God and Consciousness
Many religious traditions, in their efforts to express the grandeur and mystery of the divine, personify God as a great Being. This divine figure is often depicted as existing apart and away from us, approachable only indirectly through prayer, ritual, or adherence to sacred texts. While such personifications serve useful roles in communal worship, moral guidance, and psychological comfort, they can also become an obstacle to deeper understanding.
The notion of a separate, personal God, however benevolent or mighty, implies a duality: a creator distinct from creation. This belief in separation, born of our ordinary, ego-centric way of understanding the world, imagines the divine in a distant realm, often removed from what is already present.
The nondual perspective suggests that what these texts are pointing to is not something at a distance from ourselves. It is our own consciousness. Consciousness is our most intimate, everyday experience. It is closer than our breath. Consciousness is the very light by which we perceive. It is with us whether we are waking, dreaming, or in deep sleep*. It is that in which we “live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28), not as an external force acting upon us, but as the very substance of existence.
God, then, as consciousness, isn't reserved for holy places or specific times, but is the living substance of perception, and the very essence of life itself. Here, the distinction between the worshiper and the worshipped, or the seeker and the sought, dissolves in the presence of pure awareness expressing itself, spontaneously, as the world of form.