As a child who weekly attended Sunday school, I saw many pictures of God.  He was old, wise-looking, and had a glowing white beard. 

God looked kind in pictures, yet I was afraid of him because although the god with the white beard loved me, but he wasn’t easy to please.  He had a long list of rules, some of which were common sense, some of which made no sense at all.  He also held a fearsome grudge and I worried that no matter how good I was, I’d still end up listening to my skin crackle in the fires of hell.

Later, when my Sunday school faith in God faded, I still felt the presence of something, some kind of greater power.  I wasn’t sure if it was in me, around me, or above me, but it was somewhere.  To call that something God seemed impossible without going back to the list of rules and the threat of hell.  And so, without adequate words to describe what I felt, I supposed myself to be an atheist by default.

Today I know that my beliefs were never close to those of atheism, but my confusion brought home to me the importance of the symbols we use in describing the nature of God. 

For many of us born into the science-dominated 20th century, the religious symbols that represent God are too limited, and too dated, to sustain mature belief.  Yet without a viable symbol to help connect us to the divine, we can feel literally cut off from God.

Something missing

Separated from God is not a comfortable place to be.  We end up feeling terribly lost, then scolding ourselves for feeling that way.  After all, science has mapped out the entire universe in minute detail, so we should know exactly where we are.  Yet, we don’t.  And because we don’t, we often feel restless, dissatisfied, out of place.  We squirm about and try to settle ourselves with getting degrees, getting jobs, getting married, having babies, buying houses, and filling them up with as many things as our credit card limits will allow.

Through continual grasping, we distract ourselves from the knowledge that to be cut off from God is to be cut off from our source, our context, our meaning, our peace.  Some people will keep grasping their entire lives.  Others figure out that grasping is never going to make them feel better and determine to find what’s really missing from their lives. 

Many of those others have found their way into the New Age.  One might even say that the search for our lost God is the driving force behind the New Age.  The movement aims to heal the rift between self and God -– a rift opened by science and the razing of our religious symbols -- by rebuilding the symbolic bridges that connect us with our source.

The New Age begins this task by asking us to once again consider the symbols of divinity revered by human beings throughout the ages.  It asks to look again, closely, and discover what these symbols have to tell us. 

The masks of God

Glancing through a book on world mythology, one can see that the God of Christianity is not the only one with a white beard. 

The great Greek god Zeus, too, had a white beard, and a quiver full of thunderbolts which he hurled at wayward humans.  He also had a grandmother, Gaia, the divine Earth itself and a remarkable number of aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters, who were also embodiments of specific divine qualities.  Some were virginal women, others were lusty men or a wicked combination of man and animal.  Some were serious, some were tricky, some laughed, some cried, some were wise, others foolish.

Hindu gods are even more numerous. Some are female like Kali, the mother god, slayer of demons; some are male like the playful Shiva, who continually creates the world through his dance. 

Other pantheons have arisen from Europe, Africa, North and South America -- gods that are earth and sky, human and animal, visible and invisible.  Meanwhile, in China, the Taoists looked to the Tao, the faceless universal life force, while the Buddhists claimed no god at all.

In exploring these symbols, one learns, as Krishnamurti noted, that when we approach God, our “thought can project anything it likes.  It can create and deny God.  Each person can invent or destroy God according to his inclinations, pleasures and pains.”  

We also learn that despite the multiplicity of images we humans have created, we are singularly compelled to create them.  Symbols of the divine have spontaneously arisen within all people, in all places, in all times.  The mythologies of virtually every culture known to us, observed Joseph Campbell, are based on the same “universal doctrine” of divinity, which asserts that all the visible parts of the world are the result of an all-encompassing power, or mysterious ground of being. 

The various images of deities, he concluded, are like “footprints left, as it were, by local passages of a Universal Self.”  This Self travels through the imagination in many forms and wears, in Campbell’s words, many masks.  And the ubiquity of these footprints tell us that this Universal Self most assuredly exists.

Thou art that

Although we may love and feel devotion to one particular mask, the “universal doctrine” of humanity tells us there is more to divinity than any one image can carry.  It tells us that although God is our father, she is also our mother.  It tells us that although God looks like us, she also looks like animals, trees, oceans, mountains, suns and moons.  God is in heaven, but he is also in the world.  God is transcendent, but she is also immanent. 

In the New Age, God is understood to be all things, everywhere, both within the world as ground of being, and beyond the world as unimaginable possibility. 

This concept, in which all reality in all its forms and non-forms is recognized as a manifestation of the divine, is called panentheism.  One is All, All is One; or in the words of the Hindus, tat tvam asi, thou art that.  

Physics discovers God?

Let’s set aside symbols and abstractions for a moment, and consider reality in through the lens of science.  If we were to take up a microscope and look closely at things, we would find that that the universe is all made of the same basic substance or “stuff,” the same subatomic bits which spin together to create atoms, which create molecules, which create cells. 

Of course, we pretty much all agree this is the case, but why should we also agree to call this “stuff” by the name of God?

Ever since the discovery that matter is nothing more than trapped energy, physicists have been very busy trying to figure out exactly how this conversion works.  Many of them have apparently concluded that subatomic particles of matter are basically units of energy vibrating at different speeds (called strings theory).

