The definition of God
Every definition I was handed turned out to be a bigger version of a person. The one that finally worked does not add anything to the room.
By Sovandarapor (James) Kong · · Nondual
Nearly every business in Phnom Penh keeps a spirit house near the gate. The one at ours is concrete, painted, up on a post at about eye height, and most mornings there is a can of orange soda in front of it with the straw already pushed in, so the drinking is easy. Nobody who puts it there would call that God. It is closer to keeping a neighbour in a good mood.
I have never had a definition of God that was as useful as that can of soda. The word always arrived attached to a picture. A person, larger than the people here, somewhere else, with opinions about me. You get two moves with a picture like that. Believe it, or throw it out. Both moves treat the picture as the thing being discussed, which is why the argument between the two never goes anywhere. A believer and an atheist can spend an evening disagreeing about the same cartoon.
The definition that finally did something for me came out of Vedanta, and the first thing it does is refuse to be a picture. The Taittiriya Upanishad gives three words. The real, the knowing, the limitless. Not a being who is real, knowing and limitless. Those three words are the whole definition. And the word usually translated as God in that context, Brahman, is not a name at all. It means the vast. You could not use it to address anybody.
Take those three words seriously for ten minutes and they start cutting things away. Limitless means it cannot be one item among other items, because an item has an edge where it stops and the next thing starts. So it is not a being. It is not the biggest being. Real means it is not somewhere else waiting to be reached, because whatever is somewhere else is not here, and half of what exists would then be outside it. So no journey. And knowing means it is not an object you could be shown, because it is the side of the transaction that does the knowing. You do not get to see it the way you see the soda can.
What is left when you cut all that away sounds like nothing, and I understand the reflex to say so. But notice what happened to the usual question. Does God exist. Under this definition that question comes apart in your hands, because existence is not a property this thing has, like a car having a colour. Existence is what the word is pointing at. Asking whether existence exists is not deep, it is just badly formed. Which means the question I had been arguing about for years was the wrong shape, and no amount of evidence on either side was ever going to settle it.
The thing this definition costs you is company. There is nobody in it. Nobody to thank when the shipment clears customs, nobody to blame at four in the morning, nothing that could be offended by the soda being warm. A definition of God with no one in it cannot do the job that most people actually want the word to do, which is to make the universe someone you can talk to. I notice that the spirit house at the gate is honest about wanting that, and my definition is not honest about wanting it, it just quietly cannot supply it.
And here is my own suspicion about myself. I like this definition partly because nothing can land a punch on it. You cannot disprove existence. You cannot find a fossil that embarrasses it. There is a kind of belief that survives by retreating until it no longer says anything, and a definition that is safe from every objection is exactly what that looks like from the outside. I hold that against it.
What keeps me from throwing it out is that it does ask for something. Not agreement. It asks you to check whether the one thing you never manage to put in front of yourself, the one doing the looking right now, has any edge you can find. That is a small, boring, first person test, available in a chair, and it is either honest or it is a trick I have not caught yet. I have not caught it yet.
The soda still goes out every morning. I have stopped thinking of it as a rival theory.