The Mundane God Within Us and the Illusion of Divine Oversight

Deflating religion and mysticism by recognizing our mind’s unconscious side

Christians and Muslims say God watches over everything we do and will judge us after we die. He’ll do so not behind our back, mind you, but to our faces in the afterlife. And similarly, many Hindus and mystics say that a cosmic consciousness underlies all natural changes, and that we unite with that field of awareness through meditation and spiritual discipline.

Our divided consciousness

But there’s a simpler hypothesis that accounts for this sense that what we do in life somehow has a transcendent meaning or license. There’s no God in the sky or in what was formerly called “Heaven,” nor is there a nonhuman consciousness that’s at the root of the physical universe.

Instead, there’s the duality between our conscious self and the unconscious side of our mind. Freud called them the Ego as ruled by the Superego, and the unconscious Id. Our waking selves are socially integrated and domesticated. We have plans we try to achieve with instrumental rationality, tailoring means to ends. We compromise and refrain from violating taboos, to be welcome in civilized society. That’s the mundane context in which our lives are largely automated by our egoistic cunning and our social roles.

Yet that’s not the whole of our mind. There are evidently degrees of conscious awareness, as indicated by our nightly dreams, by actions we carry out on autopilot or that have become second nature to us, and by peak states of consciousness which can be triggered by flow states of navigating the environment or by hallucinogenic drugs.

When driving a car, for example, you might be talking to the passenger, listening to music, or thinking about something else, but your brain will unconsciously calculate when to change speed or to turn the steering wheel. A hidden part of your mind is driving while the more personal side of you, the spotlight of your consciousness is otherwise occupied.

The key point here is that our unconscious mind isn’t bound by social restrictions or by our conscious fears and ambitions. We can overanalyze problems and tie ourselves up in knots, but our unconscious mind is free to imagine alternatives, as is clear from the surreality of dream imagery and from the bizarre contents of psychedelic states.

What’s relaxing or inspiring about smoking cannabis, for example, is that this drug relieves you of your inhibitions. Your intoxicated imagination can assess problems from a new angle, which makes this drug a boon to creative types. Alcohol similarly relieves us of the restrictions we impose on ourselves. “In vino veritas” means that we tend to tell the truth when we’re drunk. Our unconscious knowledge comes to the surface, no longer repressed by our conscious fears and other expectations.

The illusion of a divine overseer

We don’t need to accept all of Freudian psychology to recognize this duality. Once we understand, though, that part of us is alert, driven, and creative but unconscious, we have a ready deflationary explanation of theistic and mystical experience. Instead of being watched by God, spirits, or cosmic consciousness, we evidently watch ourselves. An unconscious side of our brain potentially knows everything our conscious self thinks or does, because our unconscious side is part of us. Indeed, our conscious thoughts and feelings emerge from the less-connected or otherwise ignored neural states which embody our unconscious self.

You can have a vivid sense of contacting higher intelligence while high on an entheogen. Elsewhere, for example, I report on such an experience I had while vaping cannabis. The impressions were unmistakable: while “high” in that state, everything feels more real and more profound because your inhibitions vanish. You encounter the world like a child again, so when thoughts bubble up from your half-poisoned brain, those thoughts, too, seem miraculous.

It felt exactly as though God or some all-knowing intelligence were speaking to me. But of course, as I realized as soon as I began to “come down” from the altered state, I had been engaging only with myself, albeit in an unusual, revelatory way. More precisely, the freer, childlike, most authentic part of me had blasted through the inhibitions that domesticated me and had come to the fore. My Id and Ego switched roles, as it were: my conscious self faded into the background and could only interrogate this new presence that’s normally submerged but that had suddenly launched itself into the spotlight of my awareness.

This kind of personal awareness is paradoxical in that the unconscious becomes conscious. And that’s likely the source of the religious sense that we’re being watched by an all-knowing spiritual presence.

Moreover, there’s every reason to suspect that this paradoxical state of revelatory consciousness comes to the forefront at the point of death. Our dying mind may well feature our unconscious side’s showing of its cards, as it were, revealing our neglected memories, presenting our life’s journey from what would seem like a fresh, profound perspective. Once again, our personal self in the narrow, egoistic sense will fade into the background as we lose ourselves in our unconscious mind’s dream about who we’ve been.

We may eventually seem, therefore, to be judged by a higher, infallible being, but we’ll only be judging ourselves, just as we do in our dreams and nightmares. Again, our unconscious side seems divine and infallible because it’s not subject to society’s laws or to sane, rational standards. Our unconscious mind is the seat of our creativity and of our fears, loves, and longings. Indeed, the focal point of conscious awareness is only a narrow spotlight which the whole of our body — especially our nervous system, together with our gut’s microbiome — directs and attenuates.

Our personal self that society recognizes is ultimately at the mercy of this shadow self that periodically shocks us with its savagery, unfettered creativity, and indifference to sophisticated rationalizations. “I didn’t know I had it in me,” we might say while in shock after having risen to a challenge at work or even after having committed a crime. We’re normally blind to most of what we are, but that hidden part is the so-called angelic (or demonic) overseer, the daemon, guardian spirit, or divine judge. Its assessments seem divine because they’re free from the committee-driven compromises and from the profane rules and rigged social games that normally ensnare us.

At any rate, this is a much simpler explanation of the religious and mystical sensibilities than the theistic one that accounts for that sense of duality by positing a supernatural being.