Everyone is seeking God, but most don't know it
A hidden universal truth of the human experience
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A number of previous posts have thoroughly explored several aspects of the ideal around which the quest for spiritual, devotional, and mystical realism in fiction revolves, that of “simple, devotional stories that inspire people to seek God”:
“Simple”: Simplicity vs. sophistication in mystical fiction part 1 and part 2.
“Devotional”: Emotion, inpletion, and devotion part 1 and part 2.
“Inspire people”: The nature of inspiration, part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4.
The one piece that remains is that final infinitive: “to seek God.” What does that seeking mean, exactly? Does it look the same for everyone, or are there different levels or expressions of it that could appear in fiction? And if there are variations, then how might they manifest in stories to give readers the motivational inspiration to engage in that search?
We’ll be delving into various aspects of this question here and in various upcoming (but not sequential) posts; in this present post we’ll begin with the core truth, as expressed in the title, that everyone in the world is seeking God even if few actually think about their lives in those terms. As such, this fundamental hunger is the hidden motivation behind all human activity.
Seeking God as universal to the human experience
If fiction is to inspire, that is, motivate ordinary readers to seek God in some manner, then the task must be made real to them. “Seeking God” must be shown as inviting and thoroughly feasible possibility, as something they can do in their own lives in today’s world, rather than something reserved for people in a past age, people in special circumstances (like desert hermits), or people with extra-ordinary characteristics.
To put it another way, this idea of “seeking God” at first glance may conjure images of religious fanaticism—like self-flagellating ascetics, recluses, and people who can’t relate to everyday reality. As Thomas Merton said in The Silent Life:
Let us face the fact that the monastic vocation tends to present itself to the modern world as a problem and as a scandal.
In the Bhagavad Gita (The Song of God), Lord Krishna, speaking on behalf of the Divine, flatly admits that “Out of thousands, one strives for spiritual attainment.” (VII:3) Jesus admits the same in Matthew 7:14, saying, “Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.”
No surprise, then, that “seeking God” is not something you talk about openly in mixed company. People are far more comfortable if you simply became a drunk, because then they could just shake their heads and say, “What a pity.” To seek God, on the other hand, is both a challenge and a reproach to their own choices in life. And most people don’t want challenges. Still less do they want reproaches.
This caution is true even in a country like India, as related in a story told by Swami Kriyananda (J. Donald Walters):
I went to a temple once, Vishnupad Temple, and I was perhaps the first Westerner ever admitted into that temple. I meditated for a long time there. Afterwards, the priest asked me, “What do you pray for when you meditate?”
I said, “Well, I pray to see God. I pray to become one with Him. I pray to just merge in Him.”
He replied, “Ah! Beautiful, beautiful!”
“What do you mean, ‘beautiful’?” I demanded. “Isn’t that what you go to temples for?”
He said, “Oh no! Nobody prays for that! They just pray for money and job and wife and husband and children and power over their enemies and all these things. Nobody prays for God!”1
It’s necessary, then, to take the idea of seeking God out of the realm of zealotry and radicalism and into something that’s actually universal to the human experience, even if it’s not what most people actually think is happening. By doing so, we can then ask how fiction can serve what is not only a universal goal, but a universal need, encouraging readers to think, "Maybe I could do that myself?"
What every human longs for
Whether people know it or not, and regardless of whether people consider themselves spiritually or religiously inclined, the truth is that everyone in the world is on what’s often called “the spiritual path.” Not a spiritual path in terms of specific practices and such, but the spiritual path, the singular progression of inner growth and transformation, however roundabout it might be, that eventually ends in the deep and permanent fulfillment that everyone desires.
But what exactly is that fulfillment? This is a question—the question, really—that people have grappled with ever since human beings were capable of asking it. And the great teachers of the world’s wisdom traditions have provided a singularly clear answer: the lasting fulfillment that each of us seeks can be found only in that which is itself eternal, absolute, and transcendent of the individual ego. As C. S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity:
Most people, if they had really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise [...] If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.
