Two ways God might be

On the divinity of scale, or the dream of all things.

On an otherwise ordinary Saturday night a few weeks ago, floating around in a sort of tequila haze, I’m standing near the door inside a friend’s apartment and surrounded by a group of guys who usually talk about sports. Tonight, however, the conversation veered off course.

We’d been talking about how we don’t speak to our mothers enough, which made the ears of our girlfriends assembled on the couch across the room perk up. Then, in the sort of non-sequitur that makes sense only when you’re drunk, a guy standing at my 2 o’clock, with eyes so earnest you get the feeling that he’s still basically grateful to be alive, asked me point blank: “Do you believe in God?”

The topic has been on my mind lately. God-talk is percolating across unusual corners of my world. An old and now famous fraternity brother of mine recently added “Jesus Follower” to his Twitter bio. The writer Sasha Chapin just wrote about what he means when he says that “Abruptly, about five years ago, I started believing in God.” The tech writer Packy McCormick also recently found God, which to him means coming to believe that consciousness is the fundamental property of the universe, and noticing how the world is growing more magical as we all groggily wake up to that fact.

These are not, of course, identical ways of understanding “God.” There’s little consensus, but there is a common impulse. A God-shaped discourse in places I’m unaccustomed to finding it. My world seems to be shifting. Standing around with the boys at 1am, drunk, can now mean talking about the primordial stuff of the cosmos rather than basketball.

One of the last pictures of my dad shows him standing in the spacious, finished attic of his Victorian home, assuredly smiling, donning a white t-shirt with thick black lettering: “TRY GOD.” This is now one of the first images that comes to mind when I think of him, and his smile has become more of a smirk, as if he knew I’d come around eventually.

In his translation and commentary on a 4th century Sanskrit poem, the Meghadūta, or The Cloud of Longing, he describes his project as articulating “a vision of nature that can add depth, richness, subtlety, and even transformation to our culture’s habitual way of viewing and experiencing the natural world.”

In that sense, God isn’t an abstract proposition, but a sensory phenomenon. And she doesn’t just quietly slot-in to your pre-existing sense of how the world is. God shows up, I guess, during the tumult of transformation. Some combination of practice and grace yanks perception into an unfamiliar configuration, which renders a new world for you to experience, and as you search for your bearings in that transformed experiential landscape, you notice — is that God?

I’m not prepared to tell you there’s some version of God I believe in, save for maybe Joseph Campbell’s very modest proposal that “God” is a metaphor for the unknown, for all that eludes the human intellectual grasp. But I’m opening up to the possibility of a more concrete version of God in ways that surprise me. Specifically, as of this particular moment, I see two stories of God that make about as much sense as the atheist’s story of the universe (which is exactly as fantastically fucking weird and hostile to common sense as any ‘God created all this’ version).

Dalí’s Archeological Reminiscence of Millet's Angelus

We are God’s kidney cells

Let’s start with the comparatively modest story. Imagine you are one of my kidney cells.

You are roughly 20 micrometers across, or about one quarter of the width of the average human hair. Just as human bodies maintain a boundary between ourselves and our environments, the skin that traffics between our insides and outsides, the kidney cell version of you also maintains a plasma-membrane, a boundary, that separates you from the rest of the environment inside my kidney.

And as one of my kidney cells, you sit there next to all your buddies. You reabsorb a bunch of electrolytes, returning them to the bloodstream to help regulate things like blood pressure and toxin levels. You have a nice little life in there. But you don’t really know why there’s this constant stream of electrolytes showing up in your environment. You do the best you can — you try to hold your boundary together, you survive, you adapt.

Say you’re an enterprising little kidney cell, and you do some philosophy. You wonder why these things are happening. Where does this stream of electrolytes come from? Perhaps you reason that there’s a stream of blood that seems to be the origin of electrolytes. But obviously, there are things even a philosophizing kidney cell could never even begin to know about why its environment is the way it is, things for which they just aren’t equipped to comprehend.

Say, for example, my full human body just finished a 90-minute soccer game, hobbled off the field, and chugged two bright blue Gatorade drinks. Soon, my kidney cells will be flushed with a fresh stream of electrolytes. But even the brightest among them could never have any way of knowing that the environments they’re adapting to are being structured by the activities of the entire human body, by an ongoing soccer game and subsequent sports drink. These things are happening on a scale that’s just too alien to a kidney cell’s environment, too big for them to ever make perceptual contact with.

Well, I can’t think of any good reason to believe that we aren’t in basically the same position as our kidney cells. This isn’t a particularly original insight. The actor Ethan Hawke puts it this way: we can understand God (or in his case, the “divine concept of time”) about as well as a dog can understand a clock. The earth could be to some grand cosmic being what microbes are to us. How would we know? Our entire world could be the kidney cell of some vast celestial creature, moving through space as it plays some game that remains forever unknown to us.

You can push back easy enough. We are not kidney cells. And we aren’t stuck with philosophy alone — we have scientists. We have the James Webb telescope that orbits 1 million miles away from Earth and can spot new galaxies 13.4 billion light years away. We have probabilistic inference. We have equations and background radiation that suggest there was once a Big Bang.

But however far the absolute perimeter of our knowledge might reach — the extent of the presently knowable universe — there’s no reason that even that entire domain might be nothing but a puny microbe compared to the vastness of whatever is really out there, whatever is really going on here. Maybe God is a matter of the misalignment between our perceptual capacities and the unfathomable-to-us scale of all things.

