Let’s talk about the G-word

On the difference between God and Fool’s God

I was inspired to write/compile this post by a recent opinion piece in The Washington Post titled “America doesn’t need more God. It needs more atheists.”

The obvious question raised by this title is: what God? And if “more (or less) God” translates to “more (or fewer) believers,” then the question translates to: believers in what?

The author, Kate Cohen, offers some disturbing data: “Studies have shown that many, many Americans don’t trust atheists. They don’t want to vote for atheists, and they don’t want their children to marry atheists.” As there are different conceptions of God — some fundamentally different, some only superficially so — so there are different sorts of atheists. Hence the question could also be asked in this form: what sort of atheists does Cohen (along with those many, many Americans) have in mind?

We are getting a first glimpse of her target when she declares, quite correctly I’m afraid, that “in this particular political moment, we need Americans to stand up to Christian nationalists who are using their growing political and judicial power to take away our rights. Atheists can do that.”

So the atheists in question are, first of all, those who don’t believe in any Christian concept of God or, more broadly, in the God that is worshipped by any of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) or their sects. Cohen, however, targets not only the worshippers of “a conscious supreme being with powers of intercession or creation” but also those who, rather than believing in a supernatural being, apply the G-word to whatever they do believe in, or even to whatever makes their spines tingle.

Atheists, including and according to Cohen, believe that “people organized the world as it is now, and only people can make it better”:

Where atheism becomes a definite stance rather than a lack of direction, a positive belief and not just a negative one, is in our understanding that, without a higher power, we need human power to change the world.

On the other hand, according to Cohen,

You don’t have to be an atheist to conduct yourself as if [you understood that] people are responsible for the world they live in — you just have to act like an atheist, by taking matters into your own hands. Countless good people of faith do just that. But one thing they can’t do as well as atheists is push back against the outsize cultural and political power of religion itself.

Having provided plenty of rather harrowing examples — peel back this atrocity, and you find religion; peel back that atrocity, and you find religion… — Cohen turns to those who believe in God metaphorically, “as a power of nature or something like that”:

It does no one any favors — not the country, not your neighbors — to say you believe in God metaphorically when there are plenty of people out there who literally believe that God is looking down from heaven deciding which of us to cast into hell. In fact, when certain believers wield enough political power to turn their God’s presumed preferences into law, I would say it’s dangerous to claim you believe in “God” when what you actually believe in is awe or wonder.

This contains a false dilemma, for you may have a somewhat higher opinion of the God you worship, whether literally or metaphorically. You may believe in a God who isn’t doing things like looking down from heaven deciding which of us to cast into hell. You may believe in a God who both is and transcends everything, a God who enjoys and suffers everything, and this belief may be founded on entirely more solid ground than mere scripture or sacred lore — see below.

Between this latter version of God and Cohen’s much the same distinction can be made as between gold and pyrite, which is also known as “fool’s gold.”

There is God, and then there is Fool’s God.

Pyrite a.k.a. Fool’s Gold

God according to the Mother

I deliberately do not use the word God because religions have given this name to an all-powerful being who is other than his creation and outside it. — The Mother, December 21, 1950¹

You see, throughout my childhood and youth and the whole beginning of my yoga, there was a sort of refusal in my being to use the word “God,” because of all the falsehood behind that word (Sri Aurobindo rid me of that; in the same way he got rid of all limitations, he rid me of that one too). But it’s not a word that comes to me spontaneously. — The Mother’s Agenda, May 31, 1962

A great way to clarify the difference between God and Fool’s God is to turn to Sri Aurobindo’s writings and the Mother’s conversations. (I shall offer further comments on Cohen’s piece at the end of this post.) Let’s begin with one of the Mother’s reminiscences:

Between eleven and thirteen a series of psychic and spiritual experiences revealed to me not only the existence of God but man’s possibility of uniting with Him, of realising Him integrally in consciousness and action, of manifesting Him upon earth in a life divine.²

In his biography of the Mother,³ Georges van Vrekhem writes:

If the Mother stressed one thing about this period in her life, it is the fact that she was an inveterate atheist, positivist and materialist, just like her parents. She accepted only what she could touch and see, and she never sought for explanations elsewhere than on a material basis. This did not prevent the inner experiences from happening, nor did it inhibit her from feeling that inner “Presence” for which she had no name and about which she could talk to nobody. She most certainly would not have called it God.

