Are you among the 4 billion who believe in the metaphor of God? Is God just a metaphor for the transcendent kingdom of consciousness? It is easy to do when you grow up and live in a culture where indoctrination in this myth is a way of life.
“Gods are metaphors transparent to transcendence. And my understanding of the mythological mode is that deities and even people are to be understood in this sense, as metaphors…” ― Joseph Campbell
There is no other mythological construct that has held on through the centuries like the idea of a supreme being. The metaphor of God is a powerful force in many cultures. It is heresy to question the validity of the imaginary friend of some religions. Questioning the validity of their God has severe penalties up to and including torture and execution. I’d say that makes God a compelling and powerful metaphor.
It makes you wonder how we could let such misinformation continue to dominate the cultural narrative of our modern world. Easy, it speaks to the power of the metaphor as the basis for a powerful worldview.
What if God is Just a Metaphor?
A metaphor is a “figure of speech,” an analogy linking ideas, usually with something known or understood and something unknown or not understood. People use this tool of language to help others understand new ideas. Metaphors make comparisons to draw similarities between two or more things. When you understand the underlying premises of the metaphor, it helps you learn.
Many people understand that spiritual stories are elaborate metaphors. It’s a way of describing something in terms someone can relate to more easily. The story makes the lesson easy to remember. Joseph Campbell is a researcher and professor of comparative religious study, and he found a common theme in the metaphors of many traditions. This theme is what he calls the Hero’s Journey. (1)
The problem arises when you mistake metaphors for real things and events. The storyline in myths and religions are simply memory devices to help you remember the message. If you mistake fiction for a factual occurrence, you miss the message of the metaphor. And this is how the metaphor of God is mistaken for a fact. You miss the meaning if you don’t realize the story or the imaginary being is a metaphor. Then you derive the wrong conclusions.
Is God Just a Metaphor Misused by Religion?
God becomes the perfect blueprint on which to attach anything unknown or misunderstood. It is a thing of power beyond our understanding. So we can seek its divine intervention in times of need. We can blame it for natural disasters. It’s a catch-all entity. Unfortunately, most people do not see God as a metaphor but as a factual entity.
“In theology, the God is taken as a final term, a supernatural fact. When the deity is not transparent, when he doesn’t open up like that to the transcendent, he doesn’t open up to the mystery that is the mystery of our own lives.” ― Joseph Campbell
Western theology intentionally misconstrues the analogies and metaphors contained in their holy texts. They don’t want people to see that all of the stories in their sacred texts are just a metaphor for the transcendent kingdom of consciousness. If they do, they lose you as a paying customer.
People also misconstrue the metaphors of myths for facts because they lack experience a practical experience with transcendence. If you don’t understand something but want others to think you do, you can lead people to believe errors. When others follow, they believe the error is the truth. They don’t understand the term god is a metaphor for the transcendent kingdom of consciousness.
God is the linchpin that holds the mythology and superstition of many religions together. If you remove this pin, the whole worldview collapses. What if God is just a metaphor that attempts to explain the aspects of the transcendent kingdom of consciousness? But if organized religion reveals this misdirection, the organizations profiting from the misrepresentation crumbles. So, they protect this misdirection with all their might.
“It’s a poetic understanding. It is to be understood in the same sense as Goethe’s words at the end of Faust: “Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis” (Everything transitory is but a reference). The reference is to that which transcends all speech, all vocabularies, and all images. I think of the more prosaic style of thinking about these references as theological rather than mythological.” ― Joseph Campbell
The Transcendent Kingdom of Consciousness
The concept of a kingdom has been usurped by organized religion. The textbook definition of a kingdom is a terror ruled by a king or queen. It also references the spiritual reign of an imaginary friend, God.
You get a different mental picture when you understand the idea of a kingdom as an analogy for the parameters of consciousness. In this case, we are not talking about an imaginary entity like a god or a physical location but the diversity of the elements we associate with consciousness and awareness.
If you measure consciousness as a wavelength of energy, everything in the universe has consciousness. We are a part of the diversity of consciousness. In the scheme of things, we each populate a singularity in the configuration of the consciousness of the universe.
Within our small sphere of awareness, we have access to a number of different aspects of the transcendent kingdom of consciousness. We have three default states, waking, dreaming, and sleeping, but this is only the beginning. It is possible to experience different levels of altered awareness, which can be induced by chemicals such as alcohol. We can also change awareness using tools called mantras and sutras.
