The Emergence of God

(The Practice of Divine Presence: 4)

God receives his strength from you… He is all around you and inside you.
Hasan Lutfi Shushud, Istanbul, August 12, 1975

… our ALL-EMBRACING CREATOR …
G.I. Gurdjieff, Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, 1950

From the heart of the One All-Embracing Presence, there remains a question: Whose Presence is This? As always with spiritual matters, insight can come by looking into our own experience, in this case the experience of presence. When we, in our inner work, inhabit and are present in our whole body, that presence is ours, it belongs to our I. This is our direct and simple experience. Yet our I, the one who is present, is not material. It is not our body or our brain. It is not the energy of consciousness. It is the one who uses our body, the one who can direct our thoughts, the one who aims our attention and receives our sensory perceptions, the one who sees what is displayed on the field of consciousness. Our I is our will, our power of agency. Though immaterial, our I owns and directs our presence.

We can apply this personal-scale realization to a much larger domain, the domain of the One Presence within everything everywhere. The One Who inhabits that global presence sees and operates on such an immense scale as to be nearly unimaginable. The vast extent immediately rules out planting our personal flag and claiming the One Presence as our own. Yet the One Presence clearly includes us, for nothing and no one is left out of its embrace. If it is not my presence and it is not someone else's presence, then whose presence is this? There can be only one response.

We come face to face with the vast, boundless, yet intimate and immanent God. This is Who is present, in and as the world, in and as each and every one of us. For this to be realized, we can no longer allow our subjectivity, our egoism to lay claim to our perceptions. We see, but we let the seeing happen through us. It is the whole that is seeing as us, seeing with our body, seeing with and as every body.

This is enabled by a profound relaxation, by letting go on the deepest level, letting go of ourselves, of our subjectivity. In that process, we change scale. We become part of the Great Whole. We act responsibly, with conscience and kindness and joy, but as the Whole, not as our subjective, separate self. We exchange our subjective viewpoint for the pure objectivity within the Great Unity. We let right action flow through us, without laying claim to it for our illusory ego, without blocking that flow to insert our narrow self as its source.

The most common name for this benevolent SomeOne, in Whose presence we live, is God. God in you, God in all of us, God in everything: the panentheistic view from ancient times to modern. The transcendent side of God remains transcendent, while the immanent side not only touches us, but is Who we really are, Who this planet is.

To come to this, we step back from our name, from our ego, from our unfolding life story to come into the One Presence that we share and then to the One Whose presence this is. In those moments we find great relief in putting down the burden of our ego, the endless demand to feed and defend this empty wisp of a self that has consumed us. With nothing left to stop us, we emerge into the Great Whole, or rather the Great Whole emerges in us.

God is sometimes called the Friend, an apt name for the immanent side of God. When we are with a friend, it is not their body that is our friend: it is the person within that body. Here in the wider world, it is the One within the whole of this world Who is the Friend, Who by His presence brings comfort and joy, just as other friends do. We can take it as a practice to open to the Friend Who embraces us through and as the world all around us, and even through and as our own body. This Friend is always here and everywhere.

Still, the layers of truth go deeper, for we ourselves are not separate from this most intimate Friend. Where is that boundary, where we stop and the Friend begins? There is no boundary.

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