What if the dot (of you) is actually INSIDE the circle (of God)?

Meet Rabbi Lawrence Kuschner

(for the audio version, click above)

In this second installment in the Spiritual Sommelier Series, I want to introduce you to an idea I love. It’s an image, actually, and a deceptively simple one that has, I think, the potential to shift how we see just about everything.

I came across it in Rabbi Lawrence Kuschner’s conversation with Krista Tippet at On Being. Rabbi Kuschner is an author, an expert in Jewish mysticism (Kabbalah), and the scholar-in-residence at Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco. The interview is close to an hour, and well worth the time if you have it. If you don’t, the image I want to share is in the first 12 minutes. Click HERE to listen. I’ll wait patiently till you’re back…

What’d you think? Pretty cool, eh? Moving the little circle (the dot we are) inside the big circle (the vastness God is) is so simple. And yet it changes everything.

I think the traditional view that we are outside of and other than God reflects a deeply ingrained fear that we’re ultimately alone and on our own…that we’re ‘down here’ (whatever that means) and God is ‘out there’ (wherever that is), and God could disappear on us at any moment, which is a little terrifying.

This fear helps to explain why so much of our theology ends up framing our relationship with God through a lens of reward and punishment. You can almost picture us, looking up at God with our puppy dog eyes, hoping our good behavior and right beliefs will translate into treats (good fortune, eternal life, parking spots). And at the same time, we’re afraid that when we make a mess on the rug (and boy can we make a mess) we’ll get a slap on the bottom…or worse.

But what if that’s not how all this works at all? What if our relationship with God is much more mysterious, much more beautiful, and much more…intimate.

I think that’s what I love about the image, the intimacy of it. The way it conveys, without a word, that being human is so entangled with the Divine that it would be impossible to tease the two apart. I love the way it suggests that the apparent separation is a kind of illusion of the mind; an understandable by-product of our limited time-and-space-bound existence. I love the way it hints that everything we see might be shot through with the light of God (even the not so shiny stuff).

The mind wants to separate…this from that, up from down, in from out, Divine from not-Divine. But in those mystical moments that Rabbi Kuschner talks about, we catch glimpses of a deeper truth…that all of this is also one single thing.

The Big Bang Theory suggests that everything began from a single point, smaller than an atom, that exploded into everything we see. And thus, we can fairly say that to be human is to be made of stardust. In many religious traditions, including strands of Christianity, there’s a similar idea - that God, existing before time and form, chose to manifest (explode?) into creation. If true, then we are not just made of stardust, but goddust too.

When Rabbi Kuschner said, “Now put the little circle inside the big circle,” something in me went: Yes, that’s right. Even if my mind doesn’t quite know what that means, something tells me it’s closer to true than our being outside of God, separate, alone.

These days, even the idea that we are in a relationship with God doesn’t feel quite right to me. It’s not close enough; not intimate enough. I now believe that at the deepest level, to be human is not to be with God, it is to be of God.

As the Apostle Paul said 2,000 years ago:

“For in (God) we live and move and have our being.”

And Meister Eckhardt said 800 years ago:

“The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.”

And as the Baal Shem Tov, 300 years ago, said it about as simply as you can:

“There is nothing but God.”

I know to the rational part of our brain these quotes don’t make much sense. When I’m in a linear, logical mood, they fall flat. They just sound like so many words. It’s only when we drop out of our thinking mind, into a heart-wide-open space, a nothing-but-the-present-moment space, a deeply-trusting-mystical space, that we can begin taste the truth of them.

Which is why I love this image. At a rational level, it seems childishly simple. And yet, the more we sit with it, feeling our way inside the circle, the more it can touch something in us beyond anything our minds could hope to grasp.