The Mind of God
Over the last year or so I have begun to think that God is the container for all creation; that everything exists in the Mind of God which created this entire, interrelated universe and continues to create. What do I mean by mind? To me there is an intelligence that plotted out the infinite variety of species and phyla, etc., a mind that could create 250,000 kinds of beetles, or maybe just the original beetle with the infinite, innate capability to morph and adapt over millions of years as the environment dictated into as many varieties that now thrive on earth. That mind created not just whatever exists on our planet, but also for the unknown number of planets in the universe that sustain life.
It’s easy to see Intelligence in the universe, in the thoughtful plan of interconnectivity, in the rhythmic operation of the spheres, in he interdependence of species here on earth, in the provision of everything that is needed to sustain life. We see it in the laws that undergird the physical universe or even the a beauty in the design of an ear of a new born baby.
The mind of God that could plan elaborate, interrelated interdependent species who could live and thrive in an environment like ours has to be amazingly complex and probably infinite in capabilities. That infinite mind contains all the things it created. The proof of this to me is in the spiritual practices that bring us closer to God. We are not creating a relationship from nothing, we are discovering the relationship that already exists. We just need to pay attention and bring it to consciousness. Then we can begin to see what is already true: that God is closer to us than our own skin, is involved in our lives in myriad ways, and wants to be in a mutual relationship with us.
The word vast just begins to suggest how immense that mind has to be. Tremendously vaster than a super-computer the mind of God is an impossible construct for us to entertain. For all that we humans claim to know about God, I think the cosmologists come closest to knowing how much is unknown. They believe that we know 4% of what constitutes the universe—planets, species, rocks, people, stars, asteroids, galaxies—4% is all that we understand. The rest they call dark matter or dark energy which they know exists, but they don’t know anything more than that.
I would suggest that we understand 4% of what God is from the Bible and our experiences of God; the rest is mystery. Is God the fabric of our lives, the air we breathe, the sun which lights our way, our companion on the way, the essence of who we are, the emotions we feel, what we think? Is God everything that we experience and more—the One who created it all and participates with creation, too? Does he do this dance of life with us? Is she celebrating or suffering with us as the occasion demands? Or is God the remote viewer of all that is? Is God as close as our hearts and as far away as the ends of the universe?
Beyond who we think God is lies the truth, beyond what our minds can grasp. Most exciting to me is that when we surrender to another way of thinking about God, he begins to think in expansive, new ways in us. Aren’t we like fish swimming in the ocean who are unaware that water is their home, it’s so the whole of their experience that they are unaware of it? For us, as I proposed above, we live in the mind of God, but are basically unaware of that mind. Until we bring to consciousness all that God is to us, we don’t see that it is God’s mind in which we live, act and have our being. There is no separation between us and God, or between us and other people or us and other parts of creation, because we all are a part of God. We are not spun off at birth into another universe, separate from God; we are living in God. Until we become aware of all that God is to us, we are just like the fish swimming in, but totally unaware of water.