Essay #8:   The Principle of Expansion Shown in the Universal and Particular Forms of God’s Caring

The Principle of Expansion is both universal and particular in its operation.  To follow the Way of Return, we will need to be careful not to divide these two aspects in our understanding.  For we will see that it is precisely when we assume or project a division here that distortion arises which blocks our way.  In the previous chapter we exhumed the Principle of Expansion from the thicket of our own assumptions about the unfolding of the universe.  Now that we have rediscovered the principle, we need to examine more closely how we lost track of it in the first place.  The Way of Return is a way of turning back from the old ontological framework toward the new.  We need to become as clear as possible how we inclined toward the old framework to begin with in order to be able reverse those steps and come back home to our Source. Otherwise, we will get caught once more in the same thicket of projections and wrong beliefs which landed us in the old causal ontology.

The Principle of Expansion manifests in the Lord’s uninterrupted and universal caring for his creation.  It also manifests in the myriad of particular ways that God cares for his creatures.  The Lord does not raise up the particular in a way that ever sacrifices or interrupts his caring for creation on a universal level.  So it is curious that in our understanding or misunderstanding we constantly act as if we need to do something particular or behave in a particular way in order to garner his favor.  If we believe that we need to earn his favor, this is not strictly true.  He has already given us his caring and devotion.  We do not need to earn it.  In fact, there is absolutely nothing we can do to remove ourselves from it any more than the mountain can hide from the sun, than birds can hide from the air or the whale from the sea.  As John tells us, the Lord was “the light of the world illuminating all persons who came here.”  In this sense then, God’s universal caring undergirds both any particular effort on our part and any particular favor God may choose to return to us.

It is true that God does extend himself to us in particular ways, often in response to our prayers and petitions.  In these ways, God does not shrink from responding to us even in the most minor and seemingly insignificant areas of our lives.  Haven’t we all received unexpected help at one time or other with recovering something we’ve lost, with paying a bill, even with finding a parking place?  If it seems silly to imagine God helping us find a parking place, then we have not yet fully appreciated the intimacy of his caring.  However, once we fully realize that in the universality of his caring he is already tending to every blade of grass, it does not seem so extraordinary that he should also extend himself in particular ways to assist us out of his love for us.

We start to go astray when we assign some form of determinism or causality outside of God to the function of caring for creation on an ordinary or universal level.  We often tend to think this is how the universe runs “in the background.”  As we saw in Chapter 1, this assumed background became the foundation we took for our own desire to predict and control and for the pretense of knowledge we called “understanding.”  But the desire for control extends here in another way.  Earlier, our desire for control applied to materials, material processes, humans (including ourselves), and other creatures.  Here we would extend it to God himself in a way that would usurp his role as caregiver.

We observed above that we seem to need to earn God’s favor.  However, given that God already knows our every necessity through his universal caring, this amounts to a desire for control.  We want to have the particular ways God cares for us tied to the things we have done to “bring them about.”  We are accustomed to see them as responses to prayers or perhaps to some significant efforts on our part to “do better” or to bring about some positive outcome.  Of course, where the desire for control is, the need to predict and to verify is also.  Therefore, just as we would elevate our own prayers or efforts to the level of a causative factor, we would tend to see God’s responses as the extraordinary events that answer and “verify” them.  We like to find validation for our particular prayers and efforts in God’s responses.

Here we can trace a connection between our tendency to let some causal principle be in charge of the universe in the background and our desire for validation.  If assume the universe runs like clockwork most of the time, then this makes the particular manifestations of God’s caring for us seem extraordinary, that is, “out of the ordinary.”  Moreover, we tend to see these manifestations as responses to whatever we may have done to break with the ordinary.  Our desire for control expressed in the causal ontology subdues and suppresses our awareness of God’s activity of universal caring.  This then makes room for us–if we acknowledge God’s activity at all–to elicit or draw forth his activity in particular ways as responses to our own specific efforts.  God’s responses seem all the more extraordinary to us against our assumed background of universal clockwork.  And framed this way, we are quick to notice and to claim them as events which verify and validate our own particular efforts to exert control.  Of course, we usually do not admit that we are trying to “control God.”  However, if we go interior and examine the feeling we typically put behind our own prayers and would-be holy endeavors, do we not find lurking there a certain pressure, and a hidden belief perhaps that the response we get depends on our sincerity?  Do we not ever so much want to pray “just a little harder” to ensure that we have done everything possible to guarantee us the response we are looking for?  Do we not cross the line where we trust more in the efficacy of our own particular prayers and efforts than in God’s universal caring for us and for all creation?  For if we firmly trusted in God’s universal caring, then why would his particular responses assume such importance for us? We would see them rather as extensions of that caring or ways in which God chooses to emphasize his ordinary and unfailing caring rather than as extraordinary validations of efforts of our own.

