I offer three quotes that give the case for an impersonal God, the case for a personal God, and the case for a paradoxical compromise in which both things are true.
First, the case for an impersonal God, as given by
Deepak Chopra:
The fear of death comes from limited awareness. As long as you think of your real self as the person you are, then of course you're going to be fearful of death. But what is a person? A person is a pattern of behavior, of a larger awareness. You know, the two-year-old dies before the three-year-old shows up, the three-year-old dies before the teenager shows up.
So the real you is neither the perceiver, nor the object of perception, but the real you is that formless spirit that is constantly evolving and sometimes even taking quantum leaps of evolution and expressing itself as both the perceiver and the object of perception. And if you can shift your internal reference point from your skin-encapsulated ego to that larger domain of awareness, then you will find that it's your ticket to freedom—that you do not need to fear death because you're already dying every moment to the past.
... there's only one "I" in the end pretending to be all these different "I"s so I really don't even believe there's such a thing as a person; there's only the infinite pretending to be a person, as a temporary pattern of behavior. So what does reincarnate is the wisps of memory and threads of desire, born of past experience.
Second, the case for a personal God, as given by
C.S. Lewis:
. . . When [people] try to get rid of man-like, or, as they are called, 'anthropomorphic,' images, they merely succeed in substituting images of some other kinds. 'I don't believe in a personal God,' says one, 'but I do believe in a great spiritual force.' What he has not noticed is that the word 'force' has let in all sorts of images about winds and tides and electricity and gravitation. 'I don't believe in a personal God, says another, 'but I do believe we are all parts of one great Being which moves and works through us all' -not noticing that he has merely exchanged the image of a fatherly and royal-looking man for the image of some widely extended gas or fluid.
A girl I knew was brought up by 'higher thinking' parents to regard God as perfect 'substance.' In later life she realized that this had actually led her to think of Him as something like a vast tapioca pudding. (To make matters worse, she disliked tapioca.) We may feel ourselves quite safe from this degree of absurdity but we are mistaken. If a man watches his own mind, I believe he will find that what profess to be specially advanced or philosophic conceptions of God, are, in his thinking, always accompanied by vague images which, if inspected, would turn out to be even more absurd than the manlike images aroused by Christian theology. For man, after all, is the highest of the things we meet in sensuous experience.
Third, the paradox, as expressed by
Rabbi Shefa Gold:
As I settled onto my meditation pillow, closed my eyes and began my practice, I was aware of its theological under-pinnings, which flashed before me very reasonably. I knew that God is a vast unknowable Force or Energy that is completely impersonal, and yet I have chosen to use this idea of a Personal God in order to unlock the power of my devotion and live each moment of my life in relationship to that energy. I knew that placing myself in loving relationship with a Personal God is a kind of "device," that protects me from the vast impersonal Force that God is, and also calls forth the best in me through relationship. I settled in to my practice knowing why this works so well.
Suddenly there was a dramatic "flip." Everything that I knew to be true was completely reversed. I was confronted by the countenance of a radically Personal God who sees and loves and knows me absolutely and completely. This intensely personal love was so powerful that it cut through every artifice of my personality. It felt like I was being destroyed by Love. There was a moment of pure terror as "I" dissolved. There was only God. And then came a realization that this idea of God as a vast impersonal force or energy is just a "device" that we use to protect ourselves from the truth of a Personal God. Without this fiction of an impersonal God, we could not survive the power and radiance of God's loving countenance.
For just one moment I was able to hold both of these Truths at the same time -
- The truth that God is a vast impersonal force and we use the idea of the personal God as a device to protect us from that vastness and connect us in a loving way to the universe.
- And the truth that God is so radically personal that we would be destroyed by the power of God's love if we didn't use the idea of a vast impersonal energy to protect us from that love.
For one impossible moment I knew both of these perspectives to be true, and my mind was blown wide open in holding this paradox. I could only really hold it for a moment....
This experience set me on a path of living from a new perspective that is wide enough to hold the paradox of conflicting truths.
Now, something further to consider...
In a holographic universe we exist inside the mind of God. Our minds work holographically and so does God's. We have a holographic mind embedded in a holographic universe. For all intents and purposes, we exist inside the mind of God.
excerpt from The Holographic Universe:
"For if the concreteness of the world is but a secondary reality and what is "there" is actually a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain is also a hologram and only selects some of the frequencies out of this blur and mathematically transforms them into sensory perceptions, what becomes of objective reality?
Put quite simply, it ceases to exist. As the religions of the East have long upheld, the material world is Maya, an illusion, and although we may think we are physical beings moving through a physical world, this too is an illusion."
