God is a myth, and other lies my inner cynic told me
Who would I be without the thoughts that cause me pain?
Last week I was watching a conversation between Liz Gilbert and my spiritual crush, Martha Beck. Martha said something that struck me so hard I had to write it down. She said: “The opposite of your worst, most painful thought is the next step toward your enlightenment. That is the truth blaring its way into your life, and it will not stop.”
So here it is Easter Sunday, and you know what sounds like fun? Dredging up my worst, most painful thought so I can discover its opposite and take that next step toward my enlightenment. Good times, let’s do this!
I went into this exercise assuming I pretty much knew what my worst, most painful thought was, so I started there and tried it on a few different ways.
I’ll never be able to move past my trauma.
I’m doomed to exist in fight or flight / survival mode.
Peace, freedom, and comfort will always be just beyond my reach.
I’m broken in a way that can’t be fixed.
Yeah. These thoughts are painful alright, and they are all thoughts that I have from time to time. There’s fertile ground in any or all of these.
But after some deep listening, another thought floated to the surface of the Magic 8-Ball of my consciousness. This thought was so painful it blew all those other thoughts away like little dry leaves. It was:
God is a myth; life is pointless.
Ok, now we’re talking. Here it is, the big, painful thought that underpins all the rest: That there is no creator, and my existence has no meaning.
It’s worth taking a moment to explain what I mean by “God”, since there are so many different ways to interpret that loaded word.
For some people God is a male parent figure, a wrathful judge, or a specific religious character like Jesus.
This word means none of those things to me.
When I say God I mean the unified field of consciousness that expresses itself as me and all of creation. It’s the source and substance of all things in the material world, and also beyond it. I don’t always call it God; I’m talking about that thing that everyone these days calls “The Universe”. In this piece of writing I’m calling it God because that’s the more personified expression of this ineffable, infinite energetic entity, and it’s this aspect that I’m dwelling on today.
This concept of God / the sentient Universe is relevant to me personally in several ways. The first is that its existence is deeply embedded in my concept of how the world works. It’s something I have spent a lot of time thinking, reading, and writing about for most of my life. God / the Universe is the answer to all my questions about why things happen and what it all means.
The second way in which God / the Universe is personally relevant to me is that its qualities are ideals to strive toward embodying.
As for what those qualities are, I can know the nature of God by knowing my own nature. What I mean by this: Just as I could only create my daughter out of my own DNA, my creator must have made me out of its own material. I feel most “myself” when I am loving and in joyful self-expression. Compassion and connection are my natural inclination when I am in a healthy, balanced state; the absence of these qualities is always a signal that I am out of balance and off-kilter — that I’m not feeling myself. A divine creator must be the purest form of the qualities that it has passed along to me; therefore the nature of God must be joyful self-expression. It is the spirit of adventure and exuberant creativity. Its fundamental substance is love. And these qualities must be my birthright as its creation.
But I can’t verify the existence or nature of God through any scientific process. And we live in a culture that reveres science above all else; a culture that elevates the physical world above the subjective, internal realm.
Now, I’m no science denier. But where does this fixation on empirical data leave us? Answers to our questions about the meaning of life and the nature of the Universe are unavoidably subjective. That doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as spiritual reality or truth; it means that spiritual reality and truth live inside our internal experience.
That’s also not to say there is no proof of God — there is. But that proof is also subjective, experiential, and founded on interpretation. So a Christian might experience proof of God as a visitation from Jesus or a patron saint. My proofs have come in the form of serendipitous coincidences, chance encounters, and messages and signs — from oracles, dreams, or utterly random sources — that seem to speak directly to my personal private life and inner world. Proof of divine order also comes, perhaps most clearly, in the form of my own intuition. When your ear is open to spirit, spirit tends to whisper into it. In other words, the proof of God is in answered prayers.
