In the particular path we are discussing, that of the Diamond Approach there is a place for a personal God. The path includes attitudes, states, and conditions that are best conceptualized in terms of relationship to a personal God. But the important thing is that the perspective of the Diamond Approach makes it possible to have direct experiences that help us understand and appreciate what the concept of a personal God can mean. This is because the perspective includes, as an important part, a rare understanding of the personal. We discussed… our understanding of a particular essential aspect, the personal essence, which gives the soul the sense of being personal. The personal essence gives the soul the capacity for personal contact, personal interaction and communication… we saw it not simply as emotional communication based on historical content, but as a particular essential quality, a platonic form that makes it possible for us to make contact with another soul directly and in an appropriate and attuned manner, a manner that considers and respects the uniqueness of each soul and her individual unfoldment.

So my experiences gave me a sense and understanding of what a personal God is, or a personal relationship to God. A personal God does not mean God as a person; it means that you relate to God as if you are a person. There’s a relationship between the person and beingness, a relationship between the soul and true nature. As a soul, as long as you still believe you are an individual, your relationship to being is bound to be personal. Because you believe you are a person, then of course your relationship to the sacred is a personal relationship. But it’s your relationship that is personal, not God’s. And it does not make the sacred a person—it just makes the relationship personal. We usually think a personal relationship has to be between one person and another person, but when we get to the transition from the personal dimension to the boundless dimension, we find that there can be a personal relationship between the person and the divinity that is not a person. So God does not have to become a person to relate to you personally and it is not fundamental to you having a personal relationship with God.

The resolution of the separateness has to do with going from ego to non-ego, from individual to cosmic, from human to divine. We realize that our deeper nature is God itself. Realizing divine nature means not being an individual; it means being totality, universality, infinity. Nothing is excluded from your sense of self. You realize then that whenever you talk to someone, you are talking to yourself. True love, true compassion, and true generosity arise now because there is no separation between you and the other. You could still feel yourself as an individual who sees how you are unique, but you know too that you are fundamentally connected. At a more intrinsic level, that separateness is not there.

Even in the context of serious inner work, the belief in separate individuality tends to distort the truth. You might believe, for example, that there is a God somewhere who is taking care of you, who is guiding you. But that perspective is a subtle continuation of the ego view. You implicitly believe that you are a person, a separate entity, in relation to some bigger force. This is nothing but the personality’s need for the mommy being reinstated in the relationship with God. True spiritual disciplines say the relationship with God should be dissolution in God. Death in God means dissolving the personality, dissolving the sense of separateness. You are not, ultimately, someone who prays to God. You are somebody who dies in God. Praying to God, surrendering to God gets you closer and closer to God until there is no separation between you and God.

Our relationship with God is deep and unconscious. It is not what our conscious minds tell us it is or ought to be; it is how we feel about God in our guts. Unless you have worked it through, everyone has anger toward God or the universe, however you conceive of it. Everyone has suffered, felt abandoned and hurt, and has wondered in anger at God—where was the help, where was the support, where was the holding, where was the love, where was the blessing? Such feelings are hidden in many people behind their sense of themselves as God-fearing or God-believing. For such people, allegiance to God often covers more hatred of God than that of nonbelievers, since there is more reason to be angry at Him: “I believe in you—I know you’re there, so where are you? Paying attention to other people?” These feelings need to be brought to consciousness and worked through before we can consistently experience this loving presence as a force in our lives. Doing this means putting aside what the church told you your relationship with God is or should be, what you were told in the mosque or at temple, in order to really find out what your soul in its depths believes and feels about this intelligence we call God.

So, to love the truth means that you want to annihilate the false. If you go into the matter deeply, you realize that everything you perceive will in time be revealed as false. Everything to which you can give a name does not really exist as you see it. This includes even what we think of as God. Simple religious people think that God is merciful and good and will give us blessings and rewards. Why would God do anything like that for you? You don’t truly exist anyway, so why would God give you blessings? God is not deluded like you are. You are the one who thinks that you are an individual person who needs this or that. God doesn’t think that way. For God there is only God. If you think that you need blessing, God will say, “Who do you think you are? Do you think you are separate from me?” So, to think of blessings or of God’s grace is fine, but it betrays a limited understanding of reality. Although it begins to understand the divine realm, if you really see what God is, the only thing you want to do is forget that you exist. Letting God be there is loving God. Loving God doesn’t mean wanting to be with God. To love God means that you want only God to be. Anything else is not love of God, but love of yourself, love of your belief in a separate entityhood. Ultimately, what you think of as loving God actually is loving a part of your mind.

