We tend to think of God as the absolute other, presiding over the world from a transcendent throne; perhaps as a thing that exists, or a perfect personality, sometimes loving and caring and sometimes as if distant, but not so much as a quality that shows itself in the most insignificant of objects around us, in everything.
Neither of these ways of relating to God is better or worse, and I think it is the infinity of God that makes it possible to relate to It from various moods and to its indefinite aspects. After all, God is for everyone: not only are there individuals of different temperaments, each individual undergoes changes of mood and forms of receptivity. Each vessel in its varying form has the capacity to receive water.
These ways of connecting to God seem to me so spontaneous and the result of a grace of some sort, as if it is not us who determine their form but rather God Itself, revealing Itself in a certain way that befits a given condition: It reveals to the sensitive soul Its gentle side, to the intellectual Its abstract aspects, to the lover Its personal aspect and to the philosopher Its impersonal aspect, to the unbeliever Its quality of inaccessibility, etc.. It constantly shows Itself to all at all times and according to the varying moods of the individual. And all this makes sense: if God is all, then nothing that shows itself to the senses, to the intellect, or to the heart, is other than God. The quality of remoteness is as much an aspect of God as the quality of nearness.
One aspect of God that sometimes I am blessed with is given in the form of certain undefinable qualities of experience. For example, the quality of realness, the sense of reality in things. We look around and see reality; everything is real, and we attribute this reality to the object, or we don’t even think about it at all. It’s the most self-evident fact that we have simply accepted as the quality of the world out there. We know what we mean when we speak of reality but when asked we cannot really describe it, or if we do we may just rationalize it as the independent existence of objects, a learned proposition that is never our own; but to be honest with ourselves we know that we don’t think reality; we feel it, and how can we say that we feel the independent existence of objects!
Back to the feelings. It is possible for this quality of realness to be felt on its own and seen as entirely independent of objects or the world. In fact, the reality of objects is derived from the illusive but all-pervasive quality of realness that stands on its own, much like when a field of light can illumine an arrangement of objects and make them visible. The visibility is not a quality of objects themselves but a result of them participating in the reality of light.
Sitting quietly with my experience, sometimes realness strikes me directly and not as reflection, apart from appearances. It is an indivisible, undefinable, and all-pervasive quality that is felt as pure presence. Its experience is not a result of intellectual discernment, not of thinking, nor of any human effort, but rather of withdrawal of one’s constant and often unconscious engagement with objects that seem to steal the realness of the field and claim it as their own. God, for me, dwells as a lot of such undefinable qualities that are essentially felt, certainly not thought or constructed. Qualities such realness, Being, Presence, Self-evidence, etc.. There is no quality that is not God’s; even our experience of uncertainty is an experience of God, of Its quality of uncertainty; seen this way, that all manifest qualities are divine qualities, one has a better time, and some fun too, in accepting what is, without taking things too seriously or freaking out about them. It’s all the loving God, dancing before us each time with in a different robe.
I like this aspect of God, not always available but sometimes it is. It’s like sitting by a stream on a pleasant Fall day. Nothing is personal anymore.
