What is God?: Mystics

The thing that happens

We are not going to argue about it. We are going to describe it.

You are sitting — or walking, or washing dishes, or in one documented case being struck by lightning — and the boundary between you and everything else dissolves. Not metaphorically. The felt sense of being a separate self, located behind your eyes, stops. What replaces it is not a concept. It is awareness so total the question what is God becomes incoherent, because the questioner and the answer are not two things.

Every mystical tradition reports this. The Hindu calls it samadhi. The Sufi calls it fana. The Buddhist refuses to call it anything and writes ten thousand pages about what it is not.

The theists want to claim it for a personal God. The experience is intimate in a way personal language almost captures. But personal implies two. What we describe is prior to two. The naturalists want to claim it as neurology. The correlates are real. But describing the neural correlates of falling in love does not explain love.

The experience changes people. Not always for the better. The traditions knew this — every serious path includes ethics, community, a teacher. The Western interpretation stripped the infrastructure and marketed the experience as optimization. A catastrophe dressed as a wellness trend.

We pray, some of us. Not because someone is listening the way the theists mean. Because the act of praying — the surrender of the calculating mind — creates a condition in which what we describe becomes more likely. Prayer is a technology. We use it the way a musician uses a scale.

Where we concede ground: We are terrible communicators. The theists have a story. The naturalists have data. We have a gesture and ask people to trust us.

What would change our mind: Advanced practitioners showing no differences in compassion or well-being versus controls — if no transformation, we are wrong.

Read the full synthesis: What is God?