You Are Not Who You Think You Are

You are not who you think you are. You are not WHAT you think you are. French Christian philosopher and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin famously said, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” Even that does not quite communicate it. It makes it sounds like there are a lot of little spiritual beings having human experiences. 

There is only one Being, what Christian philosopher Paul Tillich called Being Itself or the Ground of Being. Another word for this is Spirit, and that is what we are. I would phrase it this way: We are not humans having a spiritual experience. We are Spirit having human experiences. This Spirit is that within which all experiences occur. All is One. We are One expressed in what appears to be many. We are Being appearing as human beings. 

Reality is One. I call that One Reality God. The problem with using the word “God” is that people mean very different things when they say that word. I am not using it as a traditional theist would use it. For that reason perhaps I should not use the word at all. But this is my religious vocabulary. If I can’t call Ultimate Reality God, then what use is the word God? 

The trick is trying to communicate this Reality, which seems to be nearly impossible to do. That is why the Tao Te Ching says, “He who speaks does not know, and he who knows does not speak.” And yet I speak. It is what I do. I am a preacher, and as the Scripture says, “How will they hear unless someone tells them?” So I speak. This episode is my attempt to express the inexpressible.