While God does not change, in the sense of never metamorphosing into a different sort of God, our perception of God does change. The "God" that is our personal construction of the reality to which we give the name "God", changes.

While there is a uniqueness about the modifications or transformations that occur in each individual's view of God, due to a range of religio-cultural factors and to our different life-stories, in the West, at least, "God" generally undergoes the following series of metamorphoses, being experienced as Parent, Projection, Subjectivity and Cosmic Presence. I have called these metamorphoses "levels" or "stages", as they do represent an increase in engagement with the foundational reality that we call God. There is a loose sense in which the "stages" are age-specific, as they pre-suppose a maturational readiness.

Several qualifications need to be made about this process. Not everyone processes through all four transitions and many remain blocked and do not move beyond the second category. Where priests/ministers remain fixated at this level, there is little encouragement for those to whom they minister to progress beyond it. Those who do make the transition do so because they are not wholly dependent on the clergy for their personal, spiritual and theological development.

Because of differences of personality, related to genetic and environmental inheritance, contact with the various levels do not always follow the general progression, as we can tap into elements associated with the "higher" stages in earlier phases of our development, that is, before we make a stage transition to that level. We may take on board, by osmosis, someone else's "God" projection. Or we may discover, early in life, that we have a heightened intuitive connectedness with a divinity imminent in nature.

We generally carry over, into the next progression, elements associated with the previous stage or stages. This may happen because of the fact that such elements have been indelibly imprinted and are not easily superseded or exchanged, or because we are fearful of relinquishing the known for a vaguely sensed unknown. There is usually a considerable period of overlap. In the process of differentiation, at each stage, there is rarely a complete dissociation from what has gone before. A healthy transition involves an incorporation of healthful elements from the previous stage/s into the new experience/paradigm and a dissociation from unhealthy aspects. [123]

God as Parent

In the earliest phase of the evolution of "God", the infant's experience of his/her parent/s is the foundational influence in forming their "feel" for God, involving a gestalt of impressions. In a sense, the parent is "God".

This fact has several implications. Where the experience of parent/s was positive, God will be related to positively. Where the experience was negative, which could range from absence, lack of affirmation, perfectionist expectations, emotional absence, desertion, through to violence and sexual abuse, "God" may be a very difficult figure to relate to, particularly where "he" has been brought in to re-inforce or justify parental demands or behaviour.

It is also likely that, for the child, God will have a masculine or feminine feel, or some combination of both, depending on which parent or caregiver has taken responsibility for the nurture of the infant. This influence will be located along a continuum from extremely beneficial to severely detrimental.

Some, whose experience of a parent, or parents, has been, on balance, negative, find in "God", that is, the "God" professed by the church, a compensatory parental figure.

There is an obvious hunger for such an image, together with the experience of engagement with that "God", or, with God through that "God", that the image promises. While this Church-talked/preached "God" may facilitate an encounter with God, the fact that the relationship with the parent has not been healthily processed, but has been substituted for, may mean that one's progression to a more comprehensive, and, therefore, healthy experience and perception of God is held back by that lack of resolution.

Anna Maria Rizzuto, a Freudian psychoanalyst, using object relations theory, which sees object representation as a synthesising of compound memories involving visceral, sensory-motor, iconic and conceptual experiences, has traced the development of children's God-images.

She pointed to the fact that Freud argued that young boys, in the period of their Oedipal development, used their parental images, particularly father images, to construct God-representations, to which they developed a libidinal attachment as father substitutes.

Rizzuto, who argued that Freud had neglected the role of the mother and the situation of the daughter, contended that all children develop God imagos, based on parental imagos, that are foundational to their experiences of God. She argued that objects in the child's early life are the primary foundation for the child's relationship to God.