Thus we see enacted in ourselves just what we warned against at the beginning of this chapter.  We divide the universal and particular aspects of the Principle of Expansion in our understanding.  Divorced from God’s universal caring, his particular caring becomes distorted into yet another expression of our own desire to predict and control.  Insofar as it opens the door to all manner of warped views of ourselves and our personal power, we will see that this division impedes our progress on the Way of Return. But let us for now remain at the internal root of our disease and see if we can better comprehend and heal the division through some further reflections.

God does indeed sometimes respond to our particular prayers and efforts. It is also true, however, that God sends very specific help to us even when we have not asked for it nor even known that we needed it. Many of us, for example, have lost something very valuable that we were not aware of missing at the time.  Perhaps we were led back to the place it was lost days later and by a series of events that seemed to us completely unrelated and unlikely.  Then only by finding it did we discover that the item was missing in the first place, much to our surprise.  Or perhaps another person found it and picked it up and later somehow managed to identify us as its owner while on their way to depositing it at the police station across town.

As astonishing as these examples seem, things like this happen all the time. Someone pulls out from a parking space just as we are starting to think we will never find where to park, and there is time left on the meter to boot!  Or a serious medical condition is discovered during an exam for something completely unrelated, a condition we could have died from had it not been found there and then.  These examples appear to show clearly that God does also intervene in our lives in quite specific ways independent from our own efforts and petitions.

The same part of us that wants to take credit for having “prayed” God into action might prefer to chalk up these events as “coincidences”–by which we probably mean once again some unfathomable operation of the “clockwork” that runs the universe. In the absence of any special prayer or effort of our own, it may be easier for that part of us to believe that such extraordinary events—as well as the everyday functioning of the world–should be assigned in principle to the clockwork, even if we are at a loss to say how it might produce them. That part would argue that it is difficult to imagine God “spending his time going around looking for ways to help us when we are not even doing anything to help ourselves.”

As we said before, only those positive interventions into life following our own prayers or special efforts would this part of ourselves prefer to consider extraordinary. It is more likely to stand witness to divine intervention here than where we seemed to play no role in eliciting a response from God.  Neither in the ordinary events we might call the “day to day maintenance and operation of the universe” nor even necessarily in extraordinary events that unexpectedly bring us benefit does it tend to see our Creator at work.  It is just and only where we ourselves play a conscious role that this part of us is quick to find God at work in crafting his response.  In short, it is where we can identify some particular effort of our own that we most readily believe God is called to respond.  This viewpoint, of course, leads us to believe that God’s response somehow depends on our effort or behavior.  This is, in fact, why it is objectionable to many of us to claim that God is frequently acting on our behalf in particular and extraordinary ways when we are not even conscious of it.  Many of us have trouble believing that God would do so unless we “bent over backwards” to show our sincerity, our good will, our sterling efforts, our improving behavior, and what have you.  However, we miss that God is actually at work every day helping every blade of grass to grow.  The ascent of our own ego actually draws our attention away from this beautiful unfolding to a projection that distorts the way things really are.  We miss that God’s caring is and always has been universal. Divorced from that awareness, our expectation that he should be stirred by our particular prayer or our particular action swells our ego.  That is the very part of ourselves which would “bend God’s will” by trumpeting our prayers and parading our efforts.  And that is the part which tends to see God’s particular caring for us as separate and divorced from his universal caring.

