How Does God Make Any Sense? There is No Evidence of Him!

Dear SSK,

Maybe first we should define what we mean by “God.” If we define Him as “a venerable Personage, adorning a throne in some antiseptic corner of the cosmos” (to quote the Autobiography of a Yogi), you are right: it doesn’t make too much sense.

But would you accept another definition, maybe an “Underlying Cosmic Intelligence”?

I think one sees intelligence everywhere. Look at your own body, the way it is made: amazingly intelligent. If we’d dump a load of bricks on the ground, would they form themselves into a house? Hardly! It takes intelligence to make something meaningful of a heap of bricks. Similarly, it takes intelligence to shape all the forms we see in nature: flowers and trees, mountains, streams, and thinking human beings.

Scientists since Einstein have discovered that matter is nothing but energy. The world, in other words, is very different from what our eyes can see: there is a more subtle reality out there (and in you too).

Modern quantum physicists, starting with Max Planck, go a step further. They postulate that behind that energy there is an even more subtle reality: consciousness, or thought, or mind. Everything comes out of thought.

Max Planck stated it this way: “As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear-headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.”

If Planck is proven right, is that so far away from an Intelligent Mind which some people have named God, others Ishwara, or Allah, or Manitou?

I know: from that idea of a “Universal Mind” or “Cosmic Intelligence” being the matrix of everything, it’s yet another big step for our mind to accept that we are not only talking about an abstract Consciousness, but that it can become personal: people can learn to commune with that Conscious Essence, which is experienced as a reality of love, wisdom, and joy.

At any rate, that is as far as I can try to take your mind. The mind, however, will never be fully convinced. It is a doubter. What can convince us, however, is our experience. If you learn to meditate, to still your mind, in openness, lifting your gaze and attention toward a higher reality, you too can learn to intuitively perceive that matter is only the surface of creation. That there is more to the picture than meets the eye.

Just don’t use the word “God” which has been so loaded with false attributes, like sin, punishment, fear, dogma, human institutions, outer religion. Think of a supreme subtle Reality. Give it a chance: meditate for one month every day, and say: “If You are there, let me have a glimpse of it.”

And see what happens. It is as if you were tuning your guitar, and suddenly life’s melodies sound much more harmonious. Separation of our individual “melody” from that original “symphony” results in disharmony, like a badly tuned instrument. That, I believe, is the basic problem of our world today.

In friendship,
Jayadev