The most important object in the child's early life is its mother, who represents the child's world and who mirrors back to the child both the attitude of the environment to the child and the mother's experience of the child's developing egoic core. [124]

The influence of the mother, and later the father, in their generation of parental imagos, has a profound influence on the development, in the child, of their feel for, perception of and mode of approach to God. Rizzuto argued that the construction of these God-images was integrally related to the construction of the self. She also contended that this experience affects all children, even those raised by aggressively atheistic parents, whose children entertain these imagos surreptitiously under the bedclothes. She went on to suggest that these imagos begin to be challenged and modified when the child ventures out of the home and warned that it was important for the psychic and spiritual health of the adult for the imagos to be updated, otherwise a dissonance between the imago and one's operating philosophy could lead to double-think, breakdown, or even dissociation.

Robert Coles, formerly Professor of Psychiatry and Medical Humanities at Harvard, drawing a distinction between religious enculturation and spirituality, has argued that the young child will use religious perspectives, stories and rituals to develop a nascent spirituality and thus to begin navigating his/her way through life.

God as Projection

The next stage in the evolution of the God image represents God as a projection of positive and negative elements from the unconscious.

There is a sense in which the "God" we worship is a reflection of factors at work in the emergence of the self, and particularly in its murky depths. At this stage, the individual is unaware of what is happening in their unconscious, unaware, even, of the presence of an unconscious.

The "god" of our projections is made up of a number of factors.

The first is the projection of an inner divinity, that is, of the presence of God that suffuses our inner being.

Where we have no conscious access to our inner being, where the conscious ego does not attempt to connect with the unconscious, out of which it originally emerged and from which it has dissociated itself, factors in the unconscious will take the initiative and project themselves onto an external object, and, in this way, confront the ego with their presence.

The object onto which the energy of the God within will project itself, in the case of individuals nurtured in a religious environment, will be images of divinity supplied by that religion. Where the individual is not nurtured in a religious context, this powerful, numinous element will be projected onto an individual, a community or an ideology, which, like the god-images of the religions, will become an object of worship. [125]

In Western culture, because a civilisation's "gods" reflect the gender balance associated with modes of production and stratification, this "god", that results from projection, has been male.

There is a sense in which, at this stage, the individual is unable to distinguish between God and the image of God, or God and his/her perception of God.

A range of negative material from the unconscious will also be projected onto this image, that is now glowing with numinosity. This will include such elements as repressed, unresolved emotions, like anger and the sense of rejection and of judgement that is unconsciously posited of internalised parents and other adults. This image partners guilt and shame. Visceral memories of neglect, lack of acceptance or violence, associated with parents or other significant others, will also texture our God-image. A consequent lack of self-acceptance, or self hatred, will also play a part, as such attitudes will be feelingly predicated of God. The god-image is loaded with freight from the unconscious.

This "god as projection", associated with a religio-cultural image of divinity, is viewed as external to us. Reflecting the negotiation of the unconscious with the conscious, in which the unconscious takes the initiative, this "god" is seen to call us to intimacy and union, to an overcoming of the separation of the conscious and the unconscious that is reflected in what we experience as a separation from God.

To effect an integration of the conscious and the unconscious requires of the conscious ego a willingness, or ability, to face, accept and own the unruly unconscious, that is, the shadow side of a carefully cultivated positive self- image. This self-image, at this stage, substitutes for what has not yet been attained, that is, an acceptance of and comfortableness with one's total being, with its light and shade and its in-process self-healing.

The conscious ego, in direct negotiation with the unconscious, will begin facing and owning its shadow distortion, that is, it will begin thinking about the total self in another way, which represents a healthy repentance. However, when this doesn't happen, and elements from the unconscious are projected onto the cultural god-image, the unconscious demands, not a healthy repentance, but an unhealthy appeasement.

This appeasement, in the Christian context, has involved two elements. The first is the urge to recommend oneself to God through moral perfection, reflected, for instance, in the frenetic activity of the Apostle Paul before his Damascus road experience. The second is the appropriation of Jesus as a projection object, where his death is viewed as a culmination of the Jewish sacrificial system. This system, at a socio-psychological level, was a ritualization of the process of projection. Metaphors, highlighting the costliness of Jesus living the way he did, are pushed to an absurd extreme to justify the demand for dialogue and rapprochement that the unconscious [126] demands of the conscious. Ironically, Jesus made this rapprochement possible in a gentler, effective and direct way through powerful incarnation of divine love.

