How to lose God
Here's an indication of how iconoclastic my morning meditation has become since I evolved into my churchless phase. Today a powerful intuition suddenly popped into my mind.
Lose God. It's the way to wisdom.
For over thirty-five years I was dedicated -- maybe even obsessed -- with finding God. I dove deeply into mysticism and meditation, hoping to locate divinity at the core of my consciousness.
No luck. So far as I can tell.
Of course, since no one knows for sure if God exists, and, if so, how God would appear to humans like us, it's possible that divinity is right in front of me, unnoticed. Possible. Just like lots of things which have a small chance of being true, yet almost certainly aren't.
What struck me this morning is how easy it is to lose God, and how difficult it is to find God. This tells us something. Indeed, a lot.
Something that's real, especially if it's Ultimate Reality, the realest thing in the cosmos -- it should be damn tough to make it go away, to disappear. God supposedly is the heart and soul of the universe, the creator and the destroyer, the Alpha and the Omega.
A galaxy is nothing compared to God.
Yet if I stop believing in Andromeda, if I stop thinking about the nearest spiral galaxy to our Milky Way home, if I stop giving it any of my attention, Andromeda still exists. Astronomers will continue to perceive it through their telescopes. Photons from the galaxy's billions of stars will still find their way through Earth's atmosphere.
Not so with God.
Even the most fervent religious devotee, not to mention someone churchless like me, can lose God in an instant. All you have to do is stop believing, stop having faith, stop trusting in holy books, stop imagining a divinity who exists only in your thoughts.
It's more important to learn how to lose God, than how to find God.
Why? Because this shows how real is the object of your losing and finding. T! he laws of nature can't be lost. They're part and parcel of reality. Try losing faith in gravity, then jump off a cliff. You'll fall just as fast as a physicist.
Atheists and agnostics threaten religious believers. I used to wonder why true believers in some dogma who visited this blog would get so upset at the skepticsm and questioning that's expressed here.
Now I feel like I know the answer: believers recognize, albeit often semi-consciously, how easy it is to lose their God. All it takes is a subtle shift in consciousness, a forgetting of the religious thoughts that generally are held firmly in their mind, and God disappears.
Again, why? Because God isn't real. It's easy to lose a memory, tough to lose a mountain. Hold on to what is genuine; let the rest go, or at least keep a loose grip on it.
Losing unreality isn't a loss. It's a gain.
