There are two main ways that we can view the Divine. On one hand, a transcendent God is one which is 'beyond' the mortal plane (metaphorically speaking), and which we need to 'rise up' to reach, or which is simply beyond reach altogether and can only manifest in our lives through Divine intervention which we have no control over, or the acts of holy men. This then invites the racket of priests who become intermediaries for this transcendent God, since the average person has no way whatsoever of reaching beyond the veil, and all of the abuses of power that we know from the past, and which still happen today of course, since the ego doesn't need religious justifications to do its thing. 1
The other type of God is immanent, which is when It is Reality itself. Of course it would be absurd to say that everyone experiences the radical Oneness of Life all of the time, but in principle, an immanent view of the Divine would say that anyone could get in touch with that because there is no inherent division in Reality. God is my own conscious experience, when it isn't filtered by my self, not a character that can punish me if I say or do the wrong things.
Both metaphors for the Divine have their truth. I say 'metaphor' because this is all that we can use when talking about metaphysical truths. Saying that God is 'outside' and needs to be 'worked towards', or that God is 'deep inside all of us' and simply needs us to 'look through the veil' are both valid if we take them non-literally, if we realize that God cannot be a "thing" out there that I can locate in space and time and make my way towards through some type of method, or ritual, or belief system, but is instead experience itself. In that sense, immanence is "more correct", in that the language it uses is less misleading, but everything can be corrupted by the literal, self-informed self.
If we start to literally believe that God is everywhere, all the time (notice the spatio-temporal terms already), then why work at anything? Why strive? Who says that a situation, or a life, is better than another? Now of course there is truth in such statements, but I hope you can see how the worm of the unconscious ego is wriggling in those questions, because it is not asking those out of genuine curiosity, but in order to relinquish responsibility.
Immanence invites us to see the play in everything, the open game of life, the vast, endless sky as a metaphor for the Infinity of everything, the baffling comedy of everyday situations, whereas transcendence asks us to take each moment deathly seriously, to realize how prone we are to waste time and make excuses, to see how much we run away from difficulties, and how afraid we are of actually living.
Immanence, interpreted egoically, can lead to what I called techno-dharma, the chimera of spirituality and techno-optimism. If God is immanent, everywhere we look (and do not look), then surely machines are just as conscious as human beings right? In that case, there is nothing truly divine about human beings, and we should just embrace technological change heh? Who is to say that we wouldn't become more conscious if we started fusing with machines? How could the mind or the ego be demonic if they are part of the same Reality as everything good is in?
It is so easy for the self-informed self to fabricate justifications for its deceit. This is why it is so important to be able to step out of any given frame, and see its statements and assumptions for what they are. Self-deception on the inside doesn't feel like an external entity whispering things to you, instead it feels like doing and thinking what is most obvious, given your current (unconscious) state of perception. Immanence, when literally interpreted, is prone to all kinds of self-delusion. As is the case for transcendence, which I didn't linger on much here, because I feel like the abuse of power of priests speaks for itself. 2
And the same is true for any worldview. If you interpret the metaphysical grounds of occultism, or panpsychism, or idealism, or anything which is likewise on the fringes, 3 in a literal manner, you will be confusing ideas about Reality with Reality itself. You will start to believe that everything is literally a dream, or that reincarnation literally happens through time 4, or that consciousness is the "substrate" of Reality from which everything emerges, 5 on and on.
But that doesn't mean that there isn't any truth in the principle of karma, or in divination through tarot cards, or in saying that everything is conscious, even atoms, or that we can experience subtler planes of reality by attuning ourselves to them, or that astrology can be a useful guide. I am not a material scientist who scoffs at those things, but I find it important to put them in their right place, because ultimately, nothing in Reality is purely literal.
We can derive many good explanations from literal frames, which is of course what science does, but what anything is, is fundamentally a mystery. This is obviously true for God, or the Universe, or Reality, or consciousness, and the "big questions" of life, but this is even true for the "mundane". What is the sky? What is a tree? What is music? What is water? What is the body? Who is my father? Who am I? What is existence? Why is there something rather than nothing? None of those can be answered literally, which is why the best thing to do is to say nothing, and experience them directly.
Yes, in that sense, I have an immanent view of God, but of course, transcendence has much to teach us, especially in our times that foster laziness, apathy, mediocrity, lack of discipline, and the erosion of boundaries everywhere. The conscious I, the I "behind" my self, is the Divine, but this doesn't mean we should put the daunting task of self-mastery on the back-burner. God is everywhere, but It will never show up for irresponsible, immature and mediocre people.
1 Arguably though, even monsters have a certain form of theology, or at least some idea of what the nature of Evil is, and where goodness falls in relationship to that, so you could say that everyone has a religion in a sense.
2 Darren Allen, as usual is the light that sparked those thoughts for me, and explains very well the fundamental problem with priests, both of the past and of today, the priests we now call 'professionals' or 'scientists'.
3 It's becoming difficult to say what is on the fringes these days, because the second religiosity of the West described by Spengler pushes people towards all kinds of wacky beliefs, on top of good old Christianity, but I assume that those are still fairly fringe.
4 What sense does it make to speak of "life after death" if death is also the death of the spatio-temporal self? The self is what produces our sense of time to begin with, therefore there is no "afterlife" because death puts an end to time itself.
5 Emergence is a temporal concept, but consciousness is beyond space and time. Thus, matter doesn't "emerge from" consciousness, nor does consciousness "emerge" from matter.
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Spirituality Plasticspirituality Metaphor Literality Chimera
2026-08-27