As will have been evident, from the enumeration of the negative elements that the unconscious will project onto the God-image, the dynamics inherent in the formation of the first God-image are not unrelated to those associated with this second development, as there is an energetic synergy between the two. The god-image, associated with projection, overlays and interacts with the foundational strata that was unconsciously worked up out of the parental imagos. It is also enmeshed with teachings the child is exposed to in Sunday school and in worship. As many adult members of the church, whose perceptions are reinforced by retrogressive mythologies, have not seen any need, or been challenged to move beyond this stage in the evolution of their god-representations, children, nurtured in this sort of Christian environment, will be so over-exposed to "god as projection" that it will be difficult for them, as adults, to move beyond it.

God as Subjectivity

The third stage in the evolution of "God" is related to the fact that, to edge closer to a more authentic discovery of God, we need to journey within.

This is the testimony of the contemplatives of all religious traditions. It was acutely obvious in the experience of the Apostle Paul. Before his Damascus road experience, Paul worshipped a "God", who was little more than a projection of his own inner disharmony, onto the image of Yahweh. He was desperate to appease this "God", and, as a consequence, he confused morality with spirituality. Following his conversion, he discovered that the God, whom he was so desperately trying to appease, was to be experienced within himself. He spoke of the Christ within¹ and of living on the level of the Spirit,² The Pauline tradition continued to speak, in similar vein, of Christians being filled with fullness of Being, that is, with the fullness of God.³

The connection between discovery of self and discovery of God can be approached in one of two ways.

The Desert Fathers of the 4th Century sought God in the loneliness of the Egyptian desert, away from the morally polluting distractions of civilisation, and found themselves confronted by the demons of the unconscious. Seeking God confronts us with ourselves.

If we are willing to go on the journey of self-discovery, to descend within and confront the shadowy identities that inhabit the darkness of the unconscious, alternative identities to the ego, that pull the levers that influence our behaviour, we will discover God as an accompanying presence, as a healing energy and as our Ground, the fundamental source of our personal existence. [127]

Both phenomena indicate that the discovery of God and the discovery of self are the one discovery.⁴ This joint discovery becomes a means of our inner healing.

Discovering the God of our depths, the God whose presence constitutes us, opens us to an experience of grace, that is, to the experience of grace as an energy-field experienced as a pervasive, yet non-intrusive love. It is this love, that, accepting us in our totality, ego and unconscious, furnishes the foundation for the overcoming of the separation between the ego and the unconscious. The resultant integration, which is always in progress, and which has a profound effect on the way we live, on our relationship to ourselves, to others, and to the eco-system that supports us, is central to the work of grace that Christ incarnated.

The fact, that, at this stage, God is discovered within, rather than in an image or identity external to us, does not imply a prior absence. The possibility of such a perspective is contradicted by the Yahwistic mythological image of human beginnings in Genesis 2, where God, portrayed anthropologically, is seen to breathe his Spirit into the clay image he had made of the prototypal human.

Karl Rahner has described, intuitively and sensitively, the universal experience of an inner Spirit presence that inclines us to act in ways that will be beneficial to our development and to that of others and of society. This Spirit also has the ability to take us beyond our natural moral capacities. He argues that we can either choose to flow with this Presence or to disregard it, choices which are obviously conditioned by the degree to which our capacity for making such a response has been damaged. He argues that we make choices at two levels in the responses we make to situations, an inner response to the flow of this guiding and empowering inclination and a response to the corresponding situation we are dealing with in the external world. His point is that the choice God presents us with, to flow with or to resist the inner inclination, is foundational to the exercise of freedom, in all of its different manifestations. In the flow of this Spirit, God is present to all individuals in the depths of their subjectivity. A recognition of this presence, and an honouring of this presence, represents an entering upon a new stage of God-awareness.⁵

Jesus, who manifest this awareness transparently, set up in others, through his mere proximity, a sympathetic vibrational energy, corresponding to his own, that brought them a deep sense of the presence of God and that caused them to feel that, in encountering him, they had encountered God.