Under the ego’s influence, we tend to see the extraordinary events of our lives as substantially different from the ordinary ones. We do not see that both the ordinary and the extraordinary come under the care of God’s love, and that both his universal and particular caring spring from the same root.  When we overemphasize the role of our own action, prayer, or effort, we allow the ego to rise up as a consciousness we are projecting separate from God.  Our ego wants to be the one that has elicited God’s response, upon whom God’s response depends.  Ultimately, our own ego wants to be “him whom we come from” rather than from Him, God the Father.  It tricks us by drawing attention to itself and by claiming credit in some way for the particular caring that God manifests for us.  If we turn back, however, to the universality of God’s caring against which all particular acts of his caring occur, we can begin to see the particular acts depend no more on the operation of our egos than the universal ones.  God cares equally for all the blades of grass as he does for the particular matter which is the subject of our prayer.  Or one could say, as Jesus assured us, that he cares still more for us than he does about all the blades of grass and the flowers of the field.  Even so, his caring comes entirely from grace and not from any merit or force of compulsion, coercion, or persuasion which the ego commands.

It is from God’s love that he responds to us, not because he feels compelled by the loudness of our petition or the weight of our case. This is easier to comprehend when we reflect that God has never stopped caring for us.  In that context, his overall plan may allow for denying our ego’s petition or desire, even for what seems to be considerable travail for a time.  For one thing, the fact that he granted us a measure of our own free will means that much of our suffering accrues to us through voluntary misuse of resources he allotted us.  In this case, in fact, his love gives us a very wide berth across which to undergo what we must in order to be able to return to him fully.  Were he to just elevate us and bring us home all at once, this would actually go against the love by which he granted us free choice in the first place.  It must, when all is said and done, be a greater act of love on his part to allow us to trace the full arc of the path we have chosen in returning to him than for him to shortcut that path in every case where suffering arises.  Nevertheless, it is precisely in and through God’s particular acts of caring for us that he does often shorten or ease that path.  It is part of his wisdom to know exactly how much he can do this for us without undermining the learning and growth that needs to accrue to us on the path.  This, too, is part of his universal caring.  Thus his universal caring informs and undergirds his particular caring. The latter is much less dependent on the ego’s involvement and prodding than we think.  We should know this by now because God frequently delivers something a little different from what the ego asks or prays for, or maybe a lot different.  The point is that we often do not fully know whether what we pray for is for our own good, or for the good of others.  Nevertheless, God hears our prayers and out of his goodness delivers what we need but not necessarily what we ask or pray for.

All of this changes the way we see ourselves interacting with God around particular needs. Rather than pinning his response on our own efforts and behaviors and prayers, which we put our ego in charge to orchestrate, which we then come from, we can choose to come from God the Father even around our particular needs.  The ego may indeed initiate prayer by seeming to identify and to desire that which we need.  Even with respect to those individual things and outcomes, we can choose to surrender the ego and its objectives.  The ego becomes, as it were, that which elicits prayer and movement.  But we do not allow it to draw us into a kind of particularity that becomes divorced from an awareness of God’s universal caring.  We see our own particular needs against the backdrop of God’s unfailing universal care.  In this way, our faith that God will provide for even our most specific needs grows organically out of our unshakable faith that God will never stop caring for his kingdom.  This is why Jesus specifically told us to “put first the [universal] Kingdom of God and all these [particular] things shall be added to you.”

Jesus furthermore reassured us that “your Father knows what you need.” He knows, in fact, much better than our own ego.  Hence, we might say that the ego is qualified to initiate the conversation with the Father about what we need in particular but only God is qualified to complete it.  This is why we say we reach a point where we surrender the ego and its objectives.  Because we want to come from the Father we must always empty ourselves and turn towards the Father as we await his response.  This is precisely where we make the turn away from the division that spawned our difficulties in the first place.  That is, we refuse to see God’s particular caring divorced from his universal.  We refuse to allow the ego to gain a toehold, as it were, in any particular manifestations of caring from which to get leverage for its projections of separation and control.  Here our unfailing mindfulness of God’s universal caring leaves the ego no place to grab hold.  As it deflates we find new room in ourselves to be filled by the Spirit of God.