We are not different individuals who are going to be separately realized. We are one organism. Sometimes we call it the cosmic amoeba, one infinite cosmic amoeba, with pseudopodia. So when someone is born, a pseudopodium arises, does its thing, and retracts again. We call that death. Pseudopodia come out when something needs to be done and retract when they are not needed. The organism continues being the organism. We could call it God. It is who we are ultimately. We are not a little pseudopodium; we are the totality of the amoeba. So we could say that one of the deepest realizations is to realize that you are a cosmic amoeba. When you become a true individual, you are the cosmic pseudopodium. When you become your true self, a true essential personality, you become the pseudopodia of the cosmic amoeba. Going beyond that to non-ego, you become the totality of the amoeba. And when you become the cosmic amoeba, which is the state called Godhood, God realization, cosmic individuality, or oneness, you realize that you don't only move your body, you move everything. Nothing moves in the whole universe without you moving it. This cosmic amoeba is the universe, is one organism.

There is a natural magnetism toward the unity, the unity between our true nature and our individual consciousness. Sometimes we feel this attraction as an interest, as a gravitational pull toward the unity, and sometimes as a love or need for it. We feel drawn to it, driven toward it, and at times we also feel it as a mutual attraction. It is not only that we are attracted to truth—the truth is attracted to us. Not only are we attracted to God, God is attracted to us. We are pulled toward God, and God is pulled toward us. The two are drawn together because they are one at the center. I know that some teachings think of God as totally separate from the human soul, but in true mystical union, at least in the way I know it, such separation evaporates, in one way or another. In the type of unity we are exploring, there is no possibility of such a separation.

The resolution of the separateness has to do with going from ego to non-ego, from individual to cosmic, from human to divine. We realize that our deeper nature is God itself. Realizing divine nature means not being an individual; it means being totality, universality, infinity. Nothing is excluded from your sense of self. You realize then that whenever you talk to someone, you are talking to yourself. True love, true compassion, and true generosity arise now because there is no separation between you and the other. You could still feel yourself as an individual who sees how you are unique, but you know too that you are fundamentally connected. At a more intrinsic level, that separateness is not there. 

When we become truly spiritual, our caring for God becomes our caring for one another, because we see God in each other. We can’t say that we care for God and then assume that a person doesn’t have God inside them. The person might not know it, might be very blocked—might even be mad and hateful—but deep inside there is only one reality. This person has true nature regardless of how he or she is acting. If we all knew that, if all of humanity knew that, everyone would stop killing each other. We would understand that it would be like killing somebody we deeply love; it would be like killing oneself.

When you realize the enlightened perspective, the objective reality of no separateness between anything—no separateness between the physical world and the Absolute, no separateness between the Absolute and God, no separateness between God and Colorado, no separateness between Colorado and North Korea, no separateness between North Korea and you—everything is connected. Whatever you can conceive, whatever you can experience, whatever you can imagine is one. If you can divide that one in half, then it’s not oneness, it’s twoness. That means, again, you’ve brought in separation and the Basic Fault. So if you believe that the presence of true nature comes to you from outside, if you believe God is separate from you, if you believe that enlightenment is someplace to get to, you’re still operating from the perspective of the Basic Fault. That’s not to say that you may not experience things that way. You can see God sitting on a throne, you can see angels, but these are intermediate experiences. You still carry the central perspective of object relations. All of the work you’ve done around your relationship with your parents and the conflicts in your relationships now—the anger and the hatred and the hurt and the disappointment—is to simplify the situation until you see it in terms of very few object relations. You have to work through all that stuff before you can fully confront the fact of objectness. Before that, you’re full of emotions that you have to go through and understand. You can’t see things simply. But the more you allow the experience to unfold, the simpler things become. As you see things more simply, you are more able to directly confront the situation and see it phenomenologically. You see not only that your mother didn’t love you or that your father rejected you but, more important, that you still believe you are your mother’s and father’s child. That’s the more fundamental problem. You’re not your mother’s child. You’re not your father’s child. Not in the real sense. Physiologically it’s true, but not fundamentally. Your mother and father and you are objectively one thing. Thinking yourself separate brings up issues of “Do I love them? Do I hate them? How do they feel about me?” The problems that we encounter are a consequence of separateness.

