7

God

Some would deny any legitimate use of the word God because it has been misused so much. Certainly it is the most burdened of all human words. Precisely for that reason it is the most imperishable and unavoidable.

MARTIN BUBER, I AND THOU, 123.

One of the greatest stumbling blocks to any effort to plumb the Hebrew Bible is its notion of God. However, any discussion of a prophetic model for the psychedelic drug experience cannot ignore this topic because God plays a necessary role in every element of prophecy. According to the Hebrew Bible, God created and sustains the natural world, including our mind-brain complex through which we experience prophecy. God created and sustains the spiritual world, which one apprehends in the prophetic state. Finally, God is the source, goal, explicator, and final arbiter of prophecy. It is because of this critical role for God in prophecy that I lay out in such detail the material this chapter contains.

I also wish to add a dimension to the understanding of the Hebrew Bible’s notion of God that may be unfamiliar to those who already possess some degree of belief in, and love and knowledge of, God. This additional dimension consists of the metaphysics of the medieval Jewish philosophers, a system that uses the tools and concepts of science to extract certain highly sophisticated principles about God. These principles provide a significantly vaster view of God than a literal interpretation of scripture might otherwise provide.

Consistent with the worldview of the Hebrew Bible, I will be discussing God as a “real thing,” albeit a spiritual one, and not as an archaeological, psychological, cultural, or biological epiphenomenon. While the latter perspectives lend valuable insights into certain aspects of the concept of God, this chapter assumes the Bible’s default position: God exists as God and is not the product of some other underlying process.

The material in this chapter is rather dense, and I will not add to its density by excessively excerpting biblical passages. In chapters 17 and 18, Message and Meaning I and II, I will quote more extensively from the Hebrew Bible in support of particular notions regarding God’s nature and activities, ones that I first introduce here.

While this chapter does not contain many excerpts from the Hebrew Bible, it nevertheless is where I begin to systematically introduce textual verses in support of many of this book’s themes. Therefore this is a good place to comment on my English translations of Hebrew biblical verses.*48

My references are Hebrew to English translations of the Hebrew Bible published by Judaica Press (New York, NY), ArtScroll/Mesorah (Brooklyn, NY), and the Jewish Publication Society (Philadelphia, PA). ArtScroll/Mesorah1 and the Jewish Publication Society2 have each issued a single-volume Hebrew Bible that contains all of its twenty-four books. In addition, all three publishers have published multiple single-book volumes; e.g., Joshua, Song of Songs, and Ezekiel. More or less subtle differences exist in the Hebrew to English translations among this vast number of books, usually reflecting the theological biases of the publisher. When deciding the exact words to choose in presenting the English translations that appear here, I use my own understanding of biblical Hebrew while also considering the rationale each of the various editions uses in its decision making. As a result, my translations may also slightly differ from those that appear in any of the Jewish versions of the Hebrew Bible.

A NOTE ON GOD’S PRONOUN

In earlier versions of this chapter, I experimented with changing God’s third-person pronoun—what in English includes the words he, him, she, her, and it—from the traditional but sometimes problematic He and Him to the non-gendered It. I did this to forestall negative reactions to the male gender connotations that a default masculine pronoun for God may elicit. At first, this change from male-gendered to non-gendered made sense grammatically. There is no non-gendered third-person pronoun it in the Hebrew language. Instead, there is only he and him, and she and her, depending on the gender of the noun. For example, day in Hebrew is a masculine noun. Any reference to day uses masculine forms of verbs, adjectives, and third-person pronouns. Thus, with respect to day, the Hebrew pronoun is the same word that one may translate as it or he. When translating the Hebrew into English, one naturally uses it, not he when referring to day. When speaking of a day’s brightness, we say its brightness, not his brightness.

I similarly tried using It as a non-gendered third-person pronoun for God despite the fact that only the masculine third-person pronoun occurs in the Hebrew Bible when referring to God. In addition to quelling objections by gender-sensitive readers, It also would sidestep the awkward He/She and Him/Her alternative to He and Him. Capitalizing It also provided the dignity that any pronoun of God calls for. I went so far as to change all English translations of biblical verses accordingly. However, further reflection led me to revert back to He and Him in nearly all instances.

While the God of the Hebrew Bible possesses no physical gender, all biblical references to God are in the masculine form. For example, the word for the second-person pronoun you differs in Hebrew depending on the subject’s gender. In all cases of God it is the masculine form of You. I also found only male adjectives describing God. And the text only uses masculine images for God, such as “king” but never “queen.”

Nevertheless, there are instances in which He and Him simply feel too restrictive. Thus, I use It when discussing certain of God’s attributes or actions, if doing so provides a more expansive appreciation for what the text is attempting to say. For example, the use of He when God speaks to humans, rather than It speaking, feels appropriate. However, It feels more appropriate when discussing something less “humanlike,” such as God’s omnipresence. Thus, translating the Hebrew verse as “It is everywhere” has the effect of enlarging the notion of presence beyond what “He is everywhere” might otherwise convey.

HOW I “FOUND” GOD

My childhood education within the Conservative Jewish tradition did not explicitly address God’s spiritual attributes nor cultivate a personal relationship with Him. And while later studying and practicing within a Zen Buddhist setting, I rarely considered God. However, once I began to study the Hebrew Bible and the medieval Jewish commentators, I could no longer set aside the question of God’s existence. In addition, as God’s importance in prophecy became increasingly clear, it led me to look more carefully at my bedside DMT notes for volunteers’ references to God or “God-like” phenomena. I noted that while these were not especially frequent, neither were they especially rare.

I therefore saw the value of learning what the Hebrew Bible and its expositors taught about God because this information would help me determine how resonant were prophetic descriptions of It with those of the DMT volunteers. If the two sets of descriptions were similar, this would provide additional evidence in support of my hypothesis that the prophetic and DMT states resembled each other.

Early in my studies, I had to confront the most fundamental questions concerning God. Does God exist? Is God real? I knew that learning about God would be easier if I accepted Its reality. I decided if I couldn’t flatly deny that God exists, I was free to engage in another thought experiment. If God were real, then what would It be? What would It be like, and what would It do? By what means would It act?

Reflecting on Buddhist teachings, I saw that the closest thing to God in Buddhism is cause and effect. Cause and effect are the bases of this reality. Things are what they are now because of what came before, and the present determines what will take place in the future. Cause and effect underlie and perpetuate all of existence. In the notion of cause and effect, I sensed a concept of God I could accept using these Buddhist ideas, ones with which I was more familiar at the time than those of the Hebrew Bible. Using cause and effect as a toehold, it was possible to posit God’s existence. Several avenues of thought drew me to this conclusion.

I had always wondered about the Buddhist proposition that cause and effect were eternal. The process had never been, and would never be, nonexistent. But Buddhism also taught that everything arises, exists, and finally passes away. What would “predate” cause and effect? And what would “exist” after it? Even more perplexing was considering what had created cause and effect in the first place and what sustains it. Positing God’s existence, Its reality, provided tentative answers to these questions. It is God who created and sustains cause and effect. God predates cause and effect and will exist after their extinction. These ideas are, in fact, one way to look at the theological notion of God’s creating this world “from nothing.” Our minds cannot grasp existence without cause and effect. It doesn’t “exist” and is therefore “no-thing.”

Buddhism also teaches that cause and effect are impersonal. However, they did not seem entirely that way. If while hiking I stub my toe when feeling angry at someone, why does that happen? Unconscious psychological process might be at work, but those processes simply describe how cause and effect affect this particular sphere. They explain how things that already exist operate, their mechanisms, but not why they got that way in the first place. Why not get rich as an immediate consequence of feeling anger? Or fly? There appeared to be a system at work, one that seemed to discourage anger; in this case, by setting up a sequence of events leading to physical pain. This was another access point in my approach to God. I could grasp the notion of a God who established the laws of the moral universe as well as the physical one. Those moral laws reflected God’s desire, as it were, for how we live our lives.

NAMES OF GOD

The Hebrew Bible uses several names for God and chooses them carefully, as they refer to God’s different characteristics. The two most common are YHVH and Elohim. These represent two polar notions of God and provide a useful foundation for investigating God’s nature at greater depth.

I raise the issue of God’s names as another example of how it may be helpful for someone who has experienced “God” in a psychedelic drug state to avail him- or herself of the Hebrew Bible’s concepts and vocabulary concerning prophecy. Most of us habitually assign a number of unexamined and general qualities to “God” when we think about It. Learning about God’s various aspects, which Its names convey, may help someone become more discerning in their work with certain God or God-like phenomena they encounter in the psychedelic drug state.

YHVH

This is the Hebrew Bible’s unique name for God. God tells Moses and Isaiah respectively about YHVH: This is My name eternally, and this is how to remember Me (Exod. 3:15), and: I am YHVH; that is My name (Isa. 42:8). It appears thousands of times in the text. It consists of four letters, thus the Greek term Tetragrammaton, which means “four letters.” This is how the word YHVH looks when written in Hebrew script, read from right to left:

where is yud (y), is hei (h), and is vav (v, or silent if it carries the sound of an associated vowel). It is likely that the root of YHVH is H-V-H, which means “to be.”

Traditional Judaism never pronounces this name, and it rarely appears with vowels in the vowelized Hebrew Bible. Non-Jewish religions have added vowels and pronounce the name Yahweh, Yehovah, or Jehovah. A common Jewish convention refers to YHVH as “the name,” or in Hebrew, HaShem. When reading from the Hebrew prayer book, the spoken pronunciation is Adonai, which means “my Lord.” The most common translation of YHVH found in English translations of the Hebrew Bible is “the Lord.” In this book, I will use the written term YHVH.

YHVH is the aspect of God that usually speaks with or appears to one experiencing prophecy. YHVH also receives the elaborate sacrificial service that the Hebrew Bible details. This fact prompted the medieval Jewish commentators to suggest that YHVH represents God’s attribute of mercy. YHVH “bends” the laws of cause and effect by “accepting” prayer or sacrifice, and thus mitigates the detriment or magnifies the benefit to which a strict application of cause and effect would otherwise lead.

Elohim

The other name of God the Hebrew Bible uses thousands of times is the third word that appears in the first paragraph of Genesis: Elohim. This is God in Its attribute of creator and sustainer of the heavens and the earth. The most common English translation of Elohim is “God.” Elohim and YHVH refer to the same God, as we note when Elohim tells Moses: I am YHVH (Exod. 6:2).

Elohim derives from El, a word signifying strength, another name for God (Gen. 31:13). Unlike YHVH, the Hebrew Bible uses the word elohim for things other than God; for example, idols, other nations’ “gods,” angels, spirits of the dead, judges, and powerful individuals. Except in some unusual circumstances, I translate the word as “God.”

Here is how the word elohim appears in Hebrew:

From right to left the letters are aleph (silent, or taking the sound of the associated vowel), lamed (l), hei (h), yud (y, or taking the associated vowel’s sound), and mem (m).

Elohim refers to God’s power and efficacy in the world. It is the complement of YHVH. While YHVH is merciful, we recognize Elohim by His manifesting strict justice, immutable laws, inexorable cause and effect. The twelfth-century Spaniard Judah Halevi suggests that Elohim is the impersonal name of philosophers’ and scientists’ God, whose existence we can infer by examining the natural world, whereas YHVH represents God’s name relative to His will and purpose as reflected in the “idiosyncratic” features of existence, why things are one way and not another.

WHAT GOD IS NOT: ANTHROPOMORPHISMS AND HOMONYMOUS TERMS

Despite the Hebrew Bible referring to God possessing certain characteristics, the medieval Jewish philosophers uniformly agree that God is not a material object nor does It reside in one, such as a star or statue. However, when speaking about God, we’re limited by language and need to start somewhere. This is where anthropomorphisms come into play. Anthropomorphisms are human qualities that we apply to something nonhuman that help us understand certain ideas by using familiar images; in this case, physical expressions for nonphysical attributes. When the Bible states that God’s “outstretched arm” freed the Hebrews from Egypt (Exod. 6:6), it does not mean that God possesses arms, but that It has unlimited power to act in the world. Similarly, referring to God’s “eyes” means that It is aware of what is happening in the world, not that It possesses physical organs of sight with a retina, lens, and so on.

Anthropopathisms are the psychological counterparts of this analogizing process. God is not like a human, who gets jealous or is merciful; rather, these are words that the Hebrew Bible uses to describe the operation of a particular facet of cause and effect. Expressions that suggest God “loves” or “is angry” refer to what we might imagine are the psychological preconditions or correlates that result in particular outcomes using a human frame of reference.

We might believe God is “angry” when witnessing the catastrophic destruction of an earthquake. However, that earthquake is the result of an incomprehensibly complex web of moral and natural cause and effect that God created and sustains, rather than the result of God’s “anger.” The moral element might be greed that led to mining resources in a dangerous terrain, and the natural element is the resultant strain on the earth’s crust causing the seismic event. Thus, we see how God set up cause and effect in such a way that encourages some and discourages other attitudes and behavior. Maimonides summarizes this idea by teaching that the Hebrew Bible expresses itself in terms that the majority of people can understand. Since most of us only have a clear apprehension of things that are similar to us, the text attributes to God physical and psychological attributes in order to convey certain ideas.

Another factor in this discussion concerning “what God is” involves the larger idea of what the medieval Jewish commentators refer to as homonymous terms. This notion extends the analogizing process to an even more fundamental level. For example, what does it mean when we say that God “exists”? God has never not been in existence and will never not exist. These are properties that we cannot fathom. However, when positing God’s existence in the context of the universe as we experience it, the medieval Jewish philosophers state that God exists, rather than saying It does not exist. In this case, “exists” only approximates the true situation.

Similarly, we say that God is “wise,” but God’s wisdom and ours differ qualitatively. How can we relate to a wisdom that takes into account every possible future outcome, everything transpiring in the present, and all events from the past? Nevertheless, calling God “wise” is better and more accurate than saying that God is “ignorant.” Both exist and wise are examples of homonymous terms.

Technically, a homonym is a word that is spelled and pronounced like another word but is different in meaning, like a dog’s bark and tree bark. Therefore, “homonym” is not a perfect rendition of the medieval Jewish philosophers’ notion. Friedländer in his translation of Guide of the Perplexed refers to “homonymous” expressions or terms; that is, the words are “like homonyms.” Pine in his translation renders the idea as “amphibolous,” which emphasizes the ambiguity of the terms involved. In the example of God “existing,” rigorously applying the idea of a homonym would mean that God doesn’t really exist because the words have totally different meanings. But what the medieval Jewish philosophers wish to impart is the notion that these terms are “nearly” unrelated because of how God’s existence differs from how we normally conceive of existence.

While on the subject of homonymity, let me briefly digress into a related issue. This concerns what God doesn’t do. God does not do the impossible; for example, causing the sum of the angles of a triangle in two-dimensional space to be other than 180 degrees. Doing the impossible makes no sense, it’s “non-sense.” If God could “do” the “impossible,” we would have to view both terms as homonymous, unlike how we currently understand them.

INTERMEDIARIES AND ANGELS

How can an incorporeal God affect the corporeal world? The medieval Jewish philosophers answered this question with the notion of intermediaries. This is a concept they borrowed and modified from contemporary “neoplatonized Aristotelianism.”3 Aristotle inferred the existence of God as the “first cause,” who then created “separate intelligences,” what the medieval Jewish philosophers refer to as “angels.” These are intermediaries between an incorporeal God and a physical world.

Medieval neoplatonized Aristotelianism held that different angels, or separate intelligences, regulate the functions, and are aware of the contents, of their respective “spheres” of the universe. These spheres contain celestial bodies such as constellations, stars, planets, and the moon. “Higher” spheres contain “lower” spheres and influence their contents and activities by means of the synonymous terms: emanation, efflux, or overflow. Emanation is a “natural” process; that is, it occurs by virtue of the attributes of the emanating thing. It is a function of its existence. Just as the sun’s nature results in it radiating light, so does the nature of God and Its intermediaries result in emanation of their influence.

The first level of overflow, or emanation, takes place between God and Its closest intermediary, and the last level occurs between the moon’s sphere and the earth, the “sublunar” sphere. This last sphere is the domain of the Active Intellect, an externally existent storehouse of all natural, historical, and moral information and laws affecting earthly life. While some medieval Jewish philosophers posit that God’s influence directly emanates upon earthly existence, most suggest that this influence is indirect, through the aegis of the Active Intellect.

I found myself attracted to this notion of intermediaries, as I sensed it could help me with several aspects of the DMT state I was having trouble interpreting. One area concerned the beings. I was eager to see how the medieval Jewish philosophers’ metaphysical understanding of intermediaries might shed light on their nature, location, and function.

The beings as intermediaries also put into perspective one of the elements I found troubling in shamanism. Their placement in medieval metaphysics between us and God, rather than in place of God, provided a conceptual foundation from which I could respond to what seemed to be shamanism’s misguided preoccupation with spiritual forces. This distinction, as I was to learn later, is one of the ways to avoid worshiping God’s creations rather than God Himself; that is, idolatry. The medieval Jewish philosophical notion of intermediaries also brought additional clarity to my discomfort with Buddhist views of the beings as simply products of our minds. While we perceive them in our minds, their existence is external to us.

Finally, I liked how the idea of intermediaries added a spiritual level to physical phenomena, seeing them as invisible Godly influences regulating and organizing processes that otherwise seem inexplicable. While we may understand mechanisms underlying natural responses, say healing an infection, spiritual intermediaries are their nonphysical proximate cause. Healing occurs through physiological actions that we objectively may characterize and understand. However, according to the medievalists, these processes reflect the activity of an invisible but inferred healing force that regulates the observable biological processes. In the case of healing, for example, this angel is Raphael, the English translation of the Hebrew being “El (or God) heals.” This idea increased my appreciation and understanding of God’s nature. Why is there such a thing as healing? Because God’s attributes of being “good,” “powerful,” and “wise” manifest by means of emanation via intermediates to direct the healing process.

LEARNING ABOUT GOD’S NATURE

We can learn about God’s attributes in two ways: by studying nature and through prophetic experience. Through reason, experiments, and deduction science indirectly demonstrates God’s wisdom and power, while prophecy may transmit that information more directly and in terms more readily understood by the majority of people. For example, both prophecy and science have arrived at the same “findings” of “creation from nothing” regarding the birth of the universe, one through revelation and the other through experimentation.

THEODICY

Theodicy means “justification of God,” as in someone justifying his or her behavior that appears to be illegal or immoral. In this case, it refers to the problem of reconciling the notion of a loving, powerful, omniscient, and fair God with an obviously unfair world. If impartial “reward and punishment” are the norm, why do evildoers prosper and good people suffer?

The classic treatment of theodicy lies in the Book of Job, and I will provide several excerpts from it and other books in chapter 18, Message and Meaning II. The medieval Jewish philosophers have also strenuously exerted themselves in extracting satisfactory answers from the text. Ultimately, our authors see in theodicy the limits of human reasoning and not God’s limits. For example, Spinoza refutes the idea that there is any evil from God’s perspective, even though there may be from ours. And Maimonides points out that God did not create the universe solely for humans.

Nevertheless, the medieval Jewish philosophers offer possible explanations, most of which propose that suffering takes place to bring about an ultimately greater good; for example, pain resulting from curative surgery. Or we actually suffer less than that which might result from a strict application of cause and effect. An individual’s suffering may allow the species to survive. Undeserved suffering may even serve to increase one’s love of God, as in Job’s case. The other face of theodicy is the success of the wicked, those who lie, cheat, steal, defame, hurt, and so on. One possible solution to this puzzle is that wicked people live a long life in order to give birth to a good child. Or they may have more time to repent. Certain evildoers may end up being necessary to combat an even greater evil.

The notion of theodicy may seem rather removed from the DMT state. However, the reality of undeserved suffering as well as the success of wicked people are topics that may occupy a significant part of anyone’s psychedelic experience. Thus, the Hebrew Bible may help us work through elements of a psychedelic drug session using terms and concepts that otherwise would be unavailable.