that event and as all events totally. The process of evolution and appearance of every kind is just happening. God is not standing off from it, creating it, seeing it happen, and requiring lesser beings to suffer a dreadful illusion. Our suffering of illusion is a result of our own irresponsibility. We are nothing but God. We are only in God. All of this is only in God. God is the only thing to be Realized. God is the only Happiness.
(22) But we are very much involved with ourselves and with things as they seem. We are-through fear-very much involved with the possibilities of feeling good and having fantastic things happen to us and acquiring knowledge about great things. Insofar as we are disposed toward all that, we are playing upon the mechanics of existence. All of Nature is just a machine-a machine of infinite possibilities. It is a medium that is utterly responsive to psychic orientation, to desiring. What you desire and think is what you experience and know. What you presume becomes experienced reality. What you presume about the world tends to be confirmed in your observations about the world.
(23) This is true whether you are a religionist or a scientist, and scientists are beginning to discover this. They are beginning to discover that their mode of inquiry, even in sophisticated technological terms, produces its own results, conditions, and knowledge. The universe is a paradoxical machine that will produce whatever evidence you are determined to find. It is a great paradox of space-time in which anything can seem to be so, but all these things that seem to be so are also limits.
(24) It is one thing to be a creationist and have a picturesque view of Nature, to think that God is behind history and God is making all these beautiful mountains. But the natural world is more than beautiful mountains. People did not think mountains were beautiful until recently anyway! (Laughter.) It was only a couple of centuries or so ago that people began climbing and walking in the mountains for inspiration. Before then mountains were viewed as awesome places that you should not go anywhere near. They were generally considered to be terrible or mighty places of power, and you would not casually walk in them. But because of the romantic, picturesque views that came especially out of the nineteenth century, people now hold the view that is an extension of creationism or conventional religious consciousness, according to which Nature is supposed to seem so damned beautiful.
(25) But, to put it simply, Nature is not beautiful. There is something extraordinary and exquisite about it, but Nature is a terrible machine in which everything is transformable, everything is eatable-in which everything that exists must struggle to continue to exist, and then it dies. Creatures are all eating one another. Deaths are random and casual. Human beings must engage in great collective enterprises just to make human life last a little longer and appear basically pleasurable.
(26) It has not been for very long that a person could live for what we regard to be a considerable period of time-sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety years. Many individuals still do not live that long, and in many human environments on Earth people still live a relatively short lifespan. Man is part of Nature until he starts developing social and technological abilities to prolong life and to pleasurize himself. He is, like all the other creatures in Nature, a vulnerable being who must, in order to survive, always struggle to defend himself against other people as well as all the forces in Nature. What is so beautiful about all that?
(27) Even in elaborate technological societies such as our own, life is not merely pleasurable and happy. It is still threatened with mortality and pervaded by limitations. It is a lifelong struggle. It is associated with pleasures but also a great deal of difficulty. Life always seems somehow or other to be fundamentally a problem, a dilemma, a kind of cage, and we must struggle our entire lives to feel relatively positive about it all.
(28) But we are characterized by a kind of TV-consciousness: We are supposed to feel positive about products of all kinds and make enthusiastic, rather gleeful pronouncements about all our experience in this great new age. We are also expected to conform to various political and social ideals that are intended to serve the general welfare, protect individual safety, and prolong human existence for the normally expected life-span. These ideals are also meant to serve future generations through passing on the knowledge we have acquired, the accomplishments we have made, and so forth.
(29) In spite of these ideals, however, society is still something of a jungle, something of a struggle. The same society or worldwide association of humanity that gives us social and technological advantages is continually threatening us with disadvantages, suppression, war, and even total destruction.
(30) Look out into vast space and ask yourself where the light is out there, where there might be something better than this. People used to look at those little spots in the sky and feel that they were powers of destiny and Divine Influence, a Great Order. People thought stars were immortals, fastened to a crystal dome on the other side of which God was controlling everything. Now, however, we can look at those stars through the eyes of science, analyze their components and their chemistry, see what is really occurring, and find that they are all mortal. Now we know there is no dome, that we are merely seeing a bit of the edge of a galaxy that contains billions upon billions of such light forms and billions upon billions of other such galaxies and who knows what else. It is awesome, but not merely positive, not merely beautiful.
