God the Agent

… I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.
Galatians 2:20

Now for the truly astounding part: where does God fit into this picture? Each level of the hierarchy of agency is an emergent phenomenon, arising from the prior level by the joining together of agents or elements that are separate on that level and become a unified whole, a unified agent on the next level. Step by step, something emerges from the material of this universe, an agency that is richer than what was put into the universe, an agency that feeds into and joins with the Original Agent, the Creator of it all. God is the Agent Who acts through the being of the universe. God is not merely some abstract all-encompassing system. God is the singular Divine Agent, the Divine Will behind and within the whole universe. We humans have a place, a role to fulfill in That.

We can view nature, the universe, as God's body. Some researchers consider the Self, the I, to be a meta-level construct from the body, a meta-cognitive construct with agency (i.e., will). We can extend that view to see that God stands in the same relationship to the universe as we do to our bodies. Gurdjieff said as much in his book, All and Everything.[1] If we are like cells in God's body, then the process of transcending our ego enables us to take our place in the larger Sacred reality, just as the cells in our body must become part of and selflessly serve the whole body, if the body is to be healthy. Unlike biologicals cells, we have more freedom, more agency. The choice to seek the greater wholeness, while not forced upon us, stands open to every one of us.

Then prayer and our search for the Sacred take on a new possibility, the possibility of the Divine being real and even being accessible to us, even being in us and us in the Divine. Ultimately, by entering the Divine Whole, though we give up our self-centered egoism along the way, we do not lose our individuality, rather we gain a new dimension, a greater individuality, that of the Greater Whole. And because that Greater Whole cannot be dissected into parts, we become that Greater Whole, acting in our own unique, individual ways, with our body and our personality as our instruments, yet living from and as the Whole.

Take the example of prayer: deep, self-transcending prayer. We do not lose anything substantial in such a state. We lose our illusion of separateness. We release our partiality, our self-centeredness, to become whole within ourselves, and then to become the Whole, the penultimate rung of the hierarchy of agency, that of the immanent God, Who is in us and in everything.

Transcending our separateness, we look beneath the surface of things. Just as there is the wholeness of a human being in us, and the personal agency that arises with that wholeness, we can find wholeness in the wider, everyday reality, in the streets, the houses and buildings, the trees and the sky, the birds, the dogs, and the people. Those things are outside us, or are they? The boundary between us and everything else grows porous before evaporating altogether. At one level, at our personal level, there is the inner and the outer. The next level harbors no such distinction. We let go of inwardly holding ourselves separate. We blend with all and in so doing return home, losing nothing, gaining everything.

The Sacred Whole embraces us and everything. We look beneath the surface. We reach beneath the surface with our will and realize that the will in us is of a piece with the will in everything. There is only one will. Yes, individualized in us, but not thereby separated from the Whole in which we are. As we walk through life, we look behind the surface to find the Sacred there, here. As this was put in pithy saying attributed to Ram Dass, "Treat everyone you meet like God in drag."

This looking behind the surface of things to find our kinship with them is a practice that can be intentionally undertaken. We need not wait for the Sacred to find us. The Sacred is calling now.

Atop the hierarchy of agency is the transcendent God, the Creator, beyond human reach. Apparently, our universe was created in the Big Bang by the original agent, the transcendent God. And evidently the agency of the universe evolves and emerges from there, bottom up. Nature, the universe, can viewed as God's body, which the immanent God inhabits. The immanent God thereby evolves with the universe. The great Muslim spiritual teacher, Ibn Arabi, is said to have had the view that the immanent God is God in the making, or more succinctly that the creation is God in the making. The evolution of will within the universe, the evolution of God along with the life of this universe, may well be why we are here, why the universe exists, why life exists: to generate a greater and greater wholeness and the will that emerges with that, to serve and become the One Will within all, the Loving Will that embraces all.

For this week, please look beneath the surface, both your own and that of everything around you.

[1] G.I. Gurdjieff, All and Everything, 1950, pp. 777-778. Gurdjieff writes that perfected people serve as the brain cells of God.

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