What We Mean by The Divine
The word Divine is one of the most freighted words in any spiritual vocabulary, and it arrives at every reader carrying baggage that was packed long before they arrived. Some readers were given a picture in childhood and have continued to carry it more or less unchanged into adult life. Some were given a picture in childhood and have spent decades since constructing themselves carefully against it. Some have inherited so many partial pictures from so many directions that they have given up on the word entirely and use it, when they have to, with the air of someone handling a tool they no longer trust.
We understand all of this. We share more of it than may be apparent. Before we can do useful work with the word — in these essays, in our practices, or in conversation with anyone who has come into our community — we want to set down clearly what Ekstaeses means by it. And, just as importantly, what we do not.
What we are not saying
When we speak of the Divine, we are not speaking of the bearded figure on a cloud. We name this not to ridicule the picture — it has carried untold souls through periods of life that would have been unbearable without it — but to be clear that the anthropomorphic projection of a vast and powerful person, separate from creation and watching it from outside, is not what Ekstaeses means by the word. The picture is, in our reading, a stage of the human imagination's encounter with what cannot possibly be straightforwardly imagined. The traditions that produced it knew this; their finest theologians and mystics said so explicitly. We honor the picture as a way the Divine has historically been pointed at and developed from. We do not endorse it as a description of what was actually being pointed at, however.
Neither are we speaking of the deistic clockmaker — the first cause who set the universe in motion and then withdrew. We do not believe in a Source that has stepped away from what proceeds from it. The implication of separation, of historical priority but present absence, is one of the harder errors to undo in the modern religious imagination, but it is an error. The Source of All Things is not behind us in time. It is not at the beginning of a chain of which we are now somewhere in the middle. It is here. It is now. It is what is doing the existing in everything that exists.
And neither — though this picture is more recently fashionable — are we speaking of the merely abstract impersonal force, the unspecified "universe" or "energy" that some readers have settled for after the older pictures gave out. We understand the appeal of this move. It strips out the embarrassment of believing in a person while preserving some sense that something larger is in play. But the picture is too flat to bear what is actually met in encounter. What is met is not a force. It is unmistakably presence. It is alive in a way energy does not capture. It is intelligent in a way the universe does not capture. It is responsive in a way an impersonal field is not. We do not insist on the language of personhood, because personhood is itself a category drawn from separate human experience and may be too small for what it is being asked to describe. But we cannot accept the abstraction either. What is met is more than any picture we have proposed of it, including the abstract one.
So if not these, then what?
The converging witness
The truth that Ekstaeses is built around is not new. It is, in fact, one of the oldest claims human beings have made about the structure of reality: that beneath every name we have given to the Divine, there is one referent, and that the major traditions of the world have, with remarkable consistency, been pointing at it.
The Vedantic teachers of ancient India spoke of Brahman, the absolute — the formless, attributeless ground of all that is — and of Atman, the deepest self, which in non-dual Vedanta is not separate from Brahman but identical with it. Tat tvam asi. Thou art that. The recognition the seeker is finally invited into is not the meeting of two strangers across a great distance but the recognition that the seeker and what is sought were never two.
The Buddhist tradition, particularly in its Mahayana forms, speaks of Buddha-nature — the awakened ground that is not the property of individual buddhas but the substrate of every mind — and of the Dharmakaya, the truth-body of the Buddha, which is not a body at all but the whole field of awakened reality in which every awakening is held. Śūnyatā, often translated as emptiness, is not the absence of reality but the absence of separate, inherent existence in any thing. What the Hindu calls fullness, the Buddhist calls emptiness, and the two traditions have argued for centuries about which is the better description of the same recognition.
The Taoist opens the Tao Te Ching with the line the Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao. The opening sentence is itself an apophasis — a way of saying that the referent is not what the sentence is. And yet the whole text proceeds, gently, around what cannot be said, never pretending that the saying is the thing.
The Jewish tradition has Ein Sof — the Infinite, the Without-End, the name for what is so beyond naming that the naming itself acknowledges its limits. The Kabbalistic literature also speaks of the Shekhinah, the indwelling Presence — what is not far, what dwells in the midst of the people, what is here.
Christianity, in its mystical traditions, has rarely been content with the surface picture. Meister Eckhart drew a distinction between Gott — the God we can speak about — and Gottheit, the Godhead, the Source from which the speakable God proceeds and into which it returns. I pray God to rid me of God, he said in one of his more provocative sermons, meaning that the picture of God we have constructed must finally be released so that the Reality the picture was pointing at can be met. The Eastern Orthodox tradition, in its practice of theosis, holds that the soul's destination is not to stand near God but to be deified — to participate, by grace, in the divine life itself. The mystics of every Christian century have insisted that God is love — meaning not that the Divine has the property of loving but that Love is its very nature, and that to step into Love is to step into the Divine.