(31) This view of the universe is not new. There have been materialists since the ancient days, who have had much the same kind of philosophical attitude as those who belong to the school of scientism in our day. Likewise, religion has not been limited to its naive dimension of conventional thinking. There are religious and spiritual traditions in which the universe is viewed as a machine with positive as well as negative aspects but awesome and binding in its power.
(32) The universe is too awesome and terrible to be summarized in the creationist's view. There is something much more profound about it. We do not see any evidence of an all-powerful, benign deity creating and managing everything. There is no evidence for this whatsoever, because the universe is immense in its destructive force, its randomness, its variability.
(33) In the context of this immensity, all relations are merely forms of transformation in which individuality is insignificant. The universe is a great transformer, a great womb, in which nothing has ultimate importance. Everything is transformable, everything can and ultimately will be destroyed, everything can be eaten. We are not immortal, but rather we are born, can live well for seventy years or so, and then die in bed. You never know when you might be killed, when you are going to die, when your life is going to become unbearable to you, when the force of the conjunction of your tendencies as an individual may bring about these events.
(34) We cannot feel good about God by observing the universe from a picturesque, romantic, self-based point of view. That point of view, which we would be obliged to hold if we were to support the creationist's view of the world, is not appropriate even from the point of view of currently popular knowledge. It was never philosophically appropriate, and even in times past, when the creationist view was a dominant part of the logic of religion, there existed individuals and groups who viewed the universe in completely different terms. Some of those who viewed it in different terms were materialists, like our modern scientists. They held a view of the universe based on doubt, and doubt is just as much an expression of the independent-self principle as is belief.
(35) Apart from religionists and materialists there have been what we could call Transcendentalists, even Radical Transcendentalists. It is commonly reported that Gautama remained silent when asked about God, but in fact this is not true. He was not silent about God in the Transcendental sense. His philosophy is filled with pointers toward Transcendental Realization. The God he was silent about is the God of the ego, the God of the popular mind, the Creator of the universe. He was silent about it because he had transcended self, and world, and the "other" God, God apart. What he enthusiastically proclaimed was a Way in which there was tacit Realization of the Transcendental Reality. That Reality is ultimately beyond description, but that does not mean that he was silent, or non-communicative, about the matter. We know very well that he was Transcendentally occupied, but he did not engage in descriptive definitions of that Reality. Rather, he pointed to a way of Realization in which one transcended such categories.
(36) Gautama's Realization of the Transcendental Reality was tacit, not descriptive and not mental. This is true of Adepts throughout time. There is no doubt that they were involved in God-Realization or Realization of the Transcendental Reality. Many kinds of language were spun out by these Adepts in their Ecstatic speech, their attempts to guide others and respond to their questions, but the God they Realized is not the God of Nature, not the Creator God, not the God of selves. The God they Realized is the only God, the Transcendental Reality Who is Realized in Ecstasy through self-transcendence, through transcendence of the categories of mind and body and relations and world. The Bhagavad Gita, for instance, is a book about God in which the realm of Nature, the realm of selves, is criticized. This realm is not merely proposed as the creation of God. It is all arising in God, but God is not viewed as the Creator, but rather the Transcendental Condition of it all, the One Who is Realized by transcending it all.
(37) In itself, Nature is merely a terrible machine of limitations, in which winter follows summer, cold follows heat, pain follows pleasure. It is a binding, limiting power. The God Who is to be Realized, the God Who is Truth, is only Realized through accepting responsibility for the automaticity of egoic existence, through Ecstasy. That process depends on profound insight into the self, the process of experiencing, knowing, presuming, thinking, desiring, and reacting.
(38) Now, the materialists, like the creationists, have a one-dimensional conception of the world, a conception created by the presumption of the self as the point of view of knowing and experiencing. This presumption underlies the acceptance of the convention of subject-object relations as the model by which scientific inquiry is conducted, just as it is the model for religious devotion to a Creator-God.
