Where to look to “see God Everywhere”
In his preface to this book, editor Barry McDonald reminds us that nature is sacred and that it is through the natural world that God reveals Himself. As human beings, our well-being—spiritual and physical—is inextricably linked to our being able to discern this reality.
Throughout the centuries, and across many religious traditions, we have sought the presence of the Real in wilderness landscapes. Deserts, forests, mountains and oceans are all places where the eye of the heart has opened and we have caught a glimpse of the beauty and the majesty of the Divine. Immersed in the silence of the great forest cathedrals and listening to the pure song of a mountain stream, we have come to know the inner man who has always lived upon the threshold of Heaven. And it is not only through the large and dramatic manifestations of nature that we have perceived the sacred: what wisdom did not the Buddha transmit by silently holding up a simple flower to the venerable Kashyapa?
are filtered through clouds,
we cannot help being struck
by this great symbol
of Divine radiance and majesty.
But are the rays
any less real and present
when clouds do not come between us
and the Source of those rays?
Do such layers of created things
act as both a filter and a mirror,
permitting us to see the radiance within
Nature while drawing us to its very Source?
Again, in the preface to Seeing God Everywhere, Barry McDonald, writes:
In the opening pages of this book, Frithjof Schuon speaks of “seeing God everywhere”. The “remembrance of God in all things” and the “metaphysical transparency of phenomena” are other pertinent expressions which Schuon uses to underline the immanence of God in the world. These words remind us that it is not only through sacred books like the Bible, the Upanishads, and the Quran that God reveals Himself to man. He also shows us the shining facets of His Reality through the beauties of the natural world; and just as we learn something about the nature of an artist through his art, we may discover the presence of the Creator in His creation.…
The fundamental thesis of this book is that our continuing physical and spiritual well-being is ultimately linked with our ability to “see God everywhere” and “remember Him in all things.”
photo by Muniyba Khan,
who also conceived this slideshow
Symbolism is one of the means by which man can “see” God. Frithjof Schuon in his essay “Seeing God Everywhere” elucidates:
Symbolism, whether it resides in nature or is affirmed in sacred art, also corresponds to a manner of “seeing God everywhere”….
How, then, do things symbolize God or “Divine aspects”? One cannot say that God is this tree, nor that this tree is God, but one can say that the tree is, in a certain aspect, not “other than God,” or that, not being non-existent, it cannot not be God in any fashion. For the tree has firstly existence, then the life which distinguishes it from minerals, then its particular qualities which distinguish it from other plants, and finally its symbolism; all of these are for the tree so many manners, not only of “not being nothingness,” but also of affirming God in one or another respect: life, creation, majesty, axial immobility, or generosity.
Symbolism would have no meaning if it were not a contingent, but always conscious, mode of perception of Unity; for “to see God everywhere” is to perceive above all the Unity—Âtmâ, the Self—in phenomena.
in Nepal, with the peak of
Ama Dablam in the background
In his essay “A Tibetan Buddhist Perspective on Spirit in Nature,” His Holiness the Dalai Lama introduces both a spiritual and practical viewpoint to the discussion of how we interact with nature and the interdependencies that exist between us:
There is a direct connection between the correct understanding of ecology and the natural environment and the Buddhist principle of interdependence in terms of causes and effects and in terms of parts and wholes, factors and aggregates. But the correct understanding of the subtlest level of interdependence—that of the interdependence of things and conceptual constructions—has more to do with maintaining the balance of the outer and the inner world, and with the purification of the inner world.…
Our very existence is something heavily dependent on the environment.…The expressed aim of Buddhism is the purification and development of the mind through mental training in order to attain supreme liberation. But the meditation manuals place great emphasis on finding an ideal environment for the practice of training the mind because a cleaner environment does have a tremendous impact on one’s spiritual progress. The Buddhist literature mentions the sanctity of the environment as inspiring and blessing the practitioner, and in turn the practitioner’s spiritual realization blessing the environment. There is an exchange between human spirit and nature. In tune with such awareness, we find in Buddhist practice specific rituals aimed at regenerating the vitality of the earth, at purifying the environment, wherein certain precious minerals are buried underground, and then consecration rituals are performed.…
Taking care of the planet is nothing special, nothing sacred or holy. It’s just like taking care of our own house. We have no other planet, no other house, except this one.
