I have been turning this idea over for most of my adult life, and I still cannot decide whether it is the most important thing I know or a very comfortable mistake.
The idea is easy to state. The divine — whatever that word is doing — is not somewhere else. Not upstairs, not offstage, not waiting at the end of history. It is here, in the ordinary business of being awake. You are not separate from it. You are, in some sense nobody has ever satisfactorily pinned down, made of it.
Said out loud, this sounds either obvious or unhinged, depending on the morning.
What follows is not an argument. I am not qualified to settle a question that has occupied far better minds for three thousand years without resolution. It is a reflection: a record of what I have found persuasive, what I find suspect, and where I keep getting stuck.
The God who lives elsewhere
The default setting in the West has been a God who is definitively over there. Transcendent, sovereign, other. We are down here — created, contingent, and separated from the sacred by a gap we cannot cross from our side.
There is a lot to be said for this arrangement. It keeps the categories clean. It makes room for grace, for gift, for a God who is genuinely more than a flattering echo of ourselves. And it puts a useful handbrake on human self-regard, which historically has not needed the encouragement.
But it has a cost, and the cost is roughly this: if holiness lives elsewhere, then someone has to import it. A priesthood, a sacrament, a licence. Divinity becomes a commodity with a distribution network.
That is the part I have never been able to swallow. Not because the clergy I have known were venal — most weren’t — but because the arrangement seemed to leave the actual experience of the sacred stranded outside the building.
Jung, and the trouble with a big head
Carl Jung is where a lot of people, including me, first find this thought put in modern language.
In Memories, Dreams, Reflections he keeps returning to a moment in John’s gospel where Jesus, cornered by a crowd about to stone him, quotes their own scripture back at them: “Ye are gods.”1 Jung’s reading is that this was not a claim to exclusive divinity but a hint dropped in public and immediately misheard.2
His diagnosis of the mishearing is the interesting part. We externalise the God-image, Jung thought, because doing so is easier than facing what it would mean to find it in ourselves. Projection is a relief. It lets you kneel instead of look.3
For Jung this was psychology rather than theology. He is careful — sometimes maddeningly careful — to say he is describing the structure of the psyche, not settling metaphysics.4 Whether there is a God behind the God-image is, he insists, not a question his instruments can reach.
He was also the first to flag the obvious danger. If you conclude that the divine is within you, the ego will happily volunteer to receive the honour. Jung called this inflation, and treated it as a genuine clinical hazard rather than a figure of speech.5
I take that warning seriously, because I have watched the idea curdle in people. The line between there is something sacred in every person and there is something especially sacred in me is thinner than anyone wants to admit.
The traditions that started here rather than arriving here
What surprised me, reading further, is that in much of the world this was never a heresy. It was the opening premise.
The Upanishads hold that the innermost self, atman, is not merely close to the ultimate ground of things, brahman — it is that ground. Aham brahmasmi, “I am brahman.”6 Tat tvam asi, “you are that.”7 These are not boasts. They are stated in the flat tone of a mathematical identity.
Advaita Vedanta builds the whole system out of that identity. What keeps us from seeing it is not sin but misperception. Liberation is less an achievement than a correction — noticing what was always the case.8
Mahayana Buddhism arrives at something structurally similar from a different direction with the doctrine of buddha-nature, tathagatagarbha: every sentient being already carries the capacity for awakening, obscured rather than absent.9 Nothing needs to be imported. Something needs to be uncovered.
I want to be careful here. It is a very Western habit to flatten these traditions into a single greeting-card sentiment about the god inside. They disagree with each other, sometimes fiercely, about what the self is and whether it exists at all. Advaita and Buddhist thought are not two dialects of one idea.10
Still, the family resemblance is real, and it is unnerving how much of the Western mystical tradition looks like an independent rediscovery of it.
The heretics
Because the West did rediscover it, repeatedly, and usually paid for it.
