The "I" is an "It"

The world to the human self is a world thought of by its self.
But is the human self which has entered the world at a late
hour in eternity's time an unprecedented pioneer in trying to
blaze a path in a spiritual void, in trying to create ideas out of
nothing, music out of chaos? Is the human mind a glowworm
in the dark, attempting all alone to illumine the wide expanse
of eternity?
      Only they who live in a prison of conceit can claim that a human
is alone and the only one who knows. Anyone whose mind is
not dteachf from their sense of the ineffable will find it impos-
sible to conceive that a human has the peremptory power to think
to the exclusion of any other spirit, as if the world were un-
premeditated, its meaning-qualities precarious, depending ex-
clusively on the mind of humanity. It is absurd even though it may 
be conceivable to assume that a human is the only being endowed
with mental and spiritual abilities.
      A human is never the first in thinking about any being, in per-
forming that strange operation of converting a thing into an
object of thought; at least, they do not consider themself to be
the first. The explorer, obtaining the first glimpse of an un-
known island, cannot believe that all the beauty and grandeur
they encountered had never been seen, never thought of, never
appreciated, until they arrived. In the daily routine of thinking it
seems to us that the self is the only active factor, the only
power that counts; the world is just material to be utilized.
And so are ideas—commodities to be expanded and consumed
according to desire. It is different in the life of independent,
creative souls who approach the world not as self-inflated mas-
ters, as self-celebrating subjects. They abandon all they know
to become receptive, to become a focus in which the lumi-
nousness of the world may be captured. Creative insight is not
brought about by computations. It comes as a response within
an experience in which the meaning of things imposes its force
upon the experient.
      To the sense of the ineffable the world is not virgin soil. The world
is and is thought of. Eternity is the memory of God. The
world stands in front of us, while God walks behind us.
      The more deeply alert we become to the inwardness in
which all things are engrossed and to the mystery of being
which we share with all things, the more deeply we realize the
object-nature of the self. We begin to understand that what is 
an "I" to our minds is an "It" to God. This is why object-con-
sciousness rather than self-consciousness is the starting point
for our thoughts about God. It is in our object-consciousness
that we first learn to understand that God is more than the
divine.

The Thought of God has No Façade

Accustomed to thinking in categories of space, we conceive of
God as being vis-à-vis ourselves, as if we were here and God 
were there. We think of God in the likeness of things, as if
God were a thing among things, a being among beings.
      Entering the meditation about the ultimate, we must rid our-
selves of the intellectual habit of converting reality into an
object of our minds. Thinking of God is totally different from
thinking about all other matters; to apply the usual logical de-
vices would be like trying to blow away a tempest with a
breath. We often fail in trying to understand God, not because
we do not know how to extend our concepts far enough, but
because we do not know how to begin close enough. To think
of God is not to find God as an object in our minds, but to
find ourselves in God. Religion begins where experience ends,
and the end of experience is a perception of our being per-
ceived.
      To have knowledge of a thing is to have its concept at our
mind's disposal. Since concept and thing, definition and es-
sence belong to different realms, we are able to conquer and to
own a thing theoretically, while the thing itself may be away
from us, as is the case, for example, in our knowledge of stellar
nebulae.
      God is neither a thing nor an idea; God is within and beyond
all things and all ideas. Thinking of God is not beyond but 
within God. The thought of God would not be in front of us,
if God were not behind it.
      The thought of God has no façade. We are all in it as soon
as it is all in us. To conceive it is to be absorbed by it, like the
present in the past, in a past that never dies.
      Our knowing God and God's reality are not apart. To think
of God is to open our minds to God's all-pervading presence, to
our being replete with God's presence. To think of things means
to have a concept within the mind, while to think of God is
like walking under a canopy of thought, like being sur-
rounded by thought. God remains beyond our reach as long as
we do not know that our reach is within God; that God is the
Knower and we are the known, that to be means to be thought
of by God.
      Thinking of God is made possible by God being the subject
and by our being the object. To think of God is to expose
ourselves to God, to conceive ourselves as a reflection of God's
reality. God cannot be limited to a thought. To think means to
set aside or to separate an object from the thinking subject.
But in setting God apart, we gain an idea and lose God. Since
God is not away from us and we are not beyond God, God can
never become the mere object of our thought. As, in thinking
about ourselves, the object cannot be detached from the sub-
ject, so in thinking of God the subject cannot be detached
from the object. In thinking of God, we realize that it is
through God that we think of God. Thus, we must think of
God as the subject of all, as the life of our life, as the mind
of our mind.
      If an idea had an ability to think and to transcend itself, it
would be aware of its being at this moment a thought of my
mind. The religious person has such an awareness of being
known by God, as if they were an object, a thought in God's 
mind.
      To the philosopher God is an object, to people at prayer God
is the subject. Their aim is not to possess God as a concept of
knowledge, to be informed about God, as if God were a fact
among facts. What they crave for is to be wholly possessed
by God, to be an object of God's knowledge and to sense it. The
task is not to know the unknown but to be penetrated with it;
not to know but to be known to God, to expose ourselves to
God rather than God to us; not to judge and to assert but to
listen and to be judged by God.
      God's knowledge of humanity precedes humanity's knowledge of God,
while humanity's knowledge of God comprehends only what God
asks of humanity. This is the essential content of prophetic
revelation.

God's Vision of Humanity

The Bible is primarily not humanity's vision of God but God's
vision of humanity. The Bible is not humanity's theology but God's
anthropology, dealing with humanity and what God asks of humanity
rather than with the nature of God. God did not reveal to the
prophets eternal mysteries but God's knowledge and love of
humanity. It was not the aspiration of Israel to know the Absolute
but to ascertain what God asks of humanity; to commune with God's
will rather than with God's essence.
      In the depth of our trembling, all that we can utter is the
awareness of our being known to God. A human cannot see God,
but a human can be seen by God. God is not the object of a discov-
ery but the subject of revelation.
      There are no concepts which we could appoint to designate
the greatness of God or to represent God to our minds. God is
not a being, whose existence could be either confirmed or de-
scribed by our thoughts. God is a reality, in the face of which,
when becoming alive to its meaning, we are overtaken with a
feeling of infinite unworthiness.

Is God Unknowable?

While modern humanity has a poor sense of mystery, humanity is willing
to accept a principle of agnosticism as a panacea to all theolog-
ical and metaphysical problems. Humanity is ready to believe that
if there is a supreme being, the difference between God and 
humanity is far greater than the difference between unconscious
matter and conscious humanity, that humanity, consequently, may know
as much about God as a bubble knows about the theory of
relativity, that God has nothing to do with this wretched
globe; that God is aloft and so far above the forms of existence
known to us that nothingness alone is where God dwells. It is
as plausible today to move God beyond all beyonds as it was
once to sense a spirit within a tree or a stone. Yet, humanity who insists
that God is in every way unknowable claims to know 
that what humanity says cannot be known. Humanity claims to know that
God lives in a jail of inscrutable unrelatedness, behind the bars
of infiniteness and wholly otherness.
      The term "knowledge," in the sense in which it is used in
regard to finite things, is, indeed, inapplicable to the existence
of God. Yet, there is more contained in our awareness than
the certainty that God exists. If to be immersed in thought
means to wear opinions on the head like plumes, than we are
witless; but if thoughts are like blood that circulates in us,
then they may be found at a sensitive soul's finger tips. We
often know God unknowingly and fail to know God when
insisting upon knowing.
      Humanity is akin to the divine by what it is, not only by what
it attains. The essence of humanity's spirit which wrestles with God
who is beyond the ineffable and often prevails must, indeed,
be pertinent to God. And if its spirit ever rises to reach out
for God, it is the divine in humanity that accounts for its exaltation:
"The spirit of humanity is the lamp of the Lord, searching all the
inward parts." (Proverbs 20:27)
      God would be beyond our reach if we were to search for
God within the maze in the light of our mental fireworks. But
we are "dust and ashes"; dust of the earth and ashes from God's
fire, and the mind, stirring up the soul, may fan the embers of
God's fire which are still aglow. To ask, then, why we believe, is
like asking why we perceive. Our trust in God is God (Deuter-
onomy Rabba 1,10).
      We do not need words in order to communicate with the
mystery. The ineffable in us communes with the ineffable
beyond us. We do not have to express God when we let our
self continue to be God's, the echo of God's expression.
      Resorting to the divine invested in us, we do not have to
bewail the fact of God's shore being so far away. In our sincere
compliance with God's commands, the distance disappears. It is
not in our power to force the beyond to become here; but we
can transport the here into the beyond.

