Personal Being and Being Itself

6 July 2004
By Jim Weller

What people call God is the self-conscious relation of personal being with Being itself; and vice-versa, if you prefer – the relation of Being itself with conscious, personal being. One key to this understanding is relatedness, but not just in the usual inter-personal sense. God is self-relatedness; it is relatedness itself.

God is not a Supreme Being of a higher order above, or among other beings; nor is it very helpful to say that God is Being itself. The God experience arises in the contemplation of mind upon the relation of its essence and its existence. The ultimate realization of God is that God's essence is existence. Answering my daughter Maggie’s question, “How big is God’s mind, Daddy?” I once replied, perhaps cryptically, “About as big as your mind, I suppose. If there were no minds to know God, there’d be no God to know.”

Adyashanti says, “Because of an innocent misunderstanding, you think that you are a human being in the relative world seeking the experience of Oneness, but actually you are the One expressing itself as the experience of being a human being.” As Alan Watts put it, “Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.” I have put it this way: “We are Being itself experiencing itself being experienced.” Experienced by whom? By itself, of course.

Watts explained further, “God also likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside God, he has no one but himself to play with. But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. Now when God plays hide and pretends that he is you and I, he does it so well that it takes him a long time to remember where and how he hid himself. But that’s the whole fun of it – just what he wanted to do.”

In the ancient Hebrew mythos, the presence of God astonishes Moses, appearing as though in a burning bush that is nevertheless not consumed. Moses asks God’s name. God replies, Eyeh-Asher-Eyeh (written YHWH, in translation pronounced, “Yahweh”) – “I am that I am.” In God, essence and existence are One, and it is significant that this realization is made by a human being. It could not be otherwise. It is said we are made in God’s image, because it is in human reflection that God recognizes himself, or herself, or itself, and remembers that existence itself was all no accident, after all. “Peek-a-boo! I see you!”

Sometimes this realization occurs to us when we recognize ourselves in other beings, other people. The Beatles sang, “I am He as you are He, and you are me, and we are all together.” This can be heard as a sort of koan – with startling, silly, ecstatic names of God: “I am the Eggman; they are the Eggmen; I am the Walrus! Goo goo g’joob!”

For me, a metaphor of raindrops is apt. We, living beings, are like raindrops falling from on high. We are formed, mind and body, in incomprehensible complexity like drops of water, as though from diffuse, disintegrated water molecules suspended in clouds of being. We are separate droplets, distinct from one another, only for the short time we are falling to our destiny. We take form as precipitating raindrops do; we grow, experience individuality, take on elements present in our environment and incorporate them, and are buffeted by the forces of nature as we fall inexorably to earth, eventually to merge into oneness, in pools and streams that flow into oceans of being. Thence the molecules that once were contained in falling drops rise again, evaporating into the atmosphere, moving over the face of the earth in great cumulonimbus clouds where, formed in chaos, droplets fall again in countless numbers, again and over again, for aeons.

The numberless elemental atoms and molecules of which we are formed once existed in other forms, in other entities, mineral, vegetable, and animal. Once, before the world and life began, we were interstellar particles, stardust forged in the centers of brilliant suns. In the fullness of time the form and substance that is us, body and mind, will dissolve and these elemental particles will then participate in the forms of other bodies, other minds, again and over again, ever changing, forever. Is all this accidental? Is it meaningless? Remember who you are!

Amen.