I am so uncomfortable with the standard image: Old man, flowing robes, up in the clouds, white, sitting on a throne.
The whole image is worse than useless. A much more expanded image is needed. One that really transcends images. Stephen Gaskin, a spiritual teacher from San Francisco, used the definition, “The container that contains all containers”. Try that on for size. That points to the scope of the image, but there are more dimensions.
Somehow, we have to find a way to break down this barrier that places God ‘out there’ – or even ‘out there and in here’. And here is where it is going to hurt a little because we hold onto some fundamental misconceptions about self and world.
Now imagining the vastness of the world is not the big hurt. You do know, don’t you, that there are more suns in the world than there are grains of sand on the earth. Now I’ve taken long excursions on the sand dunes of the Gobi Desert, the Sahara Desert, the Great Victoria Desert in Australia, The Mojave Desert in California, The Sechura Desert in Peru, and many others – there were even large sand dunes in the county where I grew up in Sherburne County, Minnesota. Don’t get me started on beaches. I know I cannot wrap my head around that number of grains of sand, or that many suns, or the much larger number of planets and even larger number of moons. If you really try to grasp it, it should surely blow your mind – and it should point to the naivety and arrogance inherent in the idea that we humans are the only intelligent life in the world.
Now the really painful misconception regards ‘self’. Right off, it flat out doesn’t exist. Our names? Made up fiction. Our possessions? More fiction. Our memories? Our thoughts? Temporary electrical storms in the grey matter. So what does exist? What creates these illusions?
Did you know that there are somewhere between fifty to a hundred trillion cells in each of these human bodies? (Notice I didn’t say ‘our’ bodies.) Nearly all these cells have a molecule that has been named deoxyribonucleic acid. Of course, each of these cells is too small to see and the molecule of acid (DNA) is just a couple nanometers in size. To put it mildly these DNA molecules are a bit complex, like three billion base pairs in each one. They are all bundled together rather tightly, but if one of them were to be stretched out it would be about two meters long – about as tall as a person. And if all the DNA in one of these human bodies were to be strung together like that, it would be about twice the diameter of the solar system. Did you know that most of these cells in these bodies are not even human cells? There are about 10,000 different organisms that make up each of these bodies. These bodies that we call ‘ours’.
Now, the particular body that is reading this, ‘your body’, started out as a sperm cell and an egg cell. And that one set of DNA molecules contained all the instructs to build ‘you’. The important point here is that no ‘self’ got added later at some point. Every cell in all the sense doors (eyes, ears, tongue, etc.) and every cell in the nervous system – including the brain – has this inherent intelligence that contains all the instructions for how each and every one of these cells is to function.
Science has figured out how some of these DNA base pairs work. About 1% of them. We should feel humbled and in awe of what we know vs. what we don’t know. So what I am trying to say is that these instructions in DNA have everything to do with how you are receiving this information and how you are reacting to this information. In fact, every thought, idea, attitude, belief, desire, emotion – all of it – behind all of it is the DNA of cells expressing their intelligence.
These human nervous systems are processing 400 billion bits of data every second. We are only conscious of about 2,000 bits per second.
There is so much more going on than what we are conscious of. I truly feel in awe and humbled.
I believe that eventually we are going to learn a lot more about the intelligence in DNA. I also believe that some of what we are going to come to understand is that:
- DNA exists throughout the universe
- DNA is now and always has been in constant communication with all other DNA
- That even our experience of space and time are mere constructs created by DNA
So to bring this full circle, this new understanding and respect for the ungraspable intelligence that is expressed by DNA puts me in a much more correct relationship to God. It annihilates ‘me’ and everything is God-saturated, or rather I see the unfathomable depth of intelligence operating on every level of all things. No there is not some old man in gowns in the clouds directing DNA. The direct experience of being conscious in this sea of infinite intelligence is a totality. No fictions need to be added to it. I have surrendered myself totally to this intelligence as a fact – as the ‘me’ was an illusion to start with. And one other thing I think we are going to come to understand in a new way:
All things are possible.