Just as a steadily sounding note or a steady color is the outcome of vibrations, said Alfred White Northead, the primordial element is "an organized system of vibratory streaming energy," which manifests itself during a period of time, and forms the physical universe.

This streaming energy is often described as a field that exists everywhere and produces all things.  Herman Weyl, a philosopher of science, suggested that each particle of matter is actually a highly-charged value in this field of energy.  “Such an energy knot, which is by no means clearly delineated against the remaining field, propagates through empty space like a water wave against a lake.”

Life, against all odds

The fact that energy behaves this way, “knotting” itself into clumps of matter, is an astonishing, extraordinary thing.  One of the basic laws of physics (the second law of thermodynamics) is based on the observation that energy flows toward entropy, or chaos.  By its very nature, energy is supposed to flow toward disorganization.  Yet against astronomical odds, energy gathers together in certain places of the universe and organizes itself into incredibly complex patterns. 

This increase of order in our solar system does not violate the law of entropy because it is balanced by an increasing disorder in other parts of the universe (think black hole). Physicists will say that’s just the way it happens, and they don’t know why.  But many of us would say the “why” is obvious.  Energy that organizes itself into purposeful intelligence clearly possesses purposeful intelligence.

Writers from different disciplines have noted again and again the extreme improbability that life as we know it could have evolved by fortuitous chance. “Darwin’s theory of natural selection based on ‘random’ mutations is no longer supported,” wrote Campbell.  “As legions of scientists and science observers have pointed out, the selection of mutations by pure chance would have taken much longer than the known age of our planet allows.” 

Henri Bergson, the Nobel Prize-winning philosopher, famously refuted the blind and dreary mechanism of struggle and destruction which Darwin described, and instead presented evolution as a creative act of purpose.  Evolution is not compelled into being from outside conditions, said Bergson, but grows into being from an inner intelligence and purposeful design. 

Furthermore, each part develops not just for the benefit of itself, but also to better serve the whole.  Life, Bergson concluded, reflects an elan vital, the vital urge of purpose which gropes gradually toward knowledge and consciousness and “more light."

The energy that forms our universe does not merely exist; it also strives, learns, adapts, and evolves.  It does not follow physical laws in blind submission, it uses physical laws to organize itself, form itself, express itself. Energy that creates life is alive, energy that creates consciousness is conscious.  What other name would be better suited to describe such miraculous than God?

Neti, Neti

Many people are appalled at the idea of God as immanent in the universe.  They do not want to bring God down to earth, they like him decorously remote and removed.  Religion critic Harold Bloom has blasted the New Age for what he calls “obsessive immanence,” and added that such “perpetual and universal immanence makes it difficult for a [New Ager] to distinguish between God and any experience whatsoever.”

Bloom brings up a valid point, and idealists themselves are quick to point the spiritual “dangers” of seeing God as immanent.  Wilber is one who warns against overemphasis on immanence.  He calls a completely immanent God a “flatland God,” which creates a world that is “all surface, no depth… just equally flat and endlessly faded surfaces.” 

This flatland God, he added, drains all value from reality and blocks our perception of the true nature of Spirit.

Tielhard de Chardin likewise questioned whether we were in any danger of becoming lost in an immanent God. “Will [the belief] blur the outline of objects around us with an atmosphere of mirage?” he asked.  “Will it take our attention from the individual and tangible to absorb us in a confused sense of the universal?”

But Tielhard concluded we need not worry about disappearing into an immanent God.  He believed that in the act of union with the all, Spirit differentiates and accentuates the individual element.  Unity, he declared, does not melt everything together into homogeneity, but allows us to see everything more clearly by revealing the context of each thing.  The immanence of God and his love, Teilhard went on to say, “impregnates the universe like an oil that revives its colors.” 

It is important to know that God is always here, in the blood, the breath, the heartbeat of all life.  Yet it is also important to remember that God is not only here, but exists beyond the realm of the mere physicality.  Immanence, said Wilber, goes hand in hand with transcendence.  Neither “is final, ultimate, or privileged, but rather, like the primordial yin and yang, they generate each other, depend on each other, cannot exist without the other, and find their own true being by dying into the other, only to awaken together.”

God is the endless sweep of divinity that encompasses all we can know and all we cannot know, from the most dark to the most light, from the most immediate in here to the most inconceivable out there.

This is, of course, a contradiction, and one reason why the Hindus would describe God, or Brahman, as “Neti, Neti,” not this, not that.  God is both and neither, All and Nothing, Form and Emptiness, Being and Non-Being, Self and Not-Self. 

Thus, in the New Age, it doesn’t matter if your symbol of the divine matches up with mine.  We each have the power to create God anew; we each bestow upon God the image that only we have the power to see.  Our different definitions of divinity are no longer a reason to hate or to fight, but a reason to celebrate, for through our differences, God is enriched.

At the same time, the New Age reminds us that all differences are superficial.  The reality of God is deeper than name, than symbol, than form.  Regardless of symbol, tat tvam asi, thou art that. We are all one with God, and we are all united by this oneness.  We are all in this together, we children of Jehovah and Allah and Brahman and Tao and the god with the white beard.  As long as we know that, we need never feel lost again.

Go to Reality: Land of Illusion.