God Versus the Soul?

Driving home from Costco today, my mind wandered, as it usually does. Somewhere between the traffic lights, the groceries in the back, and the familiar road home, I found myself thinking about God.

I was raised Mormon, and God was enormous.

He was exalted, omnipotent, all-knowing, glorious—the Lord of Lords, King of Kings. He knew my thoughts before I spoke them. He knew my character, my weaknesses, and my disposition toward good and evil.

I was completely exposed before Him.

Yet He remained largely a mystery to me.

When I prayed, I understood myself to be speaking to a personal God. Psychologically, however, He often seemed somewhere else—up there, out there, beyond me.

Somehow He was infinitely close and infinitely distant at the same time.

Jesus seemed capable of having a personal relationship with God. Prophets apparently could. But I was just Scott, trying to get through another ordinary day without screwing things up too badly.

The greatness I assigned to God may have made Him harder for me to know.

God became someone to worship, obey, please, and occasionally fear. I could ask Him for things, thank Him, and repent to Him. But having a simple conversation with the Creator of the universe seemed almost presumptuous.

The word soul feels different to me.

My soul does not seem to be somewhere else.

It is here.

The deeper I go within myself, the more I seem to encounter something beneath the chatter of my mind and the personality I normally call me.

There seems to be an awareness beneath Scott—the ego, history, worries, accomplishments, mistakes, and ambitions. I have started calling that deeper awareness my soul.

Whether the soul is literally what I imagine it to be, I cannot prove. It may be something metaphysical, or it may be a name I have given to a deeper capacity within human consciousness.

I do not know.

But as a way of understanding my experience, it has become increasingly real, practical, and useful.

And strangely, approaching God through the soul has made God feel closer.

The Wave and the Ocean

I keep returning to the ocean-and-wave metaphor.

If the ocean represents some larger consciousness or deeper reality, then my individual life is something like a wave rising temporarily from its surface.

The wave has a beginning. It develops a particular shape. It moves through the world for a while. Eventually, the form disappears back into the sea.

From the wave’s perspective, it appears to be an individual thing.

But what is the wave made of?

Ocean.

There is never a moment when the wave stops being ocean simply because it has temporarily taken the form of a wave.

Perhaps my relationship with God is something like that.

God may be the ocean. My soul may participate in—or express—something of that ocean within this particular wave. And Scott—the personality, ego, body, biography, and temporary character—may simply be the shape the wave happens to be taking right now.

That changes the question.

Instead of asking:

How do I reach God?

I begin asking:

What if I am already connected to whatever I have been trying to reach?

Not that Scott is God in some grandiose sense or that my ego controls the universe.

Clearly it does not.

Scott cannot even control traffic on the way home from Costco.

Rather, perhaps the consciousness within me is somehow connected to—or an expression of—the deeper reality I have spent my life calling God.

I cannot know whether that is literally true. But it changes how I experience the question.

The Bubble

The wave helps me imagine my relationship with God while I am alive. The image of a bubble leads me toward a different question: what might happen when the boundary of this individual life disappears?

A bubble temporarily captures air within a thin membrane. For a while, there appears to be air inside the bubble and different air outside it.

Pop the membrane, however, and the distinction disappears.

The air was never fundamentally different. Only the boundary made it appear separate.

Perhaps birth creates something like that boundary. For a while, consciousness experiences itself as me—my body, memories, problems, and life.

Perhaps death is not the destruction of what I fundamentally am, but the disappearance of the boundary that made me appear separate.

Again, I do not know. I offer it as a possibility, not a conclusion.

But I find the possibility fascinating.

A God I Can Relate To

This is where the soul has become surprisingly important to me.

I do not feel compelled to worship my soul. I do not feel the need to kneel before it, praise it, give it glory, or convince it that I am worthy of its attention.

My soul feels more like a companion. A guide. A teacher. Perhaps even an old friend I am slowly remembering.

When my ego becomes frightened, angry, defensive, or confused, I can become quiet and ask:

Is there another way to see this?

Usually there is.

The answer does not arrive as thunder from heaven. There are no tablets of stone. Most of the time, there is not even a voice.

There is simply a subtle shift—a little more perspective, a little less fear, a little more patience, a little more intelligence, a little more love, and a little less entropy.

That has become my practical test.

How Do I Know It Is the Soul?

Of course, another question immediately presents itself:

How do I know that what I call my soul is not simply another activity of my mind?

I do not.

The ego is perfectly capable of dressing itself in spiritual clothing. Fear can call itself intuition. Desire can call itself inspiration. Control can disguise itself as guidance. A belief can feel true simply because I have repeated it for most of my life.

Becoming quiet does not automatically make me wise.

So I try to test what arises within me.

Does it help me see more of reality, or merely confirm what I want to believe? Does it make me more honest about my motives? Does it lead toward greater responsibility, perspective, compassion, and intelligent action? Or does it give me spiritual permission to judge, control, avoid, or feel superior?

In the language I have been developing, does it move toward greater intelligence and love with less unnecessary entropy—or create more fear, confusion, separation, and disorder?

Even that is not a perfect test. Sometimes love requires a firm boundary. Sometimes truth creates temporary conflict. Sometimes fear contains useful information. The quieter response is not automatically the wiser one.

I do not regard the soul as an infallible voice inside my head. I think of it more as a different position from which to observe—a place where I am slightly less captured by my immediate fears, desires, and defenses.

From there, I may not receive a perfect answer, but I can often ask a better question.

Perhaps that is enough.

God Versus the Soul?

So perhaps the title of this writing is misleading.

Maybe it is not God versus the soul at all. Maybe the conflict existed largely because I once imagined them as separate things.

The God of my childhood seemed beyond me. The soul I am discovering seems within me. But perhaps if I travel deeply enough in either direction, I arrive at something remarkably similar.

The wave discovers the ocean.

The air inside the bubble discovers the atmosphere.

Perhaps the most important change is not that I have replaced God with the soul. I may simply be moving from a relationship based primarily on hierarchy toward one that also includes participation.

God is no longer only a Being above me whom I must somehow reach. God may also be the deeper reality in which I already exist and which, in some limited way, expresses itself through me.

I have not abandoned God.

If anything, I may be discovering a God who feels closer than the one I knew before.

Not smaller.

Closer.

God may still be far beyond anything my mind can comprehend. The ocean is far greater than anything the wave could ever understand.

But perhaps understanding the entire ocean was never necessary.

I can experience the water without comprehending the sea. I can explore the soul without claiming to understand God. And I can remain curious about the possibility that what appears to be within me and what I once imagined to be far beyond me may not be as separate as I once thought.

I no longer feel that I must comprehend the entire ocean to experience the water.

I only have to become quiet enough to notice what the wave is made of.