In the essay “The Firmament Sheweth His Handiwork,” Harry Oldmeadow holds our modern mentality directly responsible for current environmental crises. He exhorts us to re-connect with authentic spiritual traditions and to realize, in the true sense of the word, through the sacred rituals, the sacredness of the natural world:
The modern mentality characteristically looks for solutions to our most urgent problems in the wrong places; more often than not the proposed remedies aggravate the malady. Various responses to the so-called environmental crisis are of this type. Hardly anyone is now foolish enough to deny that there is something fundamentally wrong with our way of “being in the world.” The evidence is too overwhelming for even the most sanguine apostles of “Progress” to ignore. Much of the debate about the “environment” (itself a rather problematical term) continues to be conducted in terms derived from the secular-scientific-rationalist-humanist world-view bequeathed to us by that series of upheavals which subverted the medieval outlook—the Renaissance and Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment.
Traditional cosmogonies necessarily deal with the relationship of spiritual and material realities, a relationship which lies at the heart of all religious understandings of nature. Philosophically speaking, religions posit the existence of two “worlds,” one spiritual, immutable and absolute, the other material, mutable and relative, usually with an intermediary realm (which might variously be referred to as ethereal, subtle, astral and the like). Cosmogonies affirm the primacy of the spiritual: the material world derives from a divine creativity, or, at least, from a divine plenitude. In the religious context it is axiomatic that the material world did not and could not create itself; it is suspended, so to speak, within a reality which is immaterial and which is beyond time and space; the material world has no independent or autonomous existence.…
Humans are enjoined to play their part in the maintenance of the cosmic order, largely through their ritual life. This idea, everywhere to be found in the archaic worlds, makes no sense from a materialistic point of view which now determines the prevailing outlook—one completely impervious to the fact that, in [Seyyed Hossein] Nasr’s memorable phrase, “nature is hungry for our prayers.”
a painting by Giusto Dei Menabuoi, 14th c, San Giovanni in Padua, Italy
In his essay “Christianity and the Survival of Creation,” Wendell Berry explores the justness or otherwise of criticisms that Christianity is culpable with regard to the degradation of natural world. He says that, “…the evangelist has walked beside the conqueror and the merchant, too often blandly assuming that their causes were the same.” This behavior has led some conservationists who have not carefully read the Christian scriptures to blame Christian teachings for the destruction of the environment. Berry counters that it is vital to distinguish between biblical instruction and the actions of those who claim to have been so instructed. He advocates a closer reading of the scriptures to ascertain their true message vis-à-vis the environment and tells us that this will allow us to…
…discover that we humans do not own the world or any part of it: “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof: the world and they that dwell therein” [Psalm 24:1].…
Human ownership is limited by mortality and by natural constraints on human attention and responsibility; it quickly becomes abusive when used to justify large accumulations of “real estate,” and perhaps for that reason such large accumulations are forbidden in the twenty-fifth chapter of Leviticus. In biblical terms, the “landowner” is the guest and steward of God: “The land is Mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with Me.”