This fulfillment that everyone seeks, seemingly of “another world,” has best been articulated by the rishis (sages) of ancient India.2
For starters, they reasoned that that everyone wants continued existence, because without existence, what’s the point? It’s like the comeback that Mariel Hemingway’s character, Meli, delivers in the 1985 movie Creator (one of my all-time favorites, especially Peter O’Toole’s role). In this scene, a few older college professors are hoping to impress the attractive, young, and single Meli with their philosophical profundity:
Professor 1: It’s not that simple, Meli. Epistemologists have been trying to prove for centuries that we exist.
Meli: But if we didn’t exist, how could we do anything?
Professor 2: Yes, but the question is, Meli, how do we know we exist?
Meli: How could we even think about it if we didn’t exist?
Professor 3: Maybe we only think we’re thinking about it?
Meli: Look, why don’t you start out thinking you don’t exist, and see where that gets you?
Second, we want to be aware of our existence because again, without awareness, what’s the point of existing? An existence of unawareness would be to live the life of a rock, so to speak, or even that of a plant. Thus, awareness or consciousness is the second essential part of the fulfillment we all seek.
In philosophical terms, such awareness is sometimes called sentience, which refers to awareness through the faculties of the senses (visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, and tactile). There are, however, other forms of non-sensual awareness, such as spiritual and mystical awareness, which is why the visions of Saint Bernadette Soubirous, for instance, were entirely real to her and but were not visible or audible (that is, sensible) to those who did not share that awareness. Even so, her non-sensual visions effected scientifically observable changes in her physical body, providing an indirect sensual awareness of her experiences.
Finally, even with consciousness, no one would seek such an existence if there’s no joy in it—who ever would desire a conscious, eternal existence of abject misery? No one. That’s why the threat of an eternal damnation combined with the associated promise of escaping that fate (provided you “believe” correctly), has been an effective means of social control for millennia. Even so, the opposite of abject misery must be something more than mere pleasure or a merely comfortable routine (like the fanciful image of plucking a harp in heaven). C. S. Lewis described such a distinction in Surprised by Joy:
[Joy] is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. Apart from that, and considered only in its quality, it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But then Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is.
When we also combine continued, conscious existence with this question of pleasure, we quickly see that by the simple mathematics of dividing a fixed quality by infinity, any finite pleasure or static happiness spread across an eternity of conscious existence equals an inescapable, anguishing monotony otherwise known as zero. No thank you.
Joy or bliss, and more specifically, an inexhaustible, ever-new bliss, is thus also essential to the fulfillment we all seek.
Taking these three components together, the rishis thus summed up the goal in a single Sanskrit term, Satchidananda, which translates as follows:
Ever-Existing (sat, existence, which implies eternal and by extension, omnipotent),
Ever-Conscious (chid, consciousness, and by extension, omniscience),
Ever-New Joy (ananda, bliss, which naturally includes the aspect of love, for we seek love in order to experience joy).
Indeed, Satchidananda is their very word for the One God, the “I AM,” the Absolute, the Supreme Spirit—a conscious, universal, all-encompassing and all-pervasive Presence rather than, as one sage quipped, merely “a venerable personage adorning a throne in some antiseptic corner of the cosmos.”3
In the last analysis, then, everyone in the world is on “the spiritual path” because what lies at the end of all striving, no matter what route one takes or how one seeks, is this permanent, consciously experienced ever-new bliss.
Everyone, in short, is seeking God.
All by-paths yet end in God
As noted earlier, the great teachers of the world’s wisdom traditions have, throughout the ages, reminded us that lasting fulfillment is to be found only in the eternal, which alone is God/Satchidananda.
Of course, most of humanity, however (meaning the remainder of that one out of thousands of which Krishna speaks in the Bhagavad Gita), pays little heed to such a simple truth. They instead seek this ever-existing, conscious bliss in all sorts of things that are shallow and impermanent, such as fleeting emotions and sense pleasures, wealth and material acquisitions, relationships that are subject to the fickleness of human egotism, and even the noble yet impermanent goal of relieving the pains and sufferings of others.
As I wrote in Characters who don’t know how the story will end, part 2, we can delineate this spectrum of human motivation and behavior into four broad patterns or ideas of what people think life is about:4
Self-comforters (sensualists): “The purpose of life is to feel good (especially to indulge my senses through food, entertainment, sex, alcohol, drugs, etc.).”