In her Agenda, dated June 7, 1967, the Mother recalls her lifelong feeling that God “is a mere word, and a word behind which people put a lot of very undesirable things”:

It’s that idea of a god who claims to be “the one and only”.... That was what had made me a complete atheist, if I may say so, when I was a child; I refused to accept a being, whoever he was, who proclaimed himself to be the one and only and almighty.

Over the twelve-year period from 1958 to 1970, the Mother commented on Sri Aurobindo’s Thoughts and Aphorisms,⁴ which was written around 1913 during the early part of his stay in Pondicherry. On March 24, 1970, she responded to a question about the following aphorism:

418 — Thy soul has not tasted God’s entire delight, if it has never had the joy of being His enemy, opposing His designs and engaging with Him in mortal combat.

Q: What does Sri Aurobindo mean by “the joy of being His enemy”?

A: Here too⁵ I have to say that I do not know exactly, because he never told me. But I can tell you about my own experience. Until the age of about twenty-five, all I knew was the God of religions, God as men have created him, and I did not want him at any price. I denied his existence but with the certitude that if such a God did exist, I detested him.

When I was about twenty-five [in ca. 1903] I discovered the inner God and at the same time I learned that the God described by most Western religions is none other than the Great Adversary. When I came to India, in 1914, and became acquainted with Sri Aurobindo’s teaching, everything became very clear.

Elsewhere in her Agenda, on November 29, 1969, the Mother remarked:

I am quite certain that if Sri Aurobindo wrote those Aphorisms now, he wouldn’t put the word God where he used it (he used the word God almost everywhere). He wouldn’t use that word. God, for man, really means religion…. I don’t know how to explain, it’s a sort of sensitivity somewhere that rebels — the word is false, as it were. It has almost become the symbol of an incomprehension.

Earlier, on October 25, 1960, she said:

There’s also this old idea rooted in religions of Chaldean or Christian origin of a God with whom you can have no true contact — an abyss between the two. That is terrible.

That absolutely has to stop.

For with that idea, the earth and men will never be able to change. This is why I have often said that this idea is the work of the Asuras, and with it they have ruled the earth.

Whereas whatever the effort, whatever the difficulty, whatever time it takes, whatever number of lives, you must know that all this doesn’t matter: you know you are the Master, that the Master and you are the same. All that’s necessary is ... to know it integrally, and nothing must belie it. That’s the way out.

This from April 29, 1961:

At the age of eighteen, I remember having such an intense need in me to know.... Because I was having experiences — I had all kinds of experiences — but my surroundings offered me no chance to receive an intellectual knowledge which would have given me the meaning of it all: I couldn’t even speak of them. I was having experience after experience.... For years, I had experiences during the night (but I was very careful never to speak about them!) — memories from past lives,⁶ all sorts of things, but without any base of intellectual knowledge. (Of course, the advantage of this was that my experiences were not mentally contrived; they were entirely spontaneous.) But I had such a need in me to know! ... I remember living in a house (one of these houses with a lot of apartments), and in the apartment next door were some young Catholics whose faith was very ... they were very convinced. And seeing all that, I remember saying to myself one day while brushing my hair, “These people are lucky to be born into a religion and believe unquestioningly! It’s so easy! You have nothing to do but believe — how simple that makes it.” I was feeling like this, and then when I realized what I was thinking (laughing), well, I gave myself a good scolding: “Lazybones!” [...]

To know! ... It was to happen to me two years later when I met someone who told me of Theon’s teaching.⁷ When I was told that the Divine was within — the teaching of the Gita, but in words understandable to a Westerner — that there was an inner Presence, that one carried the Divine within oneself, oh! ... What a revelation! In a few minutes, I suddenly understood all, all, all. Understood everything. It brought the contact instantly.

Towards the end of this conversation, the Mother recaps:

I have had the most contradictory experiences! Only one thing has been continuous from my childhood on (and the more I look, the more I see how continuous it has been): this divine Presence — and in someone who, in her external life, might very well have said, “God? What is this foolishness! God doesn’t exist!” So you understand, you see the picture.