We are God’s dream

This is the one that really gets me. Dreams. Every night, whether we remember or not, our minds demonstrate their capacity to build entirely convincing, immersive worlds out of nothing but mind-stuff. Dream worlds are not made of atoms, electrons, or any sort of solid thing. Dream worlds are made of awareness. No one disputes this.

So what good reason do we have to think that this ‘waking’ world is also not just composed, entirely, all the way down to its inmost essence, of awareness? It is, at least, possible.

The famous story of Taoist philosopher Zhuangzi’s butterfly goes like this: Zhuangzi falls asleep by a river. He dreams he’s a butterfly, happily flapping around. He wakes up by the river, remembers the dream, and can no longer be certain whether he is the man, Zhuangzi, who dreamt he’s a butterfly, or if he is perhaps the butterfly, who is now dreaming itself a man.

People usually take this story to be a cute little chicken-and-egg problem. Few people are really troubled by the possibility that they’re actually the dreams of slumbering beings. It just doesn’t feel all that plausible.

But again, no one questions the plausibility that in our dreams, we inhabit worlds that are made of nothing more than mind-stuff. And this seems more destabilizing to me — it isn’t a cute little thought experiment, but a repeatedly affirmed fact, that each of us knows that entirely convincing cement floors and wooden chairs and soft grass can be made of mind alone.

I’m not especially concerned that I’m currently dreaming, exactly. But I do know that this world I experience can be made entirely of mind. And if some sort of idealism is true, then whose dream is this? Whose awareness am I touching when I clatter on the keyboard?

God, in this case, is the entity to whom all this awareness we encounter in the waking world belongs. The world is God’s dream.

Of course, there are problems here, too. We like to believe that in our nighttime dreams, we are the only actually conscious entities. In a dream, other people are just projected exteriors. Conjurations of light from the projector of our minds. “Dreams are by definition solitary: they permit only the illusion of ‘we,’” writes philosopher Raymond Tallis.

In waking life, we like to believe that other beings are conscious, too. We can’t formally prove each other’s consciousness, but we sort of need to just make the assumption in order to go on. And so how could multiple little loci of consciousness exist inside of a single entity’s dream? Can there be a ‘we’ inside of a dream, or are we all just twists of light emanating from God’s mind? Loops in the holy electromagnetic field? To Tallis, Zhuangzi might respond: reality is by definition collective: it permits only the illusion of ‘I’.

The problem with God is effort

Historically, a metaphysics that takes some form of mind to be the primary stuff of the universe has been the norm, although you can place them along a sliding scale. Something like Yogācāra Buddhism is among the most strict, where all of reality is nothing but consciousness. The world is just a bunch of mental impressions. Advaita Vedānta says that pure consciousness is the true reality, where the world as we tend to experience it is a transient illusion. Kashmir Shaivism says that the primordial stuff of the universe is Siva — mind, or awareness — but Siva emanates Sakti, or these multiplicities that are actually real and comprise the world, mostly just for fun. The Aztecs had this idea of teōtl, where neither mind nor matter exist, but only the dynamic, oscillating process of teōtl, an impersonal energy that’s self-generating and always in flux.

Commenting on Aztec metaphysics, anthropologist Miguel León-Portilla asks: “Has man any hope for escape from the unreality of dreams — from this evanescent world?”

I’m neither sure that dreams are unreal nor that escape interests me; two reasons I’m not a Buddhist. But I would like to know if the waking and dreaming worlds are composed of the same kind of stuff. Maybe it’s just an evolutionary impulse; I want to find my bearings in this unfamiliar environment. Where are we? Like the writer Annie Dillard, I want to “explore the neighborhood, view the landscape, to discover at least where it is that we have been so startlingly set down, if we can’t learn why.”

I don’t know what the practical consequences of an answer would be. I don’t think I’d live much differently if I knew this was not all a show of quantum fluctuations springing into universes of colliding particles and fundamental laws of physics, but one great big field of awareness with vortexes and eddies that evanescently develop feelings like “I’m hungry,” and “I wish I were better at basketball,” and “wow my partner is beautiful.”

But asking about the practical consequences of a God-like situation is how you wind up needing concepts like Heaven and Hell. And sure, maybe there’s something it feels like when our bodies die and our knots of awareness untwist and there is no longer any local ‘I,’ just the general, diffused mind of all things. Maybe that’s heaven. Or maybe God is now and death is oblivion.

Either way, what occurred to me when I was asked whether I believe in God was that my Dad’s t-shirt was, I hate to say, smart. God is something to try. Belief can flow from direct experience. In that sense, there’s no answer that can travel from person to person. Language is rarely up to the task of transmitting the sort of perceptual transformation in which, I gather, God might show up.

Instead, there are practices that promise to reconfigure how we experience the world. And I think this, more so than any inherent intractability of God, is why the sort of theological belief that flows from experience remains rare. Usually, it takes serious effort. Devotion, even.

This makes the perception of God its own chicken-and-egg problem — you generally have to put in serious effort just to catch the first glimpse. But it often requires an initial glimpse to motivate and sustain all that effort. So in the matter of perceiving God, what comes first: the perception, or the practice?

Either way, I’m still stuck on the implications of dreams. We’re reminded, nightly, that awareness is solid enough to construct a convincing and immersive world. One where even as you feel cool wooden floorboards on the bare soles of your feet, and the prick of an upturned splinter lodging into your big toe, you, the floor, and the splinter are all conjured of nothing but mind. There is no wood, no toe, no pain, but for the awareness that is temporarily spun into those shapes. And if this waking experience is no different, then I ask again: whose dream is all this?

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Here are the last two dispatches: