
by Gary 'Z' McGee
June 07, 2025
from
Self-InflictedPhilosophy Website
Spanish version
Gary Z McGee,
a former Navy Intelligence Specialist turned
philosopher, is the author of
'Birthday Suit of God' and
'The Looking
Glass Man.'
His works are inspired by the great philosophers of the
ages and his wide-awake view of the modern world. |

-
Saint Veronica with the Veil -
Touched by
The Clayshaper.
Original piece by
Mattia Preti circa 1655-1660.
"We are not human beings
having a spiritual experience.
We are
spiritual beings
having a
human experience."
Pierre Teilhard de
Chardin
God is not a bearded man in the sky, nor a cosmic judge tallying
your sins...
The anthropomorphized deity - crafted in our image, bloated
with human flaws and petty desires - is,
a relic of a belief system
that's crumbling under the weight of its own contradictions.
To move forward spiritually, not religiously, we must redefine God
as the Infinite Interconnectedness of All Things.
Anything less is
nothing at all...!
This is about shedding attachments to outdated myths
and embracing a reality where the divine is the pulse of existence
itself - raw, boundless, and indifferent to our egos.
William James nailed it when he said,
"The world we see that seems so insane is the
result of a belief system that is not working.
To perceive the world differently, we must be
willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away,
expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds."
The insanity of our world - its wars, its tribalism, its obsession
with control - stems from clinging to a God made in our likeness, a
deity we can manipulate or blame.
This anthropomorphic God is a
cage, locking us into outdated cycles of fear and
division.
To break
free, we must practice healthy nonattachment by letting the Phoenix
of nonattachment rise out of the ashes of our attachments.
Burn the
old idols.
Let them go.
Build something beautiful out of chaos and
ash...!
The idea of God as an interconnected concept isn't new, but it's
radical in its demand for humility.
It asks us to stop pretending
we're the center of the universe...!
As
J. MCucker put it,
"Rivers do
not drink their own water; trees do not eat their own fruit; the sun
does not shine on itself, and flowers do not spread their fragrance
for themselves.
Living for others is a rule of nature, we are all
born to help each other - no matter how difficult it is."
Nature
doesn't hoard; it flows.
God, as the web binding all things, isn't a
solo act - it's the rhythm of give and take, the dance of particles
and galaxies, the unspoken contract of existence.
To live
spiritually is to align with this flow, to stop grasping at outdated
"truths" and start participating by co-creating new, ever-evolving
truths.
But here's the thing:
this shift isn't comfortable.
It's a knife to
the ego.
As Eric Hoffer wrote,
"It is the pull of opposite poles
that stretches souls. And only stretched souls make music."
To see
God as an interconnected whole, you must hold both the light and the
shadow, as Jung said:
"Anyone who perceives
his shadow and his light
simultaneously sees himself from two sides and thus gets in the
middle."
This isn't about picking a side - good or evil, belief or atheism
- but
about standing in the tension of both.
It's about seeing yourself as
both the thread and the weaver in the cosmic tapestry.
That tension,
that stretch, is where the music of the soul begins to sing.
Mark Twain's sharp wit cuts through the haze,
"The easy confidence
with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to
suspect that my own is also."
Religious certainty - whether it's
worshipping a sky daddy or smugly dismissing all faith - is a trap...!
It's the opposite of discovery...
As Rick Rubin said,
"Living in discovery is at all times preferable
to living through assumptions."
To redefine God as The Infinite
Interconnectedness of All Things is to live in discovery, to
question every inherited belief, to let go of the need to be right.
It's edgy because it demands you to face the void of your own
ignorance and find meaning not in answers, but in the questions that
naturally arise.
Clinging to any fixed idea of God - whether it's a deity with a white-list or a cold, materialist void
- buries you in the past.
Spirituality, not religion, is about staying alive, in the moment,
staying open.
It's about squaring the circle:
reconciling the
infinite (God as all things connected) with the finite (your
fleeting, messy life).
You don't do this by praying harder or
arguing louder.
You do it by letting go, by living in the Now, and
by seeing yourself as both insignificant and essential to the whole.
As Bukowski said,
"I wish to believe but belief is a
graveyard."
This isn't a call to abandon faith, but to
redefine it...!
Stop
pretending God is a personified puppet pulling strings or a cosmic
vending machine for your prayers.
God is the Infinite
Interconnectedness of all things - every atom, every thought, every
act of kindness or cruelty.
To move forward spiritually,
is to
embrace nonattachment, to let go of the need to control or define
the divine.
It's to stand in the middle, stretched between light and
shadow, making music in the tension.
Anything less is just white
noise in a dark matter universe.
Square the circle by remaining ahead of the curve.
Keep things in
perspective by trumping ego-driven attachment with soul-driven
nonattachment.
Admit to yourself that we as a species created God as
a "technology of ecstasy" to help us with our mortal angst and
existential ennui.
God was merely the absolute Somethingness that we
ushered in to trump the absolute Nothingness of our own
impermanence.
Which is fine...
We just need to admit it, elevate
ourselves above the tragicomedy of an anthropomorphized deity, and
simply redefine God as the Infinite Interconnectedness of All
Things...!
We do this by always remembering, as Joseph Campbell said,
"God is an infinite sphere, whose center is
everywhere and circumference nowhere."
So let all your dogmatic baggage slide off you like dead skin.
Parochialism is mere water off a duck's back, comical and laughable.
Read all the Bibles and Korans and Bhagavad Gitas and Talmuds and
Tao Te Chings and then let them burn in the heat death of your own
unconquerable Phoenix Fire...
Rise out of their ashes with a muscle
memory so powerful that false and outdated Gods bow and weep at the
feet of your true and updated Infinite Interconnectedness of All
Things...
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