Meister Eckhart, a fourteenth-century Dominican, preached that the ground of God and the ground of the soul are not two things. His most quoted line — the eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me — is not poetic excess in context; it is his actual position.11 He spoke of a scintilla animae, a spark in the soul that is uncreated.12
That word “uncreated” is what did for him. A papal bull condemned a list of his propositions in 1329, shortly after his death, which was convenient for everybody.13
In Sufism the same current runs hot. Rumi returns again and again to the heart as a mirror: nothing needs adding, only the dust removing.14 Al-Hallaj said ana al-haqq — “I am the Truth” — and was executed in Baghdad in 922 after a long imprisonment, though the politics of his death were tangled and the theology was only part of it.15
Eastern Christianity, interestingly, made room for this rather than burning it. The doctrine of theosis holds that the point of the whole exercise is human participation in the divine life — Athanasius put it with startling bluntness in the fourth century.16 It remains orthodox. It just never travelled well westward.
And the Quakers, whom I have always liked, quietly built an entire practice on it: that of God in every one, and therefore no need for a pulpit, a professional, or a middleman.17
It is worth noticing what these people actually threatened. Not the existence of God — none of them denied it. What they threatened was the licensing regime. If the ground of your soul and the ground of God are the same ground, the institution becomes optional, and institutions have a well-documented view about becoming optional.
Which is a reason to take the persecutions as evidence of something, though not necessarily evidence that the heretics were right. Plenty of people have been martyred for nonsense.
What actually happens when you sit still
Here is where I have to stop quoting people and admit to something.
I have sat in silence, on and off, for years. Some of it as meditation, some of it as something closer to prayer, and I have never been entirely sure which was which or whether the distinction survives contact with the practice.
The reports are consistent across traditions, which is either evidence of something real or evidence that human nervous systems are all built the same way. Both readings are available.
It is worth separating two things that get bundled together under “prayer.” There is petitionary prayer — asking — which assumes an addressee with agency and a postal service. And there is contemplative prayer, which asks for nothing and mostly consists of shutting up.
The first has never held me. Not out of scorn; I understand why people do it and I have done it myself in bad weather. But it presumes exactly the arrangement I find hardest to credit — the God elsewhere, the supplicant here, the gap in between.
The second is a different animal entirely, and it turns out to be nearly indistinguishable from meditation once you get past the vocabulary. Sit down. Stop elaborating. Notice that you have started elaborating again. Return.
Buddhist practice has the most detailed instructions — the Satipatthana Sutta is essentially a technical manual, and unromantic about it.18 Christian contemplative practice has its own lineage: the anonymous fourteenth-century Cloud of Unknowing, the hesychast tradition of the Jesus Prayer, and in the twentieth century Thomas Keating’s centring prayer, which is disarmingly practical about what to do when you notice you have been thinking about lunch.19
What strikes me about all of these is how little they promise. No visions are advertised. The instructions are almost brutally deflationary — you will be bored, you will fidget, your leg will go to sleep, come back anyway. Anyone selling a shortcut is, on the evidence of every tradition I have read, selling something else.
Simone Weil made the connection I keep coming back to: attention, pushed far enough, simply becomes prayer.20 That formulation does something useful. It removes the question of who is listening and replaces it with a question about the quality of one’s looking — which is at least a question I can work on.
The neuroscience is real but modest. Sustained practice is associated with reduced activity in the brain’s default mode network, the system that hums along generating self-referential narrative when nothing else is demanding attention.21 That is a genuine finding, and it is tempting to read it as a mechanism for the dissolution of self that the contemplatives describe.
Tempting, and probably premature. Much of the early neurotheology literature was more confident than its sample sizes warranted, and the field has since become considerably more cautious about itself.22
What I can say is smaller and more honest. Sitting still for long enough loosens the grip of the story I am usually telling about myself. Whether what remains when that story loosens is God, or the brain doing something interesting, or simply an absence that feels significant because absences often do — I have no idea. I have had the experience and I do not have the interpretation.