It’s also in the inner knowing of my own heart and mind. In this most intimate realm of an individual cosmology, the question of the origin of life (our own little life and also LIFE writ large) can only be answered by looking within. By this token, the question, “Is God real?” is a variation of the question, “Am I real?”
Do I accept the fact of my own consciousness?
Or do I doubt my own mind, both its existence and its activity? Surely that is the definition of madness, of disenfranchisement of the human being on an existential level.
So, after all of this examination, the opposite of the thought “God is a myth” is this:
God is as real as I allow it to be.
My concept of God happens to include benevolent intent, limitless creative powers, and collaboration with me on my own personal growth and spiritual evolution. (Your concept of a creator might look very different — and we are both right, because the realness of the thing lives inside us.)
So why is the thought “God is a myth” so painful? More painful, even, than “I will never move past my trauma”? One reason is that this statement is simply not true for me, and untruths make themselves known to us through discomfort and distress. This is how our inner compass works. There is no merit is becoming comfortable with statements that we believe to be false, or in numbing ourselves to the pain of being misunderstood (by the world and by ourselves). It’s much easier and feels better to walk through life in our own shoes than to cut our toes off to fit someone else’s footwear.
God is real — to me — because I say so.
Feeling settled in my own truth is the definition of inner peace. Feeling oriented toward the values that matter to me and feeling empowered and allowed to pursue them without reservation or compromise is the definition of freedom. Reaping the rewards of my own right action is the definition of comfort.
Peace, freedom, and comfort are always available to me to the degree that I choose them.
And my most painful thought is that all of this is a myth.
To hunt for the opposite thought, as Martha Beck says is the next step toward my enlightenment, I’m going to use the questions the Byron Katie calls The Work.
Is it true, this thought that God is a myth, and life is pointless?
I don’t know. It might be.
Can I know for certain that it’s true?
No, I can’t know that for certain. Not really.
How do I feel and react when I have this thought?
I feel small, lost, sick to my stomach, bereft, alone, cynical, and terribly sad. If there is no benevolent creator, then life is meaningless and random. All of creation — including my own existence — is a pointless accident. The love, kindness, compassion, and joy that I feel in my heart are merely temporary conditions. If God is a myth, then the sense of kinship and connection that I feel for other beings is conditional, fragile and maybe even false. This would mean that there is no divine ideal for humanity to grow toward.
Who would I be without this thought?
I would be light of heart, sprightly, inquisitive, optimistic. I would look for — and find — proof of God’s nature everywhere. I would relax; I would trust the truth that lives in the deepest and steadiest chambers of my heart. I would live boldly with positive expectations. I would allow myself to feel unshakeably worthy of love. I would trust in the goodness I perceive in myself and others, and give that more weight than the moments when that sense of goodness is hard to access.
Can I think of a peaceful reason to keep this thought?
No. There’s nothing peaceful about the thought that God is a myth and that life is pointless. All the reasons that I can think of to keep it are defensive, judgmental, and freighted with gloomy resignation. The arguments for keeping this thought sound like: “It’s foolish to believe in a loving God when there is no scientific way to prove its existence, and I don’t want to be (or be seen as) a fool! God is a fairy tale meant to soothe the unsophisticated and ignorant, and I don’t want to be (or be seen as) unsophisticated or ignorant!” These are not peaceful reasons.
Can I think of a different thought that feels at least as true, if not more so?
I trust in my own existence.
I trust what I know of my own nature, and I believe that I share that nature with the One who made me.
I belong in peace, freedom, and comfort.
And here, we have arrived at it: the truth that is blaring its way into my life and will not stop.
God is as real as I allow it to be. Life is purposeful to the degree that I make it so.
Happy Easter to all who celebrate, and also to those who don’t. May you find liberation from your own worst, most painful thoughts, and find peace, freedom, and comfort in knowing your own true nature.
xo
Loved reading this one. Thank you 😊
"That doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as spiritual reality or truth; it means that spiritual reality and truth live inside our internal experience." Thank you. You have just done so much heavy lifting for me.