How Does God Feel?

I’ve always wanted to know: How does God feel? It’s not difficult to experience what God feels like in his or her formless state. If you meditate deeply, if you sit still for long enough and let your mind become very quiet until you are resting in and as the Ground of all Being, you will start to feel as good as God must feel—full, empty, and free; absolutely content; desireless. All the formless God ever wants to do is be—meditating eternally on the Self. That’s why, when we discover that deepest dimension of our own consciousness, we feel, “I could rest here forever.” When you experience that state of purest Being, you are experiencing how God must have felt before the universe was born, and you are also experiencing your very own deepest self, which is not separate from that empty, groundless ground.
That Ground of Being, however, is only one part of the nature of God. God is also everything that emerged out of that nothingness—the explosive fourteen-billion-year process of Becoming. And when God takes that momentous leap from formlessness to form, the feeling experience changes dramatically. The Ground of Being is God in his or her unmanifest form, but the minute the threshold is crossed from nothing to something, God manifests as the evolutionary impulse. The one self decides to create itself in form, and out of nothing surges an unthinkably vast desire to become. The entire universe, including your own self in this very moment, is the expression and manifestation of that one desire.

The closest we can come to understanding how this creative dimension of God feels is by looking at the biological manifestation of the evolutionary impulse. The desire to create form is experienced in the human body as the procreative impulse, or sexual desire. If you observe the arising of sexual desire in your own experience, you will see that it is felt as a sense of ecstatic urgency—a feeling of ecstasy and the simultaneous sense that “I must…” 

That same creative impulse is experienced at higher levels of the self as the drive to innovate, the passion to create that which is new. When any one of us is overcome by that creative drive, we experience a sense of ecstasy and simultaneous urgency. This is a higher, much more evolved expression of the creative impulse, which only human beings experience. No other life-form seems compelled to create that which is new. And the highest expression of that uniquely human experience is the spiritual impulse, which is the mysterious compulsion to evolve at the level of consciousness. The ecstatic urge to become more conscious is the most profound expression of the First Cause that there is. That impulse, when it awakens in the human heart and mind, is what I call the Authentic Self.

Human beings experience the creative dimension of God at every level of our being, but it is easiest to first locate it at the gross physical level, where it can, at times, seem overwhelming. Think about that ecstatic compulsion when you experience it in its greatest physical intensity, and then try to imagine that same intensity at the level of consciousness. That is how God feels all the time about creating the universe. And God never experiences relief. So when God leaps from formlessness to form, he, she, or it enters an almost agonizing state, where the desire to create or to become is overwhelming and ever unfulfilled.

How God feels, then, is always a paradox: On one hand, from the perspective of the unmanifest, unborn, empty Ground of all Being that has never entered into the stream of time, everything is always already perfect. Nothing has ever happened, and so God rests eternally, peacefully, and blissfully. But for the part of God that has become manifest, that decided to create the universe, the experience is one of unbroken, ecstatic urgency. The intensity behind this compulsion is emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, philosophically, and physically overwhelming. And what begins to emerge in the human heart and soul, as we awaken to the Authentic Self, or spiritual impulse, is the dawning recognition of the fact that each one of us, at the highest level of our being, is that manifest dimension of God, the very same energy and intelligence that initiated the entire creative process.

As you awaken to the Authentic Self, you begin to intuit and feel directly connected to that evolutionary impulse, to that surging energy and intelligence. You actually start to feel it working in you, moving in and through your own body and mind as the mysterious compulsion to evolve at the highest level. When you feel that surge, what you are experiencing is the most subtle and profound expression of the initial cosmic explosion—the outer reaches of the big bang. That’s the furthest it has gone, as far as we know right now: when you, a human being at the leading edge, awaken to this mysterious compulsion to evolve at the level of your very own consciousness. So when you experience the spiritual impulse, you are experiencing the big bang as a surging compulsion for interior development and growth. The innermost regions of the Kosmos are aspiring to actually evolve and be developed in and through you. The Authentic Self is the felt sense of that initial burst from nothing to everything that you participated in fourteen billion years ago. At the level of consciousness, it is experienced as a sense that there is something unthinkably important that must occur NOW.