Emergence into this level of God-awareness, which involves painful self-confrontation as a prelude to a comprehensive self-acceptance, results in an increase in both wisdom and compassion. [128]

God as Cosmic Presence

The experience of God as Subjectivity leads on to an experience of God as Cosmic Presence.

The sense of God as cosmic Presence is latent, or unthematically present, phylogenetically in the historical development of human consciousness and ontogenetically in the development of every individual.⁶ However, the manner in which this Presence is discerned, or experienced, at each phase, will be different. Furthermore, while a development in apperception is traceable as one progresses through various phases [e.g. archaic, magic, mythic, rational, transrational],⁷ the awareness of Presence is not always registered in an increase in intuitive perception. For example, using alternative terminology, while pre-rational and trans-rational modes of consciousness access this Presence in their different ways, rational consciousness appears to suffer the loss of such awareness, in spite of the fact that it was this very Presence that was responsible for the emergence of rationality and was manifest in its expression. This phenomenon reflects a transition from an undifferentiated embededness, to a separation, to a trans-personal reconnectedness that is enhanced by a new awareness and intentionality.

This Presence is the Presence in which the universe inheres, being its Ground, its creative evolutionary energy and the great non-dual, fecund Emptiness [tohuwa-bohu]⁸ out of which it was birthed.

In the evolution of consciousness, from the physiosphere, to the biosphere, to the noosphere, to the theosphere, this Cosmic Presence, or Spirit, has manifest in the elements of each stage, that is, the fullness of Presence has been manifest at each stage, but in a manner appropriate to the patterning of each stage. Spirit has manifest as matter in the physiosphere, as biological life in the biosphere, as mind in the noosphere and as spirit in the theosphere.⁹ It is in the total embrace of this Presence that we live and move and have our being.¹⁰

The awareness of God as cosmic Presence represents what Ken Wilber describes, in terms of the development of human consciousness, as the emergence of the theosphere. In one sense, it is God's knowing of God's Self as Spirit, as God in previous stages in this evolution has known God's Self as physical matter, as biological life and as mind. At this stage we know God by conscious, intuitive participation in God's knowing of God's self as Spirit. As Meister Eckhart explained, our spiritual discernment of this Presence in all of reality is our engagement in God's seeing and knowing, a seeing and knowing that is constitutive of all reality and that enables us to recognize this divinity, both in ourselves and in the world around us.¹¹

This map of reality is not a sheerly metaphysical construction but is a charting of transpersonal experience, which is consistently endorsed by the community of those whose experience qualifies them to judge validity claims at this level of apperception. Such are drawn from the full spectrum of [129] religious affiliation, and their authenticity is confirmed by the fact that their ascent to the level of the theosphere has led to and been balanced by the development of a corresponding depth of compassion.¹²

Those who have experienced this theosphere, that is, those who have entered deeply into the experience of God as Presence, have progressed through a range of sub-stages. These manifest the paradox of increasing interiority and decreasing narcissism. In describing these sub-stages, Wilber's categories will be used.¹³

Vision-logic, or network logic, is a transitional stage which transcends formal operational thinking and which can effect an increase in globalization, or in the capacity to intuitively appropriate the perspectives and to live the imperatives of a deeper, global identity, a globalization that goes beyond that made possible by rational thinking. Those at this developmental level are on the verge of the transpersonal.

The first of the transpersonal levels, the psychic, is that in which there is a recognition of what Emerson described as the Over-Soul, that is, the discerning in others of the Soul, or Presence, that one discerns in oneself.¹⁴ At this level, as with those above it, individuality does not disappear, but "is negated and preserved in a deeper and wider ground, a ground that conspicuously includes all of nature and its glories."¹⁵ At this level, the moral imperative becomes less a matter of shoulds, an imposition, and more a natural expression of being.

