What is God Consciousness?

In this article, we’ll talk about God consciousness, how to train it, the confusion around it, and how it affects your life.

Let me be clear that I’m not talking about the mythic, biblical God, but the direct apprehension of the ultimate nature of ourselves and of life. In that context, God is just a placeholder word, and any number of other placeholders are equally valid.

Let’s begin by distinguishing this from the common conceptions of God, which are either mythic, literal and traditional, or rational, atheistic and secular.

The Trouble with God

We must also recognise that the word “God” has been tainted and abused over the years by the lower levels of human development. As a result, we modern humans have developed an enormous aversion to anything God-related, and have no way to discriminate between the mythic, fundamentalist teachings and the legitimate ones.

In everyday language, we tend to think in terms of believing in God versus not believing in God. The implication is that a Godly life is by necessity built upon belief, and is therefore fanciful and fictional, and that a Godless life is built upon reason, and is therefore logical, correct, the default choice. The latter is the position of the Vehement Denier.

True Believers deny this, claiming that Biblical dogmas are not beliefs, but the literal word of God, as-is. Scientific evidence and reason fall on death ears. They become obsessed with Bible verses, word-for-word teachings, myths and stories, metaphorical placeholder images, morality and rituals. They love the pointers, but few have ever experienced the Pointed To.

And even if they have a vision of God at any level (whether Subtle, Causal, Witness or Non-dual), they still interpret and communicate it through their Mythic lens, which does nothing but repel the Vehement Deniers further.

True Believers and Vehement Deniers are somewhat right in their own way, but both also tend to miss out a core fact of the spiritual life: the deepest, fullest spiritual life is not built on belief, but upon practice and direct apprehension. Without those, you have a flaccid spiritual life.

The two groups are diametrically opposed in their views, yet both miss the key point. It’s like the ugly sisters: they’re at loggerheads, but they’re ultimately still sisters, caught in the same intractable game.

The greatest mystics and saints to have lived were fundamentally spiritual practitioners. They were not believers. They were, in a sense, great empiricists. Do as they did and use the practical methodologies of any Great Tradition, such as meditation, prayer, chanting, yoga, and so forth, and eventually you will come to directly apprehend God. That is, you will experience God consciousness.

Now that we’ve cleared that up, let’s explain what it’s like to glimpse God consciousness.

Glimpsing God Consciousness

God consciousness is not an idea, or a belief, or a story, or a sign of psychosis. It’s a direct apprehension of the ultimate nature of who we are and what all of life is.

There is a lot of confusion as to what experiencing God means, even among people who don’t speak from a fundamentalist perspective. That’s because there are at least 5 major states of consciousness, each of which can evoke a valid, direct experience of divinity.

For what it’s worth, I’m going to select non-dual God as my focus. It’s not that Gross, Subtle, Causal and Witness God aren’t important, but that the Non-dual contains them all and is the highest experience of God we can have, at least at this point in human history.

What is the non-dual experience of God? It is:

• Oneness: the directly apprehended, felt sense that your identity includes everything around you, including all sights, sounds, sensations, subtle phenomena, and pure awareness itself. It’s all you, without a separate “you” to know it. Everything is part of this oneness, is an artifact of it.
  
• Love: when you feel identified with everything, including the unmanifested, you feel a great sense of love and protection. You are not a little self seeing the world; you are an all-embracing Self experiencing itself in wonderful richness and fullness. Nothing is outside you. Nothing can harm you. There’s nowhere to go, nothing to get, nothing to lack.
  
• Divinity: oneness may seem bland and static, but that’s not the case. The ordinary becomes divine, because you realise that everything is simply an artifact of God. Everything is divine. Everything is an expression of the one true nature of all that exists.
  
• Ultimate Reality: accompanying the prior two is the knowing that this all-embracing, omniscient oneness and divinity is the ultimate reality of life. All other conceptions of the ultimate reality are mere theories or approximations.

I should also note that these dimensions are not simple “on-off” variables. They exist on a continuum.

The trouble is that unless you actually have the experience, you’ll insist that people like me are bullshitting you, trying to sell you something, or get you to join their Bible club.

Let’s use the metaphor of Neo waking up from the matrix. If anyone had attempted to explain the Matrix to Neo before he took the red pill, they would have failed miserably. No matter how they had attempted to explain it to him, he’d have been utterly unable to entertain the idea that it was all a simulation.

And even if he were to accept it, it still wouldn’t be enough. He would inevitably fall short in attempting to understand the magnitude of his delusion. He would be unable to step outside his familiar world and fathom the reality of his situation.

Only by taking the red pill and being unplugged by Morpheus and the crew could he understand the matrix and the depth of delusion he was subject to. There is no other way.