You know, it’s a marvelous, marvelous grace to have had this experience so constantly, so powerfully, like something holding out against everything, everything: this Presence. And in my outward consciousness, a total negation of it all. Even later on, I used to say, “Well, if God exists, he’s a real scoundrel! He’s a wretch and I want nothing to do with this Creator of ours....” You know, the idea of God sitting placidly in his heaven, creating the world and amusing himself by watching it, then telling you, “How well done!” “Oh!” I said, “I want nothing to do with that monster!”

On July 7, 1961, the Mother responded to a question about the following aphorism:

65 — Because God is invincibly great, He can afford to be weak; because He is immutably pure, He can indulge with impunity in sin; He knows eternally all delight, therefore He tastes also the delight of pain; He is inalienably wise, therefore He has not debarred Himself from folly.

Q: Can God truly be said to be weak or to fail?

A: That’s not how it is, mon petit! This is precisely how the modern Western attitude has become twisted compared to the ancient attitude, the attitude — it isn’t exactly ancient — of the Gita. It’s extremely difficult for the Western mind to comprehend vividly and concretely that all is the Divine. It is so impregnated with the Christian spirit, with the idea of a “Creator” — the creation on one side and God on the other! [...]

I have observed it in myself for a very long time.... Due to the whole subconscious formation of childhood — environment, education, and so forth — we have to drum into this (Mother touches her body) the consciousness of Unity: the absolute, exclusive unity of the Divine — exclusive in the sense that nothing exists apart from this Unity, even the things which seem most repulsive.

Sri Aurobindo also had to struggle against this because he too received a Christian education. And these Aphorisms are the result — the flowering — of the necessity to struggle against the subconscious formation which has produced such questions (Mother takes on a scandalized tone): “How can God be weak? How can God be foolish? How....”

There is nothing other than He! This should be repeated from morning to night, from night to morning, because we forget it every minute. There is only He, there is nothing other than He. He alone exists, there is no existence without Him. There is only He!

God according to Sri Aurobindo

80 — To listen to some devout people, one would imagine that God never laughs; Heine was nearer the mark when he found in Him the divine Aristophanes.

478 — A God who cannot smile, could not have created this humorous universe.

Let’s now take a look of some of Sri Aurobindo’s “definitions” of “God,” starting with this sentence, the longest in The Life Divine if not in his entire corpus:

Whether they [the human religions and philosophies] see dimly the material world as the body of the Divine, or life as a great pulsation of the breath of Divine Existence, or all things as thoughts of the cosmic Mind, or realise that there is a Spirit which is greater than these things, their subtler and yet more wonderful source and creator,— whether they find God only in the Inconscient or as the one Conscious in inconscient things or as an ineffable superconscious Existence to reach whom we must leave behind our terrestrial being and annul the mind, life and body, or, overcoming division, see that He is all these at once and accept fearlessly the large consequences of that vision,— whether they worship Him with universality as the cosmic Being or limit Him and themselves, like the Positivist, in humanity only or, on the contrary, carried away by the vision of the timeless and spaceless Immutable, reject Him in Nature and Cosmos,— whether they adore Him in various strange or beautiful or magnified forms of the human ego or for His perfect possession of the qualities to which man aspires, his Divinity revealed to them as a supreme Power, Love, Beauty, Truth, Righteousness, Wisdom,— whether they perceive Him as the Lord of Nature, Father and Creator, or as Nature herself and the universal Mother, pursue Him as the Lover and attracter of souls or serve Him as the hidden Master of all works, bow down before the one God or the manifold Deity, the one divine Man or the one Divine in all men or, more largely, discover the One whose presence enables us to become unified in consciousness or in works or in life with all beings, unified with all things in Time and Space, unified with Nature and her influences and even her inanimate forces,— the truth behind must ever be the same because all is the one Divine Infinite whom all are seeking. [LD 727–28]

The following is from Sri Aurobindo’s comment on verse 8 of the Isha Upanishad.

It is He that has gone abroad — That which is bright, bodiless, without scar of imperfection, without sinews, pure, unpierced by evil. The Seer, the Thinker, the One who becomes everywhere,⁸ the Self-existent has ordered objects perfectly according to their nature from years sempiternal.