(39) Scientists are looking at the realm of cause and effect, as are religionists. The knowledge that science proposes is knowledge about cause-and-effect relations. It is simply that scientists or scientific materialists are describing the universe as a system of causes and effects that has no ultimate cause and perhaps no ultimate effect, a system of endless patterns, paradoxes of cause-effect relations. But they are only looking at the cause-effect realm of experiencing and knowing about that experiencing. That description of reality, that entire enterprise, is developed on the basis of the conventions of egoic perception, the conventions of the relationship between the psycho-physical individual and the world of phenomena. Thus, the enterprise of science is developing a cosmology without a necessary deity.
(40) Scientists are looking at every aspect of this cause-effect universe. They are mapping out a universe of objects in time and looking back in time, ultimately to the extreme point at which there was a great explosion. Physical evidence suggests that the entire material universe is the result of what is popularly called the Big Bang. This theory is achieving legitimacy as the dominant, most believable theory. It represents an absolute qualification of the ability of science to go beyond the evidence of the present universe, because no evidence remains from prior to the Big Bang. All the conditions that priorly existed have been undone, at least insofar as scientists feel they can observe them. Therefore, scientists are beginning to feel there is no way to go beyond the presumption of this initial explosion.
(41) This investigation and the cosmic description scientists are developing on the basis of it has only one dimension. It is an exploration of a non-paradoxical, linear kind of universe. However, at the same time that the universe is conceived as a linear progression from the Big Bang, physical theories have been developed in the twentieth century that point to space-time being a paradox. It must be clearly understood that these same theories point to matter itself being a paradox. Einstein's equation E=mc2 describes a relationship between matter and energy. One-dimensional descriptions of the universe and creationist cosmologies are linear conceptions that do not conceive of time or space in paradoxical terms. They propose matter and thingness as a kind of fixed dimension of manifestation.
(42) However, the total universe is not merely linear, but a space-time paradox. In the linear mode of conception, there is the present moment of time, and if you go way back you get to the Big Bang. But you cannot get to the Big Bang from here. (Laughter.) If you fully conceive of the total significance of the so-called material universe, it is a paradox of space-time. There is no linear way to get to the Big Bang. Likewise, matter is not merely thingness. From the viewpoint of the Big Bang, the universe seems to be a transformation of existing materiality, but if we understand matter rightly, we see that matter is itself light or energy. Therefore, right conception of the universe must be based on understanding the paradox of matter as light and the paradox of space-time. Ultimate right thinking, even about the universe, must be paradoxical thinking, and it must be dimensional, not linear, thinking.
(43) As I have pointed out in Scientific Proof [of the Existence of God Will Soon Be Announced by the White House!] we should be thinking in terms of the consequences of this paradoxical view, which has been legitimized by twentieth-century science. We should be thinking of energy as a paradox of space-time, and we should be conceiving of everything as a paradoxical expression of energy with only one level being solid and fixed in present time. If we viewed the universe altogether, we would see that every manifestation in this moment inheres in infinite Energy and in non-linear time, inexpressible time, Eternity. If we engaged in dimensional or paradoxical thinking, then we would have a truer view of the universe, and of our existence as a rather paradoxical phenomenon that crosses through many dimensions of appearance. We are simply fastening our attention in one dimension of appearance, the so-called material dimension, the linear world in which the present material appearance has occurred progressively since the Big Bang.
(44) If we become capable of dimensional or paradoxical consideration, then we can also see how the transcendental or radical spiritual point of view is the ultimately justifiable philosophy. It does not depend on conventional religious thinking, creationist thinking, or materialist thinking. All such thinking is based on one-dimensional, linear, materialist kinds of conception that express the psycho-physical ego, its subject-object relations, and the conventions of such subject-object relations. Both science and traditional religion are involved in a self-based, illusory interpretation of the world, rather than a view of the world based on liberated understanding, a view in which we understand ourselves and the world as inhering in the ultimate paradox of the Absolute. We must understand and transcend ourselves altogether, submit ourselves to a different kind of process than this one-dimensional, linear, self-based process. We must enter into Ecstasy, dare to surrender into the Totality of our existence, transcending this limited material dimension in its mereness. We necessarily do so when we become intuitively Awakened to the real God, the only God. >>>
Namaste!
Jim |