At the next, or subtle level, this Universal Self, that is present in others, is directly experienced in the unity of the physiosphere, biosphere and noosphere. This Self is the originating and sustaining ground of matter, life and mind, whose glories withdraw before the radiance of the Spirit that is their Ground. This stage is represented by the sixth mansion in Teresa's Interior Castle, where the Lover and the Beloved, God and the human soul enjoy occasional intimacy and where all creatures are embraced by the love and joy that are generated within one's inner being.¹⁶

In the realm of the causal, the uniting of the soul and God, that was the fitful experience of the subtle level, is transcended in what Wilber describes as "the prior identity of Godhead, or pure formless awareness, pure consciousness as such, the pure Self as pure Spirit."¹⁷ The experience of union with God has been overtaken by an identity with Godhead. As Eckhart put it, "I find in this breakthrough that God and I are one and the same."¹⁸ This experience is also reflected in the comment of the Johannine Jesus, that, "I and my Father are one."¹⁹ This state is often described as "formlessness", primordial "emptiness". It is an experience of absolute being, or, to put it in the language of the Hebrew Scriptures, of "I AM THAT I AM."²⁰ What is experienced cannot be adequately described. The only way to approach an explanation is through negation, that is, through indicating what it is not [Sanskrit: neti, neti]. It is the pure Witness of "this and this" [130] that transcends "this and this". This state borders on the experience of a total overcoming of the subject/ object dichotomy.

When one breaks through the formless causal, or the "absorption into pure unmanifest and unborn Spirit, the entire manifest world [or worlds] arises once again, but this time as a perfect expression of Spirit and as Spirit. The formless and the entire world of manifest Form--pure Emptiness and the whole Kosmos--are seen to be not-two [or non-dual]."²¹

These transpersonal states of awareness are experienced and nurtured through meditation, without which they are nothing more than intriguing metaphysical theory that appears to have little connection with reality.

Christianity has been suspicious of transpersonal exploration, a suspicion resulting from a number of factors.

The first is a distrust in both the human body and in the teleological energies of the body/self. It is through the embodied apperception of the body/self that the Cosmic Presence is discerned.

Second, Wilber, who, incidentally, holds no brief for Christianity, argued that the divinizing of Jesus, and the development of the doctrine of the Trinity, discouraged the possibility of his followers experiencing a Christic union with the divine.²² Christian contemplatives, while admired for other reasons, have found that their mystical experiences, which were foundational to who they were, were regarded with incomprehension and suspicion.

The third relates to the separation, in the Mental Egoic phase in the development of human consciousness, the tentative beginnings of which Wilber situates around 2500 BCE,²³ of the eros-driven path of ascent and the agape-driven path of descent, the healthful union of which resulted in the integration of wisdom and compassion. The fact that the West has been unable to hold together the balance between ascent and descent, in spite of Augustine²⁴ and Schelling's²⁵ attempts to do so, has resulted in a war between the Ascenders and in the Descenders and in the current dominance of the Descenders and disparagement of the Ascenders.²⁶ This war, and its outcome, evident in the philosophical, scientific and political history of the West, is also reflected in the Church's, or, at least, in Protestantism's disinclination to take seriously the Church's tradition of mystical theology.

I have attempted, in this article, to argue that God is to be distinguished from our perceptions of God. Our perception of God, which influences the ways in which God is intentionally accessed by us, and therefore experienced by us, is related to factors associated with personal/spiritual maturation.²⁷

I have also contended that a developmental progress can be discerned, from an experience of God as Parent, to an experience of God as a gestalt of [131] projections, to an experience of God in the depths of one's subjectivity, to an experience of God as Cosmic Presence. This progress, healthfully negotiated, also registers a decrease in ego-centricity and an increase in wisdom and compassion.

In developing this paradigm, I did not intend to imply that God deals with us any differently, that is, preferentially,²⁸ or that we are any more religious or Christian, or acceptable to God, in realising the potential of the later stages. However, what it does mean, is that our capacity for engaging with God, for appropriating a God-given identity, an identity rooted in God's love for us, and for intentionally recognizing and flowing with divine grace, undergoes progressive enhancement as the different transformations are negotiated. [132]

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