The real world is nothing but the beauty that expresses the truth, the reality, the mystery that, in itself, is completely unknowable and inexpressible. Seeing this, we see that God is not somewhere else, that spirit is not something else, it is nothing specific, nothing in particular, nothing in the past or the present or the future, here or there, and has nothing to do with these. All these things are words anyway. God is a word. Truth is a word. If we are simply knowing a word, what is the mystery then? The mystery is not somewhere else, the mystery is nothing but our world, reality itself when we truly perceive it. There is nothing else, nowhere else; there is no heaven somewhere where God lives, running the show. This is God and he’s not running the show, he’s just living. To see this we first need to dare not to know. We need to acknowledge our humility, which is not just being good and spiritual. Humility means to objectively see that you do not know, not to think that something is wrong with you because you cannot know Nobody can know You cannot know the mystery. The only thing you can know about the mystery is that it is unknowable and untouchable. You see it, you perceive it, but you do not know what it is. The moment you try to penetrate it, you forget you are trying to penetrate it.

We say that God, or the Truth, never changes and is always the same, while in fact, God is changing all the time since God is everything that we see. So which perception is the truth? Both are true, and this is something that we can't really understand. When we face this mystery the mind has reached its limit and has to give up. Conceptual elucidation can only go so far, and ultimately, we end up facing paradoxes. While the threads no longer conceptually fit here, experientially, it makes total sense. Just as the atoms in the body are always atoms and always stay the same while the body is constantly changing, the Absolute is always unchanging, while there is always the arising of manifestation out of it.

Here we will discuss each Holy Idea briefly, focusing particularly on its relationship to basic trust. We will explore each in depth in Part Three. We will begin with the Holy Idea for Point Eight, Holy Truth. When basic trust is dominant, the head center opens and we perceive the fact of reality. We see that the universe in its totality—all levels, including the physical—exists in a fundamental way and that that existence is the true reality. We see that all of existence is the manifestation of God, the Divine Being, True Nature—whatever name you wish to give it. So Holy Truth is the perception that God exists as the totality of existence—that He is what exists and the existence of what exists—and God is not something separate from the universe. When basic trust is deeply integrated, we see that everything is pervaded by the living presence or consciousness that we call Living Daylight or Loving Light. It could also be called God, love, consciousness, presence, or Being. This perception of existence is the perspective of Holy Truth.

God is not something different from Being, or true nature. It is one significant potential of the wholeness of Being, a particular way that this wholeness can manifest itself in our perception and understanding. Being can be impersonal, simply the true nature and ground of all; it can also be personal, as the creative Reality that is constantly generating manifestation and relating to it in a personal way. Furthermore, God is not separate from creation. The world is the creation of the personal God, but it is also the face of God. The world, in all its dimensions and forms, is simply the appearance of the body of God, and also God's mind and heart. The world is a theophany. The two facets, world/cosmos and God/Being are intimately related. The world/cosmos is the experience of God/Being and God/Being is the nature and source of the world/cosmos. They are two facets of the same Reality. We can think of God/Being as true nature apart from the forms it manifests, which is one way some traditional teachings conceptualize the situation; but then the world/cosmos is the inseparable creation of God/Being, its external facet. In either case, there is no separation. In fact there is perfect coemergent nonduality.

