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By Lawrence Bush(This article is adapted from a piece that originally appeared in the Fall, 2003 issue of The Reconstructionist. Lawrence Bush edits Jewish Currents magazine (www.jewishcurrents.org), an independent bimonthly, and is the author of six books of fiction and nonfiction.)
Does God exist outside the human mind? Much of modern theology, in an historic compromise with humanism, tends to limit its sightings of God to the realm of “godly” human deeds, relationships and emotions. A humanistic theology like this soothes the agnostic who lurks in the minds of most modern people and permits them to observe holiday and worship rituals, and to exalt their ethical and moral commitments, without having to make a real “leap of faith.”
For some who enter into deep ritual practice, however, the “leap” nevertheless happens through a mystical “encounter with God.” In a state of altered consciousness induced by prayer, meditation, dance, fasting, sensory deprivation or other means, people experience the dissolution of their ego boundaries and feel themselves merging with some underlying “super intelligence” or “force of love” or “absolute reality” that seems nearly impossible to describe. For minds comfortable with theological metaphors, “the presence of God” seems the most apt phrase for this astounding merger experience — which is almost always accompanied by the conviction that the unity being perceived, the presence being felt, is more real and fundamental than what we daily perceive as separateness, boundary and polarity.