Finding God in What We Already Know
I used to think faith was simple—just believe, they said. Just believe.
But what happens when the God you're told to believe in doesn't match the God you feel in your heart?
The Awakening
Picture this: Ten-year-old me, sitting in a pew, listening to our priest condemn gay people with fire and brimstone. My small hands gripped the wooden bench as confusion washed over me.
Wait a minute.
All my life I'd been told God loves everyone unconditionally.
So where was this asterisk coming from? This footnote that said: God loves you... unless.
That Sunday morning became my first crisis of faith—not because I stopped believing in God, but because I realized there was a profound difference between my God and the God the Church was selling.
The Great Divorce
As the questions multiplied and the answers grew increasingly unsatisfying, I felt the relationship fracturing. The institution positioned itself between me and the divine like a controlling partner:
You need us to talk to God
You need us to be forgiven
You need us to interpret the rules
It was the classic narcissistic relationship playbook. So I said what I'd say to any narcissist today:
"Bye."
Not to God—to the middleman.
The Quest Begins
My spiritual journey started with looking for the "parent God" somewhere out there—above the clouds, beneath the soil, hidden in the cosmos. The revolutionary idea that God might be within me—that I might be an expression of God myself—hadn't yet dawned.
The Church had done its job well, keeping me feeling separate and inferior, a creature made by the Almighty who needed to walk on eggshells to avoid divine wrath.
Yuck.
Living Fully, Not Fearfully
What kind of life is it to constantly fear making mistakes? To me, living fully means having God beside me as I take risks, fail spectacularly, and celebrate wildly.
At the end of the day, we’re just making up our own problems, so we may as well make up our own joys. Money, politics, power dynamics, it’s all some game that we all created for ourselves—and then forgot we were in charge of the rules. We're like amnesiacs trapped in a game of our own design.
As I developed that perspective by reading books like the Bhagavad Gita, Tao Te Ching, and Autobiography of a Yogi, the absurdity of prioritizing material success over happiness became crystal clear.
Remind me why it’s important to get a good job, again?
So I would have enough points in my bank account to buy a big house and do whatever I wanted? Like the fisherman, I can do that anyway. (I mean, sure, money is nice, but prioritizing it above happiness is a recipe for disaster.)
The Banker and the Fisherman
There's a parable that perfectly captures this absurdity:
A young banker on vacation notices an older fisherman sitting contentedly on the beach.
"What do you do?" the banker asks.
"I'm a fisherman," the man replies. "I fish in the morning, sell my catch at my stand, and spend my days enjoying this view. People come from miles around for my fish."
The banker's eyes light up. "Have you thought about expanding?"
"And then what?" the fisherman asks.
"You could open locations across the country!"
"And then what?"
"Franchise your brand! Move into frozen foods!"
"And then what?"
"Take your company public and make millions!"
"And then what?"
The banker grins triumphantly. "Then you could retire to the beach, fish in the mornings, and enjoy beautiful sunrises for the rest of your life!"
The fisherman just smiles.
The Deathbed Test
Palliative care nurse Bronnie Ware documented the most common regrets of the dying. Number one?
"I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me."
How many of us are like the banker, inventing complex schemes to delay our own happiness? Or like Annie, always betting on tomorrow?
When my wife and I decided to live on the beach in Florida, friends assumed we were wealthy. We weren't. We just decided to prioritize what mattered most to us now, not someday. The truth is that we have everything we need, right in front of us, right now, to be happy. We just need to get out of all the stories we’re telling ourselves about how we don’t deserve to be happy NOW.
The Leap of Faith
Making such decisions requires enormous trust in the universe and willingness to surrender to unexpected outcomes. But when you show the universe you mean business (by putting yourself in that vulnerable position), something magical happens—the world rearranges itself to support you.
Call it manifesting if you're into the woo, or divine providence if you're traditionally religious. The principle remains: live authentically with compassion, and the path reveals itself.
Two Kinds of Faith
In my journey, I've discovered faith takes two distinct forms:
Blind Faith: Believing in what you can't see or understand
Experiential Faith: Directly encountering the divine in the here and now
My transformation began, surprisingly, through science. After college, I immersed myself in physics, chemistry, and quantum mechanics. I'd spend hours staring at leaves, visualizing photosynthesis—sunlight being transformed into oxygen, carbon becoming wood, essentially capturing sunlight in solid form.
I'd contemplate black holes and the countless interconnected systems within our bodies, and something profound would happen—a transference of faith.
Those childhood beliefs I'd been asked to accept blindly? I began seeing them manifest right before my eyes, hidden in plain sight.
Seeing Through God's Eyes
Have you seen the "Double Rainbow Guy" video? That man breaking into tears at the sight of colors in the sky isn't crazy—he's experiencing a moment of divine recognition:
In those kinds of moments, my blind faith comes pouring back to me ten-fold as I witness the manifestation of God in the real world. In moments of experiential faith, I see not with my own eyes, but with the eyes of God. I look around, breathe, and feel my body as if God has taken up residence for a moment.
These are some of the most beautiful moments imaginable, and although they’re fleeting, they’re also the reason I’m on a constant quest to raise and widen my awareness. I want to have these moments more often, and ultimately, to live in that state permanently.
The Kingdom Within
The enlightened ones throughout history—Buddha, Jesus, the rishis of India—occupied this space of divine union continuously. They called it samadhi, nirvana, or the kingdom of God within.
As Yogananda described his first experience with samadhi:
"My sense of identity was no longer narrowly confined to a body, but embraced the circumambient atoms... The entire cosmos, gently luminous, like a city seen afar at night, glimmered within the infinitude of my being."
So, yeah.
I’ll have what he’s having.
No one puts God in a corner
If you were to ask my 22-year-old self, I would have said that understanding how evaporation works is simply a form of knowledge about a physical phenomenon. But if I had a chance to talk to that 22-year-old, I might ask him: what causes the forces of nature to do that? And then, what forces drive those forces?
Scientists may think that by acquiring new knowledge, we’re pushing God into a tiny corner, but the truth is that the opposite is happening. The corner is a figment of our imagination.
We’re inventing names and rules about a world that we can only detect a small part of. We haven’t even gotten past the tip of the iceberg. To paraphrase Dirty Dancing, nobody puts God in a corner. If someone’s in a corner, it’s definitely not God.
The Addiction to Knowledge
For me, the more we discover, the more proof we have that God exists.
I don’t need to know how a sunset (or a rainbow) works in order to know it’s beautiful. It’s the surrender of knowledge and figuring things out that allows us to be present and see what is actually going on around us. To step into our feelings and intuition and be part of the picture for a hot second—not separate from it.
The alternative is that we continue in our addiction to knowledge, hoping that it keeps us safe from the always-looming threat of the unknown.
But the thing about knowledge is that the more we get of it, the more we realize how little we actually know, and it makes us feel even smaller. That’s the curse of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil: it’s not the Tree of Good and Evil. It’s the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.
Knowledge indicates separateness, which gives birth to duality and the existence of positive and negative forces. Knowledge helps us survive, so if you don’t know something, it’s bad, and if you do know something, it’s good. The second Shiva Sutra states very bluntly that knowledge is bondage.
So we build homes and factories and manufacture products that make us survive, feel better, and feel smarter. We start companies that create things that make our lives easier, including the largest company in the world whose name, for the record, is Apple.
So we continue acquiring new knowledge like starving lions in a feeding frenzy. And on and on it goes until we either die a lonely death, or (ideally) finally get tired of “getting smarter” and realize, at long last, that the “something bigger” out there was patiently waiting for us the whole time.
