I Don’t Believe in God – I Know God

Tony Crisp

Strange isn’t it that people don’t say, “Do you believe in the Sun?” or “Do you believe in the wind?” But they do say, “Do you believe in God?”

Belief shouldn’t come into such things as fundamental as that. You either know from personal experience or you don’t. And if you don’t know you should say so. Instead of which people assure each other, out of ‘belief’ that there is or isn’t a God. I don’t need to ‘believe’ that I exist – I know through daily experience. I don’t need to ‘believe’ God exists – I know through the same sort of daily experience. Or as Carl Jung said, “The reason we don’t know God is because we don’t know how to bow low enough.”

Perhaps I can explain that through a conversation I witnessed. A man said to a woman he was confronting, “Religion! That’s surely a direction for failures and people who can’t really cope with facing reality?”

And the woman he is accusing of this inability to face reality said, “You poor man! Is your mind or awareness so tiny that you have never realised the forces and processes of your own body and mind are beyond anything you understand? Can’t you see that your very existence is brought about by things so far beyond your knowledge that it is only a statement of your impoverishment to suggest an awareness of God is an expression of some sort of smallness and failure? Have you never understood that? Have you not seen that religion is not only an acknowledgement of what we fail to understand and yet depend upon, but it is also an opening to it, a willingness to relate to it? It can also be something far more even than that. It can be an active loving relationship with what gives you life. And such love is an exchange, a sharing, a way of merging one with another. It is an exchange – a sharing of bodily fluids – the very substance of life. Imagine that; a glorious love affair with the very spirit of life! A love affair with the invisible and forever indefinable. Is that something you are afraid of?”

I know God because I don’t define God as some sort of father figure in the sky who is forever wondering whether I am obeying his commands, or punishing me if I don’t do as I am told. I define God as the very background to the emergence of our universe, in which we all partake and contribute. I know God because at the core of my being I am that very mystery of life, sprung from the Universe. I know God daily because I am aware of myself. I am willing to bathe in the great depths of my experience, the passions and terrors, the hurts and awfulness of my own past deeds. If you don’t know God from direct experience, it’s because you don’t open yourself wide enough to the glory and the shit, the pain and wonder of life. God isn’t an intellectual idea.

If you don’t know yourself like that, then I ask you, “What are you doing wasting your time in the shallows of experience? Are you scared to really know yourself? Are you frightened of the depths of your own emotions, your mind and passions, your hurts and fears – frightened to the point of avoiding knowing who you are and how you came to be?”

If so I say to you – WAKE UP!