God Substitutes and Consolation Prizes

The deeper the realization, the more God becomes everything until there is no more a distinction between God and the absence of God. But before that happens there is plenty of “absence of God,” often simply described as “ignorance and suffering.” 

“The absence of God” is our default way of being. It is what we know. The pain and agony of feeling separate from Life, our deepest existential and spiritual suffering - this is the absence of God. 

God is a big word, no doubt - a word that comes with much baggage. To me, God is that which makes dissatisfaction disappear. Call it Love, call it Peace, call it non-separation, call it the Unknowable Mystery of our Being. Labels cannot define God. 

Since everything is God, we can intuit God even in the midst of profound agony. God is existential and spiritual freedom, freedom from the most fundamental confusion about the true nature of things. This confusion is called “ignorance” in Buddhism. 

God is what we are even before we knew our name. God is the most unreducible, the most fundamental truth of what is. God is all there is. God is. 

Where God is not, human beings cling to God substitutes. The most notorious of these are power and fame. There is also lust as well as eating and drinking, followed by perfectionism, workaholism, etc. We can easily add relationships to this list since love easily becomes addictive where God is not. 

Consolation prizes abound and life goes on. We cling to one thing (or person) after another, we jump from pleasure to pleasure in our desperation and agony, only to find ourselves more and more dissatisfied with empty experiences, however full our houses or bellies. 

Where God is not, human beings become consumers of experiences devouring one experience after another ever feeling empty, exhausted, dead. 

Each era in history has its own favorites when it comes to which experiences are now used (no, abused) as a substitute for God. Each way of being, each world view has its own false Gods and consolation prizes. 

For the religious belief, for the scientist reason, for the activist being against, for the spiritual the quest for enlightenment become God substitutes.  

Nowadays in contemporary culture, we have our phones and social media. We also have porn and casual sex. We are the ever dissatisfied consumers of these experiences. 

Like a monkey we jump from one branch to another, chasing experiences even in the name of enlightenment without stopping one moment to notice the beautiful forest we already live in, the forest that we are.

God is stopping. 

When we stop, really stop, there is a chance to recognize what’s already here - the beauty, lightness, and simplicity of Being.

Where there is God, we experience without clinging because we are already satisfied in the deepest sense possible. God is the feeling of enough. 

My beloved Rumi talks about God as a presence we feel and he refers to this presence directly as, “You.” 

“Come to the orchard in Spring. 

There is light and wine, and sweethearts in the pomegranate flowers. If You do not come, these do not matter. 

If You do come, these do not matter.”

Orienting towards God is the beginning of a love affair with the fabric of existence, with love itself. All inferior loves must go.

All clinging, addiction, desperation must be seen through and let go of. All suffering must be illuminated and worked through. Every fiber of one’s being must be seen as God itself - every feeling, every thought, every emotion. 

Nothing can substitute God. Nothing can console the human heart. 

There is nothing but God.