Knowing God

 

The more I think about agency and voluntary action, the more I come to believe that we experience god ( “the divine”) in a similar way to how we feel love, or hate or fear or anger. 

The divine as an emotion, essentially. 

And so if you ask the question, do I believe in the existence of emotions, of having the phenomenological experience of fear or love or hate or anger, then I answer in the affirmative. 

These are feelings I’ve had and have and for which there is considerable evidence that others have had, do have, whose prevalence is thought to be extensive, if not universal among us humans.  And so, if you ask me do I believe in a feeling of the divine, of some ineffable agency that pervades my awareness of everything I know about myself and my existence in the world, as well as the world around me, then yes, I believe with certainty that this is part of my experience and likely part of the experience of most, if not all, others – at least those who are open to it. 

Yet I also view my emotions as having a strong correlation to states of my nervous system; states related to neurochemical and electrophysiological systems that evolved over millennia to promote survival in an uncertain, unpredictable world. 

Saying that you believe in the existence of fear or love or hate does not imply that such things are material or even ephemeral vapors that float on clouds or exist within the ether of outer space. 

We don’t’ have a very good theory about consciousness, about how or why it exists or how it relates to our intentional, voluntary actions or even those subconsciously driven aspects of our being.  Presumably, our dreams are manifest from brains that first gather and process information when awake, the stages of sleep promoting and eliciting involuntary thought that string together Jungian archetypes of belief from our deepest subconscious. 

We can track electrical patterns and neurochemical activity in the brain. But we don’t really know if the spark of a feeling or an idea stems from the realm of some conscious or preconscious event or begins with a molecule moving across a membrane, or some other physical activity in our body. 

Perhaps consciousness is the product of certain neural events, or conversely, that our conscious realm dictates key nerves to activate in our brains, or maybe both.

Whether epiphenomenon or interactive, our mind, comprised of conscious and unconscious activity is what we experience.  And through our mind’s eye, it is the conduit through which we experience our bodies and the world around us. 

So I believe in the feeling of the divine, and I have learned that it is usually beneficial to pay attention to my feelings.  That knowing if I am in love, or afraid, or angry is useful when evaluating a circumstance.   My feelings provide me with a gauge as to the importance of a thing, whether I understand what’s going on at a  deeper level or not, I know that the stronger the emotion, the more importance I should attach to the circumstances eliciting it.  And the more attention I need to bring to bear on what is going on, and in determining what the reality is around me.  To the extent that I have a feeling of agency to affect the circumstances I find myself in, how might I act for a propitious beneficial outcome?  Knowing god, having a sense of divine agency offers me a motivation and context in which to interpret events and a context in which to determine a course of action and to proceed with a perspective and intent most suitable for the circumstances.