Seek to avoid pain and experience sensual pleasure or simply comfort, with as little effort as possible. Sense concerns, in other words, override other considerations.
Self-servers (egotists): “The purpose of life is to get mine.”
Seek to advance themselves in the world through creative self-effort, achievement, and acquisition.
Self-sacrificers (idealists): “The purpose of life is to act nobly and uphold honor.”
Seek to serve and even sacrifice themselves for others and/or a greater cause, such as improving the world in some way.
Self-transcenders (saints, aspiring or actual): “The purpose of life is God-realization (to know God in the fullest extent).”
Seek transcendence in a greater reality beyond the individual ego.
As noted in the other post, I say “baseline” here because these patterns represent an individual’s default even though at times one may express qualities of any of the other patterns. Self-comforters can easily become self-sacrificers in a crisis and self-servers might have moments of transcendent inspiration, even as self-sacrificers and aspiring self-transcenders (those who have yet to fully realize God) might descend at times into sensuality or acts of selfish egotism. After those temporary excursions, though, people by and large return to pursuing fulfillment according to the purpose of their baseline pattern.
In that pursuit, one may or may not have an explicit relationship to God and religion. That dimension of relationship is actually orthogonal to this spectrum of purpose and something we’ll discuss in another post. For now, just observe that plenty of people engage in religion not to offer and dissolve one’s very sense of “I, my, me, and mine” into God like the self-transcender seeks to do, but for “what God can do for me” or even “what I can do for God” in terms of service to what one believes is God’s agenda in the world. Faith and religion, in other words, are often employed solely as means to fulfill selfish and egotistical priorities.
Many others, of course, reject the idea of God altogether;5 their views of life’s purpose don’t suggest anything religious or spiritual. There are also those who try to reframe materialistic pursuits like drug abuse and sexual indulgence as a spiritual practice with the claim, as I heard directly from a young relative who has been in and out of rehab, that it “draws me closer to God.” Still others might consider themselves spiritual in a non-religious, moral sense but not in the sense of surrender to and inner communion with the Divine, which is the explicit purpose of the self-transcender. (See Genuine spirituality in fiction, part 2.)
In short, only those in the self-transcender pattern explicitly “seek God,” seek “to know God,” or seek “God-realization” (the mystical oneness discussed in Three literary accounts of mystical union, part 2) and do so for that purpose alone.
Nevertheless, there is a silver living where all these other apparently unspiritual by-paths are concerned. If we look at matters not statically but rather directionally, we can see that the natural consequences and discontents of the other three patterns of behavior inevitably lead people—compel them, really—toward the pattern of the self-transcender. For no matter how much they experience shallow and/or temporary gratifications, they must eventually admit that their thirst for lasting, inner joy remains unquenched.
It’s at that point, when they decide to try a different approach and take a step up to the next higher pattern, that they do grow closer to the true and lasting fulfillment of Satchidananda. And I think to recognize this directionality, driven by the fundamental motivation of seeking God, can give added depth—truth, even—to any kind of fictional character, just as it gives greater insight into the behavior of real human beings.
We’ll delve more into the different transitions between those patterns—and what it means for writing fiction—in later posts. In the meantime, do share your thoughts.
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This version is from a 1996 lecture that I attended personally. Kriyananda also tells the story with slightly different wording in Chapter 10 of his book, The Hindu Way of Awakening: It’s Revelation, It’s Symbols (An Essential View of Religion).
Accounts of which are related by Paramhansa Yogananda in several texts including The Science of Religion and God is For Everyone, along with the first saying in Chapter 6 of The Essence of Self-Realization.
Sri Yukteswar, as quote in Autobiography of a Yogi, Chapter 14, 1946 first edition.
In the previous post I used “Sensualist” for Self-comforters and “Saints (aspiring or actual)” for Self-transcenders, terms that I include in parentheses. I’ve restated these terms to align more with the names of the other patterns and to also suggest that it’s a direction or intent rather than a specific state of being.
Which lies at one extreme of the dimension of relationship, because rejection is yet a form of relationship.
Quite profound. You know, the other day I was asking myself, what is that one thing that makes us human? How can you say, this is human, and not an animal? And the obvious answer is, if they seek God, they are human.