One of the most asked spiritual questions on the planet is this: is there a God, or something bigger, and if so, what is it actually like? Most of us are asking it without ever using those words. We are looking for meaning, for something to make sense of our lives, and we call it almost anything except God.
We Are Looking for God Without Saying So
The world today feels big, chaotic and ultra-competitive. The endless scrolling on social media, which shows perfect bodies, faces and lives, feeds an ongoing sense of not feeling enough. What feels real is what comes at us in a relentless stream: the news, the chatter, the noise.
Underneath all of that, we are looking for something to hold it together. We rarely name it as God. Many of us cannot fathom that any divine force or purpose even exists on the earth. The idea that there could be a great mystery underneath it all, holding the answer, is a totally foreign concept.
The Cosmic Web Underneath It All
What I have come to trust, as a Shaman and guide, is that there is a great cosmic web underneath everything. It is benevolent at all times and in all ways. It is designed to teach us, not to punish us.
This matters, because so much of what keeps us from God is the fear that God is keeping score. There is no such thing as a curse. Whatever comes to us is not retribution. It is instruction, offered by something that wants us to become more, not less.
The disconnection most of us feel is not really from God. It is from nature, and from the source, and those turn out to be the same thing. When we lose our footing in the natural world, we lose our footing in the mystery. The separation is one separation, wearing two faces.
Not Separate From It
The oldest mistake is imagining God as something outside of us, watching from a distance. When we pass through a certain gateway, a certain initiation, we remember that God, the Divine, the Mystery, is not something separate from ourselves.
A single drop of water is not separate from the ocean itself. This is not a comforting idea to lean on. It is a description of what is actually so. The thing we are looking for is not on the far side of a wall. It is the water we are already made of.
The earth, with all of its beings, is a huge school of love. It is perhaps the one place in the universe in which souls can individuate from the collective consciousness into an individual. We come here not to dissolve into the whole, but to become someone specific, and then to remember we were never cut off from the whole to begin with.
The Medicine Is in the Problem
If the cosmic web is designed to teach us, then the trouble in our lives is not an interruption of the lesson. It is the lesson. The work is to get all of the teaching out of the problem, into every crevice of it.
I think of it like reaching a finger into the bottom of the jar to get the last little bit of peanut butter out. We tend to skim the surface of our difficulties and move on. The mess, the madness and the true magic are all below the surface, and that is exactly where we have to go.
That is where the medicine is. Being fully realized, enlightened, is not about rising above the problem. It is about getting the full teaching out of it, so we are changed by what it was meant to give us. Nothing is wasted in a school of love.
What God Is Like
So what is it really like, this thing underneath everything? It is benevolent, without exception. It teaches rather than punishes. It is close enough to be our own substance, not a force in the sky.
And it is not sentimental about our smallness. I am here only for a breath, a flicker of light between shadows. The world will fade, names will be forgotten, even stars will fall. Even stars die.
And yet, in that breath, in that flicker, love blooms. The love I give, the love I am, outlives the silence. Whatever God is, it is the thing that makes love the one part of us that does not die with the rest.
The Quiet Truth
There is a God, or something bigger, and it is not separate from us. It is the ocean we mistook ourselves for a stray drop of. It teaches through everything that happens, and the harder the teaching, the deeper the medicine buried inside it.
We are here for a breath, learning to love inside the school of love. Together with God, Love’s light remains. I will meet you on the other side.
In Everything We Trust, Sylvia Solit