Why Is God Just a Metaphor
The term God is a catch-all metaphor because it is flexible. So deists use God as the answer or reason for everything. There may be other ways to explain the situation, but God is an all-encompassing concept that leaves no room for questioning the evidence or logic behind the assertion.
There are three primary ways to approach the subject of God; faith, experience, and reason. Some people choose one, and many use all three. Each of these paths has a different result. Stop and think about that for just a moment. How can the same subject result in different answers? Simple. The meaning can be anything you want because it’s all made up, make-believe.
The metaphor of God is versatile and can hold a variety of meanings. If something is good, God did it. If something is terrible, God allowed it, but it is beyond our “level of understanding.” Is God just a metaphor to base the belief on other things for which there is no proof?
“Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.” — Joseph Campbell
“I make the assumption that every religion has been rooted in some mystical or transcendent experience. From that assumption, I just look at all the different systems as metaphors or doorways to God.” — Ram Dass
“I argue against a literal interpretation of religious doctrines. Religions make progress when they emancipate themselves from literalism and take their doctrinal statements to be metaphors or allegories.” — Philip Kitcher
There are proofs for the existence of “transcendence.” Transcendence in the spiritual sense refers to an experience beyond the normal states of waking, dreaming, and sleeping. It has nothing to do with feelings.
There are forms of meditation that enable one to reach and experience the transcendent. Some call the 4th state of consciousness the transcendent state of awareness. We can measure the 4th state by its effects on physiology. Japa, or Transcendental meditation, is one way to access this partition that underlies our awareness.
When someone meditates and reaches the transcendent state, we see lower heart rate changes and brainwave coherence, and skin resistance increases. These metabolic changes prove that the 4th state of consciousness differs from waking, dreaming, or sleeping. In this pure state of consciousness, one experiences a transcendence of our being absent from the internal dialogue.
Many influential teachers, like Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, describe the transcendence state as bliss consciousness because it silences internal chatter. But, if you have never had this experience, you mistake the symbolic reference for a description of actual events or people. Thus, the metaphor is mistaken for a fact, and you create a religion from this error.
God as a Metaphor for The Transcendent Kingdom of Consciousness
We hope this discussion provides food for thought. We want you to think about how your beliefs in a higher power shape your opinions and values. Do you see your higher power as a metaphor pointing the way to a more just and verdant behavior?
Do you believe in God existing in the literal sense? Perhaps not in this world, but at living on some plane of reality? Do you think of God as an actual person? Or is God just a metaphor “for a greater truth?
Many people believe in the existence of God as an actual person. Many people believe in God as a central part of their identity and want everyone else to have the same confidence in the same God. The “need” to believe” is so powerful that it propels them to act violently toward others. But, if belief equaled fact, then all Gods would “be real.” Think about that.
Does God exist, or is it more probable that people are merely mistaking the metaphor as a fact? Is it more likely that there are thousands of Gods? No, it’s more likely that the stories of and about Gods are just a reference for the transcendent kingdom of consciousness and awareness.
Approaching the subject of a higher power sparks deep emotional connections in many people. It is possible because they start from a place where metaphor is mistaken for a fact.
“Heaven and hell are within us, and all the gods are within us. This is the great realization of the Upanishads of India in the ninth century B.C. All the gods, all the heavens, all the world, are within us. They are magnified dreams, and dreams are manifestations in image form of the energies of the body in conflict with each other. That is what myth is. Myth is a manifestation in symbolic images, in metaphorical images, of the energies of the organs of the body in conflict with each other. This organ wants this, that organ wants that. The brain is one of the organs.” ― Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
The Metaphor of God Summation
The transcendent kingdom of consciousness is hard to explain to those who have not experienced awareness beyond the default states of waking, dreaming, and sleeping. So they buy into the rhetoric of organized religion, which proposes their imaginary friend is real. They don’t see God as a figure of speech to help people understand the experience. Without practical knowledge of the transcendent, it is easy to mistake the “metaphor of God” for a fact.
How could so many people fall into the trap of misconstruing the metaphor for a fact? This misdirection is no mistake. It is the way religions are born, and religions are cash-flow generators. They keep people fixated on the counterfeit to fleece them.
God is a metaphor that provides a focal point. It’s easy to express the attributes of creation and the human spirit in a story to make it more easily understood. For the transcendent to be understood, one must experience it first-hand.
Do you have another point of view? If you have comments, questions, or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to contact us. If you like our research, please help us stay online by donating to support our non-profit mission.
References
(1) Joseph Campbell & Joseph Campbell’s Book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