God is Sachchidananda. He manifests Himself as infinite existence of which the essentiality is consciousness, of which again the essentiality is bliss, is self-delight. Delight cognizing variety of itself, seeking its own variety, as it were, becomes the universe. But these are abstract terms; abstract ideas in themselves cannot produce concrete realities. They are impersonal states; impersonal states cannot in themselves produce personal activities.

This becomes still clearer if we consider the manifestation of Sachchidananda. In that manifestation Delight translates itself into Love; Consciousness translates itself into double terms, conceptive Knowledge, executive Force; Existence translates itself into Being, that is to say, into Person and Substance. But Love is incomplete without a Lover and an object of Love, Knowledge without a Knower and an object of Knowledge, Force without a Worker and a Work, Substance without a Person cognizing and constituting it.

This is because the original terms also are not really impersonal abstractions. In delight of Brahman there is an Enjoyer of delight, in consciousness of Brahman a Conscient, in existence of Brahman an Existent; but the object of Brahman’s delight and consciousness and the term and stuff of Its existence are Itself. In the divine Being Knowledge, the Knower and the Known and, therefore, necessarily also Delight, the Enjoyer and the Enjoyed are one.

Another definition from The Life Divine:

We have started with the assertion of all existence as one Being whose essential nature is Consciousness, one Consciousness whose active nature is Force or Will; and this Being is Delight, this Consciousness is Delight, this Force or Will is Delight. Eternal and inalienable Bliss of Existence, Bliss of Consciousness, Bliss of Force or Will whether concentrated in itself and at rest or active and creative, this is God and this is ourselves in our essential, our non-phenomenal being. Concentrated in itself, it possesses or rather is the essential, eternal, inalienable Bliss; active and creative, it possesses or rather becomes the delight of the play of existence, the play of consciousness, the play of force and will. That play is the universe and that delight is the sole cause, motive and object of cosmic existence. The Divine Consciousness possesses that play and delight eternally and inalienably; our essential being, our real self which is concealed from us by the false self or mental ego, also enjoys that play and delight eternally and inalienably and cannot indeed do otherwise since it is one in being with the Divine Consciousness. If we aspire therefore to a divine life, we cannot attain to it by any other way than by unveiling this veiled self in us, by mounting from our present status in the false self or mental ego to a higher status in the true self, the Atman, by entering into that unity with the Divine Consciousness which something superconscient in us always enjoys,— otherwise we could not exist,— but which our conscious mentality has forfeited. [LD 152–53]

Central to Sri Aurobindo’s conception of God is the distinction between a mental consciousness and a supramental one — Mind and Supermind — and the inevitable evolution of the latter out of the former consummating the evolution of Life and Mind out of Matter. The mental consciousness is separative and egocentric, while the supramental is integral: a single Self transcending the universe but also constituting and containing it, so as to experience and express its inalienable self-delight in infinite varieties of action and form and movement.

Fool’s God is but an egocentric caricature of God. It is the kind of God the egocentric mental consciousness creates in its own image. It is the God that creates the world out of valueless dust — all comes from dust and to dust it returns, or so the Bible tells us (Ecclesiastes 3:20) — and who knows where he gets his dust. The integral God of the Upanishads, on the other hand, creates the world out its infinite self-delight: “From Delight all these beings are born, by Delight they exist and grow, to Delight they return” (Taittiriya Upanishad III:6).

Sri Aurobindo has captured the mind’s conception of God — Fool’s God, that is — beautifully in these lines of his epic poem Savitri [p. 657]:

Against human reason this is his offence,
Being known to be for ever unknowable,
To be all and yet transcend the mystic whole,
Absolute, to lodge in a relative world of Time,
Eternal and all-knowing, to suffer birth,
Omnipotent, to sport with Chance and Fate,
Spirit, yet to be Matter and the Void,
Illimitable, beyond form or name,
To dwell within a body, one and supreme
To be animal and human and divine:
A still deep sea, he laughs in rolling waves;
Universal, he is all,—transcendent, none.
To man’s righteousness this is his cosmic crime,
Almighty beyond good and evil to dwell
Leaving the good to their fate in a wicked world
And evil to reign in this enormous scene.
All opposition seems and strife and chance,
An aimless labour with but scanty sense,
To eyes that see a part and miss the whole.