The Sufi tradition has al-Haqq, the Real — one of the ninety-nine names of God in Islam, and the name the Sufi mystics most often returned to when speaking of what cannot finally be named. The Beloved, in Rumi's poetry, is not a metaphor for God; the Beloved is what God is, when God is approached through the heart rather than through the doctrine.
The Indigenous traditions of North America have, in their many forms, the Great Mystery — Wakan Tanka in Lakota, the Great Spirit in many other tongues — a name that does not pretend to describe the referent but only to mark the seriousness with which the people approach it. The reverence is the recognition. The mystery is the point.
We could continue. The Greek philosophical tradition, before and around the rise of Christianity, spoke of the One — Plotinus most centrally — as the source from which all multiplicity flows. The early Christian theologians inherited this vocabulary and braided it with Hebrew and apostolic threads to produce both the doctrine of the Trinity and the literature of the apophatic mystics who would, century after century, refuse to let any of it harden into a final picture. Across all of this, in every century and across every continent, the same recognition keeps coming forward: that what is being pointed at is one. That the names are many. That the names are not the thing. And that the thing is never absent.
What we mean
Within this long converging witness, Ekstaeses takes its place. We do not claim to be saying anything that has not been said before. We are saying it in the vocabulary that has come to us, shaped by the texts we work with and the practices our community has built.
When we speak of the Divine, we mean the Source of All Things — the originating ground from which everything that is proceeds, and to which everything that is belongs. We mean the Ground of Being — the is-ness in which everything that is, is. We mean the One Mind — that into which every individual mind opens and from which every individual mind draws its substance. We mean Love — not the emotion, but the fundamental orientation of reality toward continuance, reunion, and recognition. We mean Oneness — the Truth, beneath all surface appearance of separation, that there is one continuous presence from which nothing has ever been finally cut off, that the language of modern physics is ever describing. We mean Presence — the fact that the Divine is not located, not earned, and not absent, ever; it is what is here when nothing else is and when everything else is.
We use these words interchangeably and we do so deliberately. The Divine resists single description because of what it is, not because of what we lack. Variety in expression grounds the expansiveness of the idea. To speak only of the Source is to risk implying a beginning that has receded into the past and to acknowledge time as a finite thing. To speak only of Presence is to risk implying a current state that might shift. To speak only of Love is to risk reducing what is met to a feeling we already know how to have. Each of these vocabularies, used alone, would put a fence around what cannot be fenced. Used together, in rotation, they hold open the space the Divine actually inhabits — which is the space that exceeds every description offered of it, and yet is met, by every honest seeker, in terms recognizable enough to be reported back.
This is part of why the central creed of Ekstaeses is the sentence it is: Truth can only be experienced. It cannot be described and it cannot be explained. The vocabulary we have offered above is not a description that tries to settle the matter. It is the orientation we use when speaking of what we know, finally, by encounter.
Already met, not yet recognized
There is one more thing to say about what Ekstaeses means by the Divine, and it is the most important. The Divine, in our reading, is not far. Recognition is not a journey to a distant destination. The Source of All Things is not at the end of a road; it is what every road is made of. What we call encounter is, more accurately, recognition — the soul's recognition of what was always there, awake, holding everything in being, including the very awareness that has now turned to face it.
This is the deepest reason we do not place the Divine on the other side of belief. The Divine is not waiting for anyone to assemble the correct propositions. It is not behind a barrier of cognition, evaluating progress. It is the ground in which we have been standing all along. The architecture of the assumed self, the inherited pictures, the substituted descriptions — these are the only things that prevent recognition, and they are not nothing, but they are not the Divine. They are what stands between us and what we have not, in any meaningful sense, ever been without.
The work of Ekstaeses, in its largest sense, is the careful loosening of that architecture, so that what has been here all along can finally be seen plainly.
A word to the seeker who has lost the picture
If you came to this essay with no settled picture of the Divine — perhaps because the picture you were given as a child has long since stopped serving you, and you have not been able to construct another that holds — we want to say one thing to you directly. You are not in trouble. You are not behind. The pictures were always pointers. The words were only temporary indicators. The Source they were pointing at is still here. It does not require you to construct a new picture before it makes itself known.
We are not offering you a new picture to memorize. We are offering practices — the daily Syllabus, the disciplines of silence and ritual, the sacramental ceremonies of pilgrimage — through which recognition becomes available. The recognition, when it comes, will not look like the picture you lost. It will not need to. It will be the meeting itself, in whatever vocabulary your soul is prepared, in that moment, to receive.
That meeting is the Source from which the word Divine comes. It is the only thing the word, finally, has ever meant. We are willing to walk toward it with whoever is willing to come with us.