MenuON DEEPAK CHOPRA'S SEVEN IMAGES OF GOD
The Omnipresence
of God is a traditional teaching in most religions. The claim that God is
always present everywhere often leads thoughtful young people to ask why they
can’t see God. Taking that inquiry one step further, avowed atheists (who speak
on ABC TV’s Q&A, for example) can
insist they will only believe in God’s existence when they personally do see
God.
Yet, no one can make God enter the
world; for God is more real than we are.
Indeed, as pointed out by Deepak
Chopra (How to Know God, 2000; p. 10),
‘the real question is whether God might be here already and going unnoticed.’
So, let’s consider this. Everyone today
knows that we can only see a small proportion of all that exists. Richard
Dawkins (The God Delusion, 2006) rightly
says that human senses have developed to detect only a narrow range of physical
things. ‘Our brains have evolved to help our bodies find their way around the
world on the scale at which those bodies operate’ (p.368).
Scientific instruments
have revealed the existence of very small things like neutrinos and very large
things like nebulae. Yet, as Dawkins points out (p.370): ‘no action that our
wild ancestors ever had to perform, no decision that they ever had to take, would
have been assisted by an understanding’ of such extreme magnitudes.
From that perspective, what we see and
hear and touch are objects that have significance for our physical survival
from day-to-day. ‘We live near the centre of a cavernous museum of magnitudes,
viewing the world with sense organs and nervous systems that are equipped to
perceive and understand only a small middle range of sizes, moving at a middle
range of speeds’ (p.363).
Someone looking at the world through a
larger lens than that of neo-Darwinist evolutionary biology, however, might note
that "sense organs and nervous systems” don’t understand anything at
all, for understanding is an intrinsically first-personal activity of the
mind.
Just as a mirror doesn’t see
anything but we can see things in a mirror, so too there is no understanding of
any objects unless it is by some subject. And subjects, such as the human beings
we are, inevitably find themselves facing questions of meaning, death and
destiny that have no perceptible objects.
To deal with matters of thought that
reach beyond the immediate continuance of our physical body, human beings in
virtually all times and places have devised ideas of invisible spiritual
reality and of an origin for everything in a Source, or Supreme Being, called "God”.
Whatever the ultimate divine reality is
in itself, out of respect for the fact of our neurobiology, it’s hard to deny
that human images of God must conform to what human senses, brain and mind can
detect, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to conceive of God.
Deepak Chopra, who trained as a medical
doctor, charts seven advancing stages in theology from the viewpoint of what he
identifies as the brain’s seven basic responses to stimulus. If the reality of God is an invisible
presence in, throughout and beyond the world, then any experience we have of
God (and any image formed to explain that experience) must correlate with one
of the brain’s seven possible responses to experience.
The correlation between images of God
and the responses of the brain are as follows:
1. A God who
protests us like a parent stems from the fight or flight response
2. A God who
makes laws and rules over society stems from the reactive response
3. A God who
brings peace stems from the restful awareness response
4. A God who
encourages us to reach our full potential stems from the intuitive
response
5. A God who
inspires us to explore and discover stems from the creative response
6. A God who
makes miracles stems from the visionary response
7. A God who
brings us back into ultimate unity stems from the sacred response
Chopra’s suggestion is that our image
of God becomes more sophisticated as we advance on our spiritual journey from
infancy to enlightenment. God initially seems to be like a superhuman parent
telling us what to do. After progressing through the various stages, however, we
grow to realise that "God” is just a name for the Oneness of existence, life
and mind – just a way of describing the energy or spirit or love that
interconnects everything to everything else, including us.
Once we grasp that all human concepts
of God are just different ways of understanding the source and substance of ourselves
and all that exists, then clearly – because God is everything – God is always present
everywhere!