What Is a Higher Power?

Metaphysics in finding the Lord

What is the Lord? People speak about a higher power. But what is a higher power? In other words: what is outside of me, what is not within my own control? And then: that, in regard to my existence.

We do not tend to say, “I created myself.” Something is there, outside of us, “that made us.” I am the product, the son. I bear relation to it. So, it is that which is me, which is my life, of which I am definite part, but which I (in my limited capacity) do not exert total control over. In that sense, there will always be a Lord—some higher power. There is always some God.¹ Something beyond us, beyond me, beyond you.

Then what is you, if not part of it? What you imagine yourself to be is a fiction of separation. A term attributed to the carved slice of existence that we feel to be us. Where the higher power ends and we begin—our own experience; that phenomenon of conscious being. But if the higher power is irrevocably attached to us, we are contingent on it. And hence the mystics say they are one with God.

The private I—the famous old ego—is an assumption that propels you forward in that limited capacity of control. A local nervous system, bodily control. (What I call me, what you call I).² But the universe does not end where the body ends—or begins, for that matter.

Similarly, people imagine too much—(or too little)—that heaven is a place in a literal sense. They imagine jesus and the saints find themselves on a cloud, approved by the big guy above them. But as we are now working toward: that lord is then a fiction. A way that we have come to imagine that the world works. Nothing like our image of God so perfectly reveals our perception, our assumptions of reality— what we implicitly think that is possible in existence.

Heaven is a place relative to yourself. We are “in heaven” when we are experiencing something wonderful. It is not post-mortem; it is contingent on life. Just as hell—a feature of which is that it feels eternal. It is a place, but not some far-away land beyond comprehension that a transparent figure contained within our bodies will travel to once the shackles of the enclosure are broken.

What’s more: if we entertain that former vision, and find ourselves on that cloud, then what? What kind of horrible eternity is that? Anything that lasts too long becomes hell, purely through its monotony. You reach the inverse! Whoever tries to sell you on that vision hasn’t thought through his product, and what he’s advocating for.

Even if it weren’t such an unappealing dream: distrust anyone who too seriously promises to get you to that far-away land. Because they are converts of what they have not tried themselves. They know equally little. Whatever works to get you to heaven will be experienceable—not received in postponement of life. How will we ever know what gets us toward heaven or hell that way? It is anyone’s guess.³

Part of the beauty that makes it appreciable is the ephemerality. “All things pass”—both our hells and our heavens.⁴ We can navigate to them, we can outlast them. It is like a rubber band that can stretch either way out of its center. None of it is everlasting—but is simultaneously all that will ever be. Perpetual movement, finitum ad infinitum. “The only constant is change; the only permanence is impermanence.”⁵

1. That is what has been misunderstood about God. Both advocates and unbelievers can think too strongly in what it isn’t—in idol images.

2. “I is the name we all share”, said by Alan Watts, I think.

3. That does not stop people with great conviction and social strangulation to live by interpretations of these kinds. They are enchanted by the medium, and constrained by their own imagination.

4. The great psychedelic lesson, as per McKenna, in many lectures: “all things pass, including your friends, your enemies.”

5. The only guarantee is the unassured; the only assurance is the unknown.