Returning to Cohen’s piece, I totally agree with her that in this particular political moment, Americans need Americans to stand up to Christian nationalists who are using their growing political and judicial power to take away basic human rights. But I refuse to have the baby thrown out with the bathwater. I deplore that so few know that there actually is a baby in the bathwater. I insist on the distinction between God and Fool’s God. I am as much an atheist with respect to Fool’s God as Cohen. I detest the God of the religions as much as the Mother did. But I also disagree with the implied distinction between a “higher power” and “human power.” This, too, is a false dichotomy.

The notion that “people organized the world as it is now, and only people can make it better” is a delusion. Ultimately there is but one power, God’s power, and this works in a myriad of ways. At present, human power is the most important mode or aspect of its working, even though most of us are ignorant of the largely instrumental roles we play. The farther we mount “from our present status in the false self or mental ego to a higher status in the true self,” and the farther we enter “into that unity with the Divine Consciousness which something superconscient in us always enjoys,” the more effective will be God’s power working through us.

To conclude I can do no better than offer the following triad of aphorisms:

273 — Thou thinkest the ascetic in his cave or on his mountaintop a stone and a do-nothing? What dost thou know? He may be filling the world with the mighty currents of his will &changing it by the pressure of his soul-state.

274 — That which the liberated sees in his soul on its mountaintops, heroes and prophets spring up in the material world to proclaim and accomplish.

275 — The Theosophists are wrong in their circumstances but right in the essential. If the French Revolution took place, it was because a soul on the Indian snows dreamed of God as freedom, brotherhood and equality.

1. The Mother, Questions and Answers 1950–1951 (Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department, 2003).

2. Nirodbaran, Sri Aurobindo for All Ages, 1889, URL.

3. Georges Van Vrekhem, The Mother: The Story of Her Life, p. 37 (Rupa & Co. Kindle Edition 2014).

4. The Mother, On Thoughts and Aphorisms (Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department, 2001).

5. Why “too”? Earlier the Mother responded to a question about this aphorism: 228 — He who will not slay when God bids him, works in the world an incalculable havoc. The question was: “In what kind of circumstances does God give the command to slay?” To which the Mother gave this most charmingly elusive answer: “This is a question I cannot answer, because God has never asked me to slay.”

6. When the Mother speaks of memories from past lives, one should bear in mind something she said in 1957 ([The Mother’s Agenda, Vol. 1, pp. 74–75):

Those who claim to have been this or that baron in the Middle Ages or such and such a person who lived at such and such a place during such and such a time are fantasizing; they are simply victims of their own mental fancies. For what remains of past lives are not beautiful illustrated classics in which you see yourself as a great lord in a castle or a victorious general at the head of his army — all that is fiction. What remains is the memory of the instants when the psychic being emerged from the depths of your being and revealed itself to you, or in other words, the memory of those moments when you were fully conscious. The growth of the consciousness is effected progressively through evolution, and the memory of past lives is generally limited to the critical moments of this evolution, to the great, decisive turning points that have marked some progress in your consciousness.

While living such minutes of your life, you do not at all care about remembering whether you were Lord so and so who lived at such and such a place during such and such a time — it is not the memory of your civil status that remains. On the contrary, you lose sight of these petty external things, these minor perishable details, so as to be fully ablaze in this revelation of the soul or this divine contact. And when you recall these minutes of your past lives, the memory is so intense that it seems very near, still living — much more living than most of the ordinary memories of your present life.... So it may be that one retains the memory of the circumstances surrounding these minutes of revelation or inspiration, one sees again a landscape, the color of a garment one was wearing, the shade of one’s skin, things that were around you at that particular moment — all this is imprinted in an indelible way, with an extraordinary intensity, for the details of ordinary life are then also revealed in their true intensity, their true tonality. The consciousness that reveals itself in you reveals at the same time the consciousness in things. These details can sometimes help you reconstitute the period in which you lived or the deeds that were accomplished, surmise the country where you lived, but it is quite easy, too, to fantasize and mistake one’s imaginings for reality.

7. See this post.

8. Every word here is significant. “The Seer” signifies Supermind. “The Thinker” signifies Mind. “The One who becomes everywhere” signifies the material universe.