We often do, nonetheless, find ourselves caught up in our own ego and invested in whatever it wants. Again, the ego wants to be “him (or her) we come from” rather than the Father.  Therefore, we must remind ourselves again and again with respect to these wants that “our ego wants to be him that we come from.”  In this way, we are identifying where we are getting caught along the Way of Return. It is like walking along an overgrown path where our clothing gets caught in thorns and brambles.  We may have to stop for a while to figure out where the overgrowth has gotten hold of us.

Disengaging ourselves may take some time.  We may get caught on new thorns in the process of releasing the first ones.  Our ego is fully capable of spawning allies for itself as it fights to remain in control.  Anger may arise, for example, as an ally to the thorn of desire on an emotional level, and both of those thorns may be seen as allies to the more deeply buried thorn of loss, which is still harder to extract.  In the end, we surrender all of those thorns not so much to God but back to the underbrush as we turn to come from God. The myth that we must surrender all of our suffering to God, runs the risk of missing what we are about to receive.  It places us in a kind of null zone, freed from our egos but still outside of God’s care, not a very attractive or compelling place at all.  It makes it look as if we shed all the promises of our ego only to find ourselves in “no man’s land.”  It may make us feel like we are parked in a loading zone downtown on a Sunday afternoon when all the businesses are closed.

Surely, we do experience these griefs, and there is a place that has been aptly described as “the dark night of the soul.”  There is a night that falls as the ego becomes disappointed that we are turning away.  There is a barrage of fears and threats that it unleashes as it begins to wane.  But we have to come to regard this like we would regard the moon sinking into the sea.  We might wade out into the water compelled at least by pity for the thing now disappearing across the horizon.  We might even reach out to it and try to restrain or comfort it, if not to hold it back.  But then in the blackness of its absence we would discover the sea.  We would discover that we have entered a new realm whose presence we could feel enveloping us all around.  We would sense if not yet absolutely know for certain that this presence and this realm extended vastly on all sides of us.  We would have made the transition from the particularity of our own needs to the universality of God’s caring for us, and when the sun arose for us the next morning we would not likely see things the same way as before.

In the light of God’s universal caring, our particular needs appear like individual pieces in an infinitely grand mosaic.  They have a place, yet against the whole their importance diminishes.  Set in the scheme of God’s eternal love for us, they become like particles of sand awash in a vast ocean where there is more and more and more without end.  In this light, too, our desires appear upgraded to preferences. Indeed, once we begin to see and to trust the vastness of God’s caring it becomes easier to subsume our wants under waves of “grace upon grace.”  Within the unfolding of space and time, our needs and desires can become unduly emphasized like parts of a cloth whose folds poke out at us.  When the cloth is fully opened–that is, when space and time are fully expanded into eternity–the folds disappear into a seamless and encompassing background.  Within space and time even, we can begin to sense and to trust the waves of grace which soften our hold upon our wants and needs.  As eternity more and more washes through us, our dim eyes can brighten and see more clearly the goodness God has in store for us as we make our way home.  Like Christ, we can be “in this world but not of it,” living within in the dimensions of space and time while living from the viewpoint of eternity.

Our ego is indeed like the moon sinking into the sea.  It has nowhere to go but back into the Source from which it emerged.  During its short traverse it steals its light from another orb.  It wants to be that which leads and guides us.  Yet its borrowed light is too dim for us to make out our true path.  Knowing the shortness of its time, the ego at last becomes angry and desperate like the beast in the Book of Revelation.  Like that beast, it is expelled from heaven.  That is, the ego eventually gives up even sensing its connection to the sun.  It usurps even its own role of eliciting a response from God to human effort.  Rather, it seeks to become the sun and to replace God.  It assumes power rather than trusts in the true Source of power.  Therefore, the power that it assumes is false. It is derived and granted from On High, but the ego in its delusion would be separated from its Source.  In its desperation, it would no longer wait on God to provide a response to supplications.  Like the Whore of Babylon drunk on her own power, the ego would rather ride the beast of her own desires into oblivion than turn back to the Source.

Thus we arrive at the terminus of the forewarned mistake of separating in our minds God’s particular caring from his universal.  The ultimate manifestation of this error is the refracting of God’s particular caring into an ego that assumes power over all our needs and wants.  We need to look more closely now at just how this happens.