Our Knowledge Is an Understatement

Life, as we see it, is not all a wilderness of follies. There are in
it both fertility and sterility, both meaning and absurdity. Is it
conceivable that wisdom, music, love, order, beauty, holiness
have come out of chaos, out of something lifeless, inferior to
you and me? Is that startling, unfathomable wealth of spirit
the product of an accident? It would be absurd to assume that
the power in us which created laws, ideals, symphonies and
holiness is contained only in us and exists nowhere else.      
      No one will deny that there are people who despised the gain
of oppression, who shake their hands from holding bribes.
Whatever their motives, we all revere their way. Even though
we may be unable to attain perfect righteousness, we at least
cherish it as an ideal, as the finest of norms, and are even able
to implement it to some degree. To assert that such an ideal
and its implementation are the monopoly of humanity and unknown
to the Supreme Being, that a human is the only being endowed
with intellectual and moral qualities, that a human is superior to the
Supreme Being, is something which is both absurd and revolt-
ing, a folly that can be maintained only as long as humanity sees
only itself and its specious glory, and dissipates with the
first glance at their true situation. A Human who has ever sensed the
endless superiority of the ineffable is wise enough to admit
that God cannot be inferior to any other being, that we could
not own the power for goodness if it were lacking in God. If
there is morality in us, it must eminently be in God. If we
possess the vision of justice, it must eminently be in God. 
Even the cry of despair: There is no justice in heaven!—is a
cry in the name of justice, a justice that cannot have come
out of us and still be missing in the source of ourselves. Those
who are alive to the ineffable will refuse to accept a source of
energy called the first causeas expressing the highest. Those
who know that to assert that the highest is endowed with spirit
is a gross understatement; that rather than formulate it,they
would seek to hide in silence...

Knowledge or Understanding

It is more appropriate to describe the ideas we acquire in our
wrestling with the ineffable as understanding of God. For if
God is neither an abstract principle nor a thing, but a unique
living being, our approach to God cannot be through the
procedures of knowledge but through a process of under-
standing. We know through induction or inference, we un-
derstand through intuition; we know a thing, we understand
a personality; we know a fact, we understand a hint. Know-
ledge implies familiarity with, or even the mastery of, some-
thing; understanding is an act of interpreting something which
we only know by its expression and through inner agreement
with it. There is no sympathetic knowledge but there is sym-
pathetic understanding. Understanding, significantly, is a syn-
onym for agreement. It is through agreement that we find a
way of understanding.
      The ineffable we may know and recognize. Yet only rarely
do people learn how to live in ultimate agreement, and this is
why they so often miss the way which leads from the ineffable
to God. In the prophets the ineffable became a voice, disclos-
ing that God is not a being that is apart and away from
ourselves, as ancient people believed, that God is not an enigma,
but justice, mercy; not only a power to which we are account-
able but also a pattern for our lives. God is not the Unknown,
God is the Lord, the God of Abraham; out of stillness of
endless ages came compassion and guidance.