Such close reading of the scriptures ultimately leads to an obvious conclusion:
Our destruction of nature is not just bad stewardship, or stupid economics, or a betrayal of family responsibility; it is the most horrid blasphemy. It is flinging God’s gifts into His face, as if they were of no worth beyond that assigned to them by our destruction of them.…We have no entitlement from the Bible to exterminate or permanently destroy or hold in contempt anything on the earth or in the heavens above it or in the waters beneath it. We have the right to use the gifts of nature but not to ruin or waste them.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr, in “The Spiritual and Religious Dimensions of the Environmental Crisis,” explores the significance of religious rituals in establishing cosmic harmony—an idea that is alien to the modernist mind:
This idea is meaningless in the context of modern thought, where ritual seems to have no relation or correspondence with the nature of physical reality…how could rites establish cosmic harmony? From the modern scientific point of view such an assertion seems to make no sense at all. But it is not nonsense; it is a very subtle truth that has to be brought out and emphasized. From both the spiritual and the religious perspective, the physical world is related to God by levels of reality which transcend the physical world itself and which constitute the various stages of the cosmic hierarchy. It is impossible to have harmony in nature, or harmony of man with nature without this vertical harmony with the higher states of being. Once nature is conceived as being purely material, even if we accept that it was created by God conceived as a clockmaker, this cosmic relationship can no longer even be conceived much less be realized. Once we cut nature off from the immediate principles of nature—which are the psychic and spiritual or angelic levels of reality—then nature has already lost its balance as far as our relation to it is concerned.…
Rituals, from the point of view of religion, are God-made.… According to all traditional religions, rituals descend from Heaven. A ritual is an enactment or rather re-enactment here on earth of a divine prototype.
Now, these rites, by virtue of their re-enactment on earth, link the earth with the higher levels of reality. A rite always links us with the vertical axis of existence, and by virtue of that, links us also with the principles of nature.…From a metaphysical point of view a ritual always re-establishes balance with the cosmic order.
In the deepest mystical sense, nature is hungry for our prayers, in the sense that we are like a window of the house of nature through which the light and air of the spiritual world penetrate into the natural world. Once that window becomes opaque, the house of nature becomes dark. That is exactly what we are experiencing today. Once we have shut our hearts to God, darkness spreads over the whole of the world.
photo by Roland Reed, 1915
Oren Lyons’ moving essay “Our Mother Earth” makes a plea for the rights of nature to be balanced with the “human rights” that we are so quick to support, and he warns of the consequences if this does not happen soon:
We went to Geneva—the Six Nations, and the great Lakota nation—as representatives of the indigenous people of the Western Hemisphere. We went to Geneva, and we spoke in the forum of the United Nations.…And what was the message that we gave? There is a hue and cry for human rights—human rights, they said, for all people. And the indigenous people said: What of the rights of the natural world? Where is the seat for the buffalo or the eagle? Who is representing them here in this forum? Who is speaking for the waters of the earth? Who is speaking for the trees and the forests? Who is speaking for the fish—for the whales, for the beavers, for our children? We said: Given this opportunity to speak in this international forum, then it is our duty to say that we must stand for these people, and the natural world and its rights; and also for the generations to come. We would not fulfill our duty if we did not say that. It becomes important because without the water, without the trees, there is no life.…You think about it.…When you are sick and when your children are sick, you remember what the Indian said to you about water.
We are indigenous people to this land. We are like a conscience. We are small, but we are not a minority. We are the landholders, we are the land keepers; we are not a minority. For our brothers are all the natural world, and by that we are by far the majority.
The temporal beauty of the Sakura— cherry blossom, provides an important spiritual lesson for the contemplative mind as Hari Prasad Shastri illustrates in “O Hanami: Flower Viewing” where he relates such an experience:
Today the schools and offices of Yokohama have a holiday to allow the people to view the cherry-blossoms. The Japanese call it O Hanami. Men and women, children with their nurses and old folks, are in the country to view the beauty of the blossoms which come, nobody knows from where, for two days. They do not die on the branches; their color does not fade. When they have delivered their message of the love of Buddha and taught a lesson in detachment, they leave the branches in small petals and dance in the wind, as if saying a good-bye to the trees and the wind, and cover mother earth with their purity and beauty. The wind is in love with their high spirit and lifts the petals from the earth to embrace them; but they must go to the Land of Truth, the Platonic Region of Eternal Ideas, the Paradise of the holy Buddha.
“We must cultivate beauty of character in daily life,” declare the cherry-blossoms. Live to diffuse beauty, seeing the eternal, immutable Truth, in the passing and the changing and leave the world like them, smiling, beautifying and peace-giving. Passions are wrong because they cloud our reason, narrow the scope of our heart and localize our soul. