Belief in God is an Obstacle to Knowing God

Eckhart Tolle, the spiritually awakened teacher and sage, and author of The Power of Now, said: “A huge number of people are going through the process of awakening, some in the early stages, some in the later stages, and it’s wonderful to see.”  Indeed, evidence of this is seen through the website Batgap.com, which stands for Buddha at the Gas Pump: Conversations with “Ordinary” Spiritually Awakening People. It is a website dedicated to the interviews of hundreds of these people. One of my many favorite awakened teachers, who is number 268 on Batgap’s interview list, is Leonard Jacobson. I recently read an article of his in one of his newsletters, and I wanted to share it here. Please enjoy these words by Leonard Jacobson:

“God is real. God is here now, but we are not. We are lost in the past and future world of the mind. We are lost in a world of illusion and separation. We are lost in ideas, opinions, concepts and beliefs including spiritual and religious concepts and beliefs.  If we want to experience the living presence of God, we will have to come to where God is, which is the present moment. Then we will begin to experience God as the silent Presence at the very heart of all things present. That’s what omnipresence really means! For believers it’s a comforting concept. For mystics who are awake in the truth of life, it’s a living reality.

Belief in God is an obstacle to knowing God. Belief is a function of the mind and God is unknowable with the mind. To believe in God is to create God in man’s image and it doesn’t work. The truth is that we are created in the image of God, which means that we have all the attributes and qualities of the divine. In Presence, we are love, acceptance and compassion. We are without judgment. We exist in the realization of Oneness and all these qualities flow into our daily lives if we are fundamentally grounded in the present moment. But if we venture too far into the past or future, we disconnect from the present moment and in so doing we disconnect from our divine nature. We separate from God and the present moment. We then seek to avoid the pain of separation by believing in God, which actually takes us further into illusion and separation. We can only know God through direct experience, which arises when we are very deeply present.

Did Jesus believe in God or did he know God?  Was he so deeply present that he could feel and sense the Presence of God in everything? Was he so present that he experienced Oneness with everything, and so he felt one with God? Christ is a state of consciousness, not a person. Jesus the man awakened to Christ consciousness. He opened so fully into the present moment that he could see, feel and sense the Presence of God in everything. Christ consciousness is available to everyone who is willing to surrender belief in God and become fully present.

If you want to go beyond belief in God to the direct experience of God, then you will have to learn how to be deeply present. As you deepen into Presence, the illusion of separation dissolves. You will feel fulfilled by the moment as it is and your constant striving for more dissolves. You relax. You accept the moment as it is. You can sense that there is a Presence in everything and somehow you know that the Presence in everything is the Presence of God. You feel overwhelmed by love and gratitude. Your soul rejoices. It is what your soul has been longing for from the very beginning of time. You are aware of the extraordinary abundance and beauty of the present moment. You feel one with God. It feels like you have come home.

There is one step beyond Christ consciousness. It is God consciousness. In Christ consciousness, you are so present that you experience yourself as one with God. In God consciousness you have become so fully immersed in the present moment and Oneness that all sense of yourself as an individual dissolves. Only God remains.”