In the particular path we are discussing, that of the Diamond Approach there is a place for a personal God. The path includes attitudes, states, and conditions that are best conceptualized in terms of relationship to a personal God. But the important thing is that the perspective of the Diamond Approach makes it possible to have direct experiences that help us understand and appreciate what the concept of a personal God can mean. This is because the perspective includes, as an important part, a rare understanding of the personal. We discussed… our understanding of a particular essential aspect, the personal essence, which gives the soul the sense of being personal. The personal essence gives the soul the capacity for personal contact, personal interaction and communication… we saw it not simply as emotional communication based on historical content, but as a particular essential quality, a platonic form that makes it possible for us to make contact with another soul directly and in an appropriate and attuned manner, a manner that considers and respects the uniqueness of each soul and her individual unfoldment. 

Just by calling yourself Michael, or Laurie, or Jean, or whatever, you are deadening yourself. You made yourself into an object, something unchanging, and ended up cut off from the dynamism that is your being. The concepts arise to describe actual differentiations and contrasts in our perception. But the concepts become so concrete that they seem real. And because they determine how we experience ourselves and the world, our experience tends to continually reinforce the ideas we already have. So the concepts that constitute our knowledge become our reality. Even your idea of what God is, is a notion in your mind, which you learned from your parents. So you never really see what God is, because you already know. The issue here is the belief that you know. You believe that you know who you are, you believe that you know the world, you believe that you know what existence is. What you actually know is your own mind. You don’t know existence. You have lost the mystery that you live in. We all lose the mystery that we are, the mystery that surrounds us, the mystery that brings us wonder, freshness, and freedom. We have made our world into a fossil. We have turned Being, mystery, God, into dead fossils. And we are looking for a new fossil that will make us feel alive and happy. We call these new fossils spiritual or psychological insights. Why not question all the fossils instead of running around looking for new ones?

When you are God, you don’t feel you are God. If you feel “I am God,” then the “I” is still there. You are not God; you don’t relate to God; you are not part of God; you are not supported by God. If you believe any of these things, then you think there is something other than God. And when you experience something other than God, it is no longer God; it is your idea of God or something you learned about God. God becomes something you made up in your own image. But God is not made in the human image; it is the other way around. You are an image of God. The experiences of devotion to God, relationship to God, union with God, connection with God, being part of God, being cells in the body of God, being God—all appear on various paths. But they all retain the sense of the presence of the self. When the self goes, there is only the seeing of God. You don’t even feel “I am being God” because there is no “I.” If you say, “I am experiencing God,” there are two, not one. If you say, “I love God,” there are you and God. When there is God, there is no one there who loves God; there is just God. There is the seeing of God and that’s it. You don’t feel that you are seeing God, that you are relating to God, that you are God; you don’t feel anything that has an “I” in it. You don’t feel anything. There is just the seeing of God, and God is all and everything. All that you can see and cannot see. If for one moment you see that there is something other than God, whether separate from God or connected to God, if for one moment you perceive that God has parts, then what you are experiencing is not the absolute oneness. You are experiencing parts. As long as you are experiencing parts, there are ego boundaries, which bring a sense of separateness, a sense of richness of possessions, and a sense of impurity.

Your God representation is an amalgam formed from your early experience with your mother, your experience with your father, what the culture around you said about God, what you were taught if you went to church or temple, what you heard about God in school, on television, and in other places, and pictures you saw related to God or religion. Your relationship with God is particularly affected by your relationship with your parents, since in the beginning they were gods to you in the sense that they took total care of your life. From your perspective as a very young child, your parents appeared omnipotent and omniscient. Also, because in the early months of infancy your sense of self was fused with mother and you were still abiding for the most part in Being, your sense of mother contains many aspects of the experience of Being. All of these experiences with mother and father and whatever religious ideas you came in contact with form your unconscious image of God. In theistic cultures, the image of God is usually anthropomorphic, taking on human or super-human characteristics; but even if your parents were atheists or Buddhists, you probably formed an image of God. We are not talking about your direct experiences of God here, but rather what your mind thinks of as God. Many people, especially those who come into the Work, have experiences as children that they later understand were direct experiences of God. These experiences, for the most part, do not affect our beliefs about the intelligence we call God, nor does what our rational, conscious mind tells us about Him. It is the concept about Him that we hold in our unconscious and deeply believe in emotionally, that we project onto the objective, universal force that exists.