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, seated in a heavenly realm, and approachable only through prayer, ritual, or adherence to sacred texts. While such personifications serve useful roles in communal worship, moral guidance, and psychological comfort, they can be an obstacle to deeper understanding.
The notion of a separate, personal God implies a duality: a creator distinct from creation. This belief in separation arises from our ordinary, ego-centric way of understanding the world.
The nondual perspective suggests that what these texts are pointing to is not a divine entity at a distance. Rather, it is the very consciousness with which the world is perceived. Consciousness is not some extraordinary, heightened state; it is our most intimate, everyday experience. It is closer than our breath. Consciousness is the light by which all perception occurs. 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 experience.
God, then, as consciousness, isn't reserved for holy places or specific times, but is the living substance of perception, the very essence of life itself. Here, the distinction between the worshiper and the worshipped, the seeker and the sought, dissolves in the unifying presence of pure awareness expressing itself, spontaneously, as the world.