Feuerbach’s objection, which I have never fully answered
The obvious rebuttal was made properly in 1841. Ludwig Feuerbach argued that theology is anthropology in disguise: we take our own best qualities — love, wisdom, creative power — project them onto the sky at infinite magnification, then kneel to the projection and call ourselves worthless by comparison.23
Feuerbach thought the cure was to take the projection back. Which is, on the face of it, more or less what everyone in this essay is recommending.
That is the problem. The mystic and the atheist can agree on the whole procedure and disagree entirely about what it means. Withdraw the projection and you either discover the divine in yourself, or you discover that there was only ever yourself, dressed up.
I cannot find a test that would distinguish these. I have looked.
William James, at the end of his study of religious experience, ends up in roughly the same honest cul-de-sac. Something more than the ordinary self is genuinely encountered in these states, he concludes; the further characterisation of the “more” is where the traditions start disagreeing and where he declines to arbitrate.24
I find that unsatisfying and I suspect it is correct.
The secular version, which is not as different as it thinks
There is a version of this available with no metaphysics at all, and it is more moving than its proponents sometimes let on.
Every element in a human body heavier than hydrogen was assembled inside stars — the mechanism was worked out in detail in 1957 in a paper that remains one of the great achievements of twentieth-century physics.25 The calcium, the iron, the carbon: all of it manufactured under conditions of unimaginable violence, scattered, and eventually reassembled into something that can think about the process.
Carl Sagan’s line — that we are a way for the cosmos to know itself — is not mysticism.26 It is a literal description of a causal chain. The universe has produced local regions capable of modelling the whole.
Spinoza got to a version of this without any astrophysics, identifying God with nature itself and getting excommunicated for the trouble.27 Emerson made it American and slightly too pleased with itself.28 But the structure is the same: whatever is ultimate is not elsewhere, and we are not outside it.
If you strip “divine” of the throne and the beard and leave it meaning something like the deepest organising principle of what is, then the religious and the secular versions of this essay converge to an uncomfortable degree.
A third option I did not expect
For a long time I framed this as a binary — the sacred is out there, or the sacred is in here.
Working in this country has slowly persuaded me that the binary is a local artefact. In Aboriginal Australian frameworks, as Deborah Bird Rose documented, the relevant category is not interiority at all. Country is sentient, and the relationship is one of mutual obligation between people and place.29
That is not “God within.” It is not “God without.” It is something relational that my inherited categories are not shaped to hold, and I am wary of conscripting it into an argument it was never making.30
But it has made me suspicious of the question. Inside or outside may simply be the wrong axis. Between might be closer.
Where I have landed, provisionally
I notice that the traditions I find most convincing on this are the ones least interested in the doctrine and most interested in the practice.
Eckhart preached, but he also told people to get on with it. The Buddhist texts are almost aggressively practical. The Quakers built a whole religion out of shutting up in a room together. Weil turned the entire question into a discipline of attention.
The ones that worry me are the ones where the idea has been detached from any practice at all and turned into a flattering self-description. Spiritual bypassing is the term of art, and it earns its keep: the divine within can become a very sophisticated way of not doing the work.31
So I hold the idea loosely, and mostly for its ethical consequences, which seem to me more defensible than its metaphysics.
There is also a version of the idea I distrust for the opposite reason — the one that has been thinned out into wellness. The sacred spark as a personal amenity, available by subscription, requiring nothing of you but eight minutes and an app. Every tradition in this essay would have regarded that as a joke, and not a kind one.
If there is something in every person that is not reducible to their usefulness, their productivity or their compliance, then cruelty is not merely prohibited — it is a category error. You are damaging something you are not separate from.
I cannot prove that. I am not sure it is the sort of thing that admits of proof. But it has proved a more durable working assumption than anything else I have tried, and after fifty years of arguing about how we treat each other and the country we live on, durability counts for something.
The rest I am content to leave open. It has been open for three thousand years. It will probably survive my not resolving it.
Notes
1. John 10:34 (King James Version), quoting Psalm 82:6.
2. C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, rec. and ed. Aniela Jaffé, trans. Richard and Clara Winston, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), chap. 12, “Late Thoughts.”
