You've already known. You just didn't have the word for it.
A quiet corner of the blog for the thing that keeps happening, and the old, sharp minds who already had a word for it.
By Sovandarapor (James) Kong · · Nondual
I want to tell you what the word God actually means.
Not the version handed to you at seven years old. Not the one you quietly put down somewhere in your twenties. Not the one people fight about online.
The one almost nobody bothers to define, which is why most of us spend our lives either defending or rejecting something we could not describe if asked.
It takes about ten minutes and it is simpler than you are expecting.
First, the word.
I know what happened when you read it up there. Something tightened. Either you are in, candles and prayer and all of it, or you checked out the second you saw it because you have heard enough.
I get it. The word carries a lot of luggage.
The luggage was never God. The luggage is the picture we were handed. An old man on a throne, a judge keeping score, something far off that you have to be good enough to reach.
That picture was always going to fall apart. It was built to.
Forget it. We are starting over.
There is a stretch of road near Wat Phnom where I have been stuck in traffic more times than I can count. One afternoon, on the back of a moto, everything happened at once. A monk crossed in saffron like the road belonged to him. A woman worked a baguette cart with one hand. A kid slept in a hammock strung between two trees while the entire city went off around him.
And for about a second, watching it blur past, something in me went quiet. Not peaceful. Quieter than that, and further down, like slipping under the surface of a pool where the noise stops.
I did not mention it to anyone. There was no place to put it in the conversation I had been having ten minutes earlier, so I wiped the dust off my face and Phnom Penh closed over it.
But it keeps happening.
At the riverfront when the sun drops over the Tonlé Sap. In a temple in Siem Reap, standing in front of a face carved into stone eight hundred years ago, feeling, somehow, like it is looking back. In a guesthouse upcountry, fan on, rain on the roof, everything suddenly simple and enough.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to find out that this has a name, and that people worked it out a very long time ago.
In the oldest Sanskrit texts, the word for God is Brahman. And it does not mean a person. It does not mean a being. It literally means the vast.
That which has no limit.
That sounds like poetry until you take it literally, which is what the texts actually intend.
No limit means no limit. And there are only three ways anything in this world can be limited.
A thing can be limited in three ways: by space, by time, or by being one particular object and not another.
You are here, not there. You were born, you will die. You are you, not someone else.
That is the cage every single thing lives inside. Including you.
Now imagine something with no cage at all.
No limit in space. There is nowhere it is not. Not in the temple. Not in the bar. Not in the worst hour of your worst night. Nowhere it is absent.
No limit in time. There was never a moment before it. There will never be a moment after. It does not begin. It does not end.
No limit in object. There is nothing in the universe separate from it. Not one thing. Not the monk. Not the moto driver. Not you reading this right now.
One thing. Everywhere. Always. Nothing outside of it.
That is the word God, stripped clean.
Because if God really has no limit in space, then God has to be right here. Not in heaven. Not after you die. Not somewhere you have to earn your way to.
It has to be in the room with you, in the traffic, in the afternoon you are having.
Pick anything in front of you. Your hand. The wall. The cup of coffee gone cold.
Now strip away the name. The shape. The colour. The story.
What is left?
It exists.
That quiet, stubborn, undeniable fact. This is here.
Now look at something completely different. New object, new name, new everything.
Same thing underneath. Same raw is-ness.
The cup and the wall and your hand are all different on the surface. Different shapes, different names, different functions. But the existence inside them is not different. It is the same existence. One continuous ocean of it, and every object in the world is a wave in that ocean. Different shapes on top. Same water all the way down.
The Tonlé Sap and the puddle from last night''s rain are not having two different experiences of being wet.
That ocean. That pure existence itself. That is what the old texts mean when they say God.
You have been swimming in it your whole life.
And then it goes one layer deeper. This is the part that changes everything.
The awareness you are using to read this right now.
The thing noticing your thoughts without being the thoughts. The part of you that watches you worry, watches you laugh, watches you scroll. The thing that was there when you were seven years old and is somehow still here now, unchanged, watching.
That is not yours.
Every experience you have ever had, every single one, happened inside consciousness. Consciousness is the one thing common to every experience you have ever had. Without it, nothing is known. Nothing exists for you at all.
And it has no edges. No location. No expiration date. Nothing apart from it.
It is the same consciousness that looked out from the faces at Angkor Wat. The same one behind the eyes of the monk who rose at 4am this morning in Siem Reap. Behind every face in every century in every corner of the world.
It was never born. It does not die. It just keeps looking.
It is looking right now, through you.
So that is the word. That is what I mean when I use it.
Not a figure. Not a judge. Not a reward at the end of a long obedient life.
Pure existence. Pure consciousness. The ground everything is standing on. The ocean every wave rises from. The awareness reading these words.
And once you really sit with it, the whole thing flips.
You are not a person searching for God.
You are God, briefly, looking through a person. Forgetting. Remembering. Forgetting again.
Somewhere in you, reading that, something just went quiet.
Not confused. Not even convinced.
Just still. Like you dropped below the surface of something again.
You have felt this before.
That is where we start.
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