The same thing goes with God consciousness. Unless you experience it for yourself, you have no idea what it is. That’s not a judgment, but a simple fact of the matter. You can’t just learn about it.

And like how Neo in The Matrix film was permanently and fundamentally transformed when he saw the reality of his life, having just one brief experience of God consciousness can change you forever.

Training God Consciousness

Enlightenment is an accident. But we can make ourselves more accident prone.

well-known buddhist saying

Sometimes enlightenment comes as a sudden, permanent transformation. But those cases are rare, and in any case the initial insight is followed by many hours of committed work.

It’s not sexy, I know, but in the vast majority of cases, enlightenment comes after years of spiritual practice. And it tends not to a one-time, orgasmic high but a process of mastery that slowly sneaks up on you.

As Shinzen Young says in this video, “although some people have a dramatic moment of enlightenment… for most people it sort of sneaks up on them. And unless it’s pointed out to them, they might not even be aware of quite how enlightened they’ve become… Usually it’s a more gradual process.”

Fortunately, we don’t have to rely on pot luck to experience God consciousness. Well-worn paths to God have existed for hundreds and thousands of years, East and West. And as the old saying goes, “Enlightenment is an accident. But we can make ourselves more accident prone.”

Meditation is the prime technology for God consciousness. It has been rediscovered and rehashed dozens of times across the world, yet the fundamentals of meditation reappear time and time again in all traditions.

And since I’m a meditator, my preferred method is meditation. For around seven years, I mainly practiced mindfulness using Shinzen Young’s Unified Mindfulness system, racking up roughly 1500 hours of formal meditation in that time. This gave me a solid foundation in meditation work with a highly qualified and skilled teacher.

And this year, I’ve switched into Dzogchen meditation, one of the main systems in Tibetan Buddhism, under the virtual guidance of Lama Surya Das. Its main practices are trekchö and Kuntuzangpo’s meditation.

I may be wrong, but my take is that without the systematic training of mindfulness I could never understand the poetic, pointer-style non-dual teachings of Dzogchen.

Recently, and to a large extent thanks to my Dzogchen practice, I’ve come to realise that enlightenment is not a gaining of something we don’t already have. It’s more like a losing than a gaining.

In the same way that a dirty mirror is still a mirror and only needs to be cleaned for it to reflect light as it should, ultimately your connection with God is not absent. It cannot possibly be. What is absent, however, is your awareness of it and the comprehension of your true nature.

For this reason, God consciousness is both an ever-present experience and an arduous journey. In spiritual practice, we slowly peel away the layers of all our false ego-bound, body-bound, form-bound identity until we arrive at the One identity. All else in spiritual practice is an artefact of that.

Learn more with my video Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing.

Living God Consciousness

You might wonder about the effects of (some level of) stabilised God consciousness on your life. For a very detailed and rich account, you could do a lot worse than read William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience. Yes, that’s the same William James that is the father of modern psychology.

But James himself admitted that he had never experienced what he documented from the reports of spiritual adepts. So for a first-hand, anecdotal account, let me offer a short account of my experience, for what it’s worth.

These effects are present even when I don’t feel particularly connected to God. I like to think of them as the lingering effects of repeatedly, much like how the muscles of a weightlifter fundamentally remain strong even if they’re momentarily tired. That said, they also don’t replace God consciousness itself.

I have an almost everpresent sense that I’m being guided by something larger than me. My life is as it should be, and it’ll remain so if I maintain contact with God. This has been challenged in recent times as I’ve experienced big changes, expanded my comfort zone and felt the strain of doing so, but even in tough times it remains.

This brings a huge sense of trust regardless of circumstances. I don’t need to force things. I can lean back a little and trust that things are deeply taken care of, even if the surface appears choppy. At the same time, it doesn’t preclude pragmatism and action; it provides a grand context for my daily doing.

I also have a fabulous sense of peace and repose that I’ve rarely experienced before. This goes beyond the outward, momentary circumstances of my life. It is the knowing that “all is well and all will be well”, as CS Lewis worded it, regardless of the circumstances. This is not an intellectual knowing, but a felt, visceral experience of my innate, unshakeable inner peace, which is divine in origin.

This also brings great sadness, because I have to watch myself and other people running on the Wheel of Samsara, desperately trying to find fulfilment in all the wrong places.

And the final thing I’ll say is that I see God in all, with no exceptions. There is a built-in understanding that everything that happens, everyone I meet, and everything that exists is all God-in-manifestation, or part of the consequent nature of God.

Often people make the mistake of dividing the world into “Godly” and “not Godly”. That which is high, or moral, or loving is Godly, and the rest is not.

I don’t see things like that. Sure, there may be levels of divinity, but everything is ultimately divine. It’s only our dirty mirror that veils that truth.