3. Jung develops the mechanism of religious projection across several works; see especially C. G. Jung, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 2nd ed., Collected Works vol. 11, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969).
4. Jung, Psychology and Religion, CW 11, §2, where he restricts his claims to the empirical psyche and disclaims metaphysical assertion.
5. C. G. Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, 2nd ed., Collected Works vol. 7, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), pt. 2, on inflation and the mana-personality.
6. Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 1.4.10, in The Principal Upanishads, ed. and trans. S. Radhakrishnan (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1953).
7. Chandogya Upanishad 6.8.7, in Radhakrishnan, The Principal Upanishads.
8. Eliot Deutsch, Advaita Vedanta: A Philosophical Reconstruction (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1969), chaps. 2–3.
9. Michael Zimmermann, A Buddha Within: The Tathagatagarbhasutra (Tokyo: International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology, Soka University, 2002), 39–63.
10. On the substantive disagreements between Advaita and Buddhist positions on the self, see Richard King, Early Advaita Vedanta and Buddhism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995).
11. Meister Eckhart, Sermon 57 (“Qui audit me”), in The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, trans. and ed. Maurice O’C. Walshe, rev. Bernard McGinn (New York: Crossroad, 2009). Sermon numbering varies between editions — worth checking against your own copy.
12. Bernard McGinn, The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart: The Man from Whom God Hid Nothing (New York: Crossroad, 2001), 48–52.
13. Pope John XXII, In agro dominico, 27 March 1329; text and commentary in Bernard McGinn, ed., Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher (New York: Paulist Press, 1986), 77–81.
14. Jalal al-Din Rumi, The Mathnawi of Jalalu’ddin Rumi, trans. Reynold A. Nicholson (London: Luzac, 1925–40), bk. 1.
15. Louis Massignon, The Passion of al-Hallaj: Mystic and Martyr of Islam, trans. Herbert Mason, 4 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), esp. vol. 1.
16. Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation, §54.
17. George Fox, The Journal of George Fox, ed. John L. Nickalls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), 263 (epistle of 1656). Page reference is edition-specific — flagged for checking.
18. Satipatthana Sutta, Majjhima Nikaya 10, in The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, trans. Bhikkhu Nanamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1995), 145–55.
19. The Cloud of Unknowing, ed. Patrick J. Gallacher (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997); Thomas Keating, Open Mind, Open Heart: The Contemplative Dimension of the Gospel (Amity, NY: Amity House, 1986).
20. Simone Weil, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” in Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1951), 105–16.
21. Judson A. Brewer et al., “Meditation Experience Is Associated with Differences in Default Mode Network Activity and Connectivity,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108, no. 50 (2011): 20254–59.
22. For a critical survey of methodological problems in contemplative neuroscience, see Nicholas T. Van Dam et al., “Mind the Hype: A Critical Evaluation and Prescriptive Agenda for Research on Mindfulness and Meditation,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 13, no. 1 (2018): 36–61.
23. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), 12–14; first published 1841.
24. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: Longmans, Green, 1902), lecture 20 and postscript.
25. E. Margaret Burbidge, G. R. Burbidge, William A. Fowler, and F. Hoyle, “Synthesis of the Elements in Stars,” Reviews of Modern Physics 29, no. 4 (1957): 547–650.
26. Carl Sagan, Cosmos (New York: Random House, 1980), chap. 1.
27. Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, trans. Edwin Curley (London: Penguin, 1996), pt. 1; on the 1656 herem, see Steven Nadler, Spinoza: A Life, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), chap. 6.
28. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Divinity School Address” (1838), in Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1983).
29. Deborah Bird Rose, Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness (Canberra: Australian Heritage Commission, 1996), 7–10.
30. On the risks of assimilating Indigenous ontologies to Western spiritual categories, see Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2019).
31. The term originates with John Welwood; see John Welwood, Toward a Psychology of Awakening: Buddhism, Psychotherapy, and the Path of Personal and Spiritual Transformation (Boston: Shambhala, 2000), chap. 11.