God is Bottom-Up
Posted on April 11th, 2008
Many people have visceral reactions to the word God. Fear, discomfort, aversion. But the definition of God is changing. Old ideas of God come from the top-down hierarchical paradigm. God is being understood once again as bottom-up.
| Old Paradigm Religion | New Paradigm Spirituality |
| God is the top of a top-down authority structure. God -> Priests -> Parents -> Humans -> Animals. God is the CEO of the Universe, the Principle of the Galactic Classroom. | God is like water, supporting you from the bottom, the ground of your being, the field of your existence. |
| God is an entity outside of us. Therefore God may or may not exist. | God is within us and everything else. Ultimately there is no separation, we are patterns within the fabric of God that have the subjective experience of being separate. God is the same as reality. |
| God is in charge and makes the rules. He created everything a long time ago. | We co-create with God (being little bits of God ourselves) in an ongoing process of creative unfolding. |
| God is inherently perfect; we are inherently not. | Reality has no inherent morality. Ideas of “good” and “evil” create separation and disconnection, which leads to violence. Violence isn’t “bad”, it’s just unpleasant. |
| God is watching you sleep to see if you do bad things. | God is sleeping you. |
| You know God when you have faith in things you can’t prove and seem unlikely. Faith is hard and God tests you to see if you are worthy. | You know God when you become viscerally aware of the inherent connections between things. Faith is hard because we’re trained out of sensing God directly, but once you become aware of it, that sense is always with you. |
| God has a plan for you, and if you don’t fulfill it you’re bad. | God manifests through you in a unique way and it feels good to participate in that creative process. If you don’t, you might feel unfulfilled and long to pursue it, but you won’t be punished. |
| God gave us dominion over the Earth. | The earth is part of the way God supports us, and we are a beautiful part of it’s fabric. If we play nice as part of the web of life, it will treat us well. |
| God sets the standards and we ought to live by them, even if they feel wrong or impossible (like not being gay). | There is an underlying harmony to the Universe that it feels good to be in alignment with. Our heart and body can sense it when we are paying attention. It feels inherently good and right to us, and does not require sacrifice. |
We can all be vibrantly alive and happy. Here I discuss the ideas and tools that will get us there.
“God is sleeping you.” Wow, that phrase touched my heart right… in… my center. Phew. Like a line from a Rumi poem! Lovely. I liked how you’ve organized and contrasted old and new paradigm, as I get to be reminded of all these things that I know intuitively, but that I don’t often get to see presented with clarity and simplicity.
Thank you, Emma. :o)
I read your post less in terms of old and new paradigms and more as the distinction between religiosity (the “legalism” we construct around spirituality) and spirituality itself. I believe that both have always been with us … though certainly religiosity has been dominant in popular U.S. consciousness for a long time.
I would like to hear more about why you think true spirituality is ascending over religiosity in the general consciousness. I certainly hope that you are right, because (precisely as you describe) people’s reactions to God — that God names you “bad,” for instance — are joyless and out of synch with what God really is.
Separate question: Is it possible to be “vibrantly alive and happy” without spirituality?
[…] in both Business and Spirituality — a mix I too rarely get to enjoy. Please go read her post, God is Bottom-Up, and tell me if it doesn’t resolve all of this stuff and put us all onto the same page. I […]
This is awesome, I was nervous about writing about God explicitly on this blog because of people’s ideas about it, so I’m really glad that this resonated with folks.
Holly, yes! I wasn’t sure if I should include that line because the rest are more analytical, but it just popped out and it felt like “well, this is it, really”. God as a verb.
RD, yes, I agree, it’s not *really* new, I think it’s what mystics have always held, but what I see as new is that now it’s not just mystics or monks that are thinking this way. It’s starting to spread to a general understanding. I see this in my life, in the people I meet, in the proliferation of books on spirituality and consciousness, in the ways that these fundamental ideas are showing up in various fields from therapy (Hakomi) to software (open-source, agile programming) — without people naming them as such, but there they are. Co-creative process, organicity, intrinsic knowledge. The idea of “Bottom-Up” being a more natural, efficient, fair, and human-supporting way of organizing reality is spreading, or being re-discovered, all over. Wherever I look I see people doing cool things. And I think ultimately it’s something that is a fundamental shift in paradigm and thus affects spirituality too. Just the fact that people go out and discover their own spirituality and feel free and OK and valid doing that is part of that shift.
Your second question, heh, is that about someone you know? Perhaps a dogged atheist?
My answer is yes and no. If you take the word “spirituality” out of your question and replace it with “a felt sense of belonging to the Universe, being connected to and contributing to life, and a trust that the Universe is a good place for you”, I would say no, without some sense of that I’d imagine life would be scary, painful, and confusing. However I think you can have all that without calling it “spirituality”, if you don’t like that word or how other people use it.
When I’ve met people who say they are not spiritual but who seem vibrantly alive and happy, they are doing something to get in touch with the interconnectionness of everything, and they generally have organizing beliefs that are congruent with the ideas of spirituality that I write about above. They have something that plugs them into the juiciness of life, like being close to nature, helping people, contributing or being in the flow of life. They just don’t call it spirituality, usually because they have a lot of negative history to that word. But I could look at them and see what I might call a spiritual practice (which is just anything that renews that sense of connection with Everything).
Does that address what you were getting at? What do you think?
Absolutely, in that your last and first thoughts circle back to each other and connect. There is a sense that one shouldn’t speak about God outside certain fora, or with strangers, and certainly never in connection with, say, career choice and business and the ways we provide for ourselves. But if we agree that spirituality is necessary to being vibrantly alive, then we have to be open to talking about spiritual things in those contexts. I think that for now, that has to happen on an individual level, until we figure out how to have broader (national/international) discussions of spirituality that aren’t about religion and the “culture wars.”
As for dogged atheists, when I see a person who is vibrantly alive and happy but claims that nothing spiritual is possible and there is no order in the universe but cold chance … well I don’t really believe him. I think that is self-deceit and there must be some belief in something, in order to be so happy. And that feels wrong and patronizing, because certainly adults should know — and be the last word on — their own beliefs.
Yeah, I have a sense of disbelief in those situations too. And it usually hasn’t worked for me to point out to people the contradiction I see. It activates their defenses and then the conversation becomes an argument and we disconnect.
What I’m becoming aware of lately is the importance of defenses and how to work with them in people. They are always there for a reason, and understanding that reason really helps.
I am aware of how risky it is sometimes to say you do believe in something more than “cold chance”. Cold chance is the party line, and I think often it’s like jumping off a huge cliff for people to admit to faith in something more. I definitely had to go through a lot of fear to be able to openly talk about God - internal fear that I was deluding myself, external fear that I would be criticized or rebuked. So coming from that environment, I can see how it is hard for people to admit to “spiritual” beliefs or experiences if they aren’t “supposed” to be having them. It involves some personal confrontation with how they’ve been socialized, and that’s scary and hard and requires vulnerability, humility, and confronting a lot of fear.
So keeping that in mind helps me stay in a compassionate frame of mind, and also pay attention to how much they can be vulnerable around a topic that they’ve basically been traumatized around - being open about their inherent spiritual connection the Universe/God. If I’m arguing with them and sound like I’m making them wrong or criticizing them in any way, it will only activate the defenses more. What helps is being curious, respectful, and not too serious/lecturey or confrontational (yes, I’ve learned a lot since college LOL!).
And, having my own community of people to talk to where we do speak the same language and my ideas are validated and supported takes the pressure off immensely, so I’m not constantly trying to get validation from people who aren’t in a place to give it. =)
Anyway, I’m not sure if you were really asking for advice here on how to have these conversations. I guess I just wanted to share some of what I’ve come up with as I’ve had a number of those kinds of conversations over the years and it’s been a journey to try to understand why it is so difficult to get to understanding around it. What I’ve come to is an even deeper understanding of how much we are socialized to deny our direct spiritual connection and how much fear/power there is in confronting it.
Thanks for sharing this Emma. It ties in with the current conversations around books like Conversations with God. I find this approach to God and spirituality far more interesting, empowering and uplifting. I find it far more integrative and coherent.
Hi Zern,
Yes, “Tomorrow’s God” is the book of his that I’ve read (well, skimmed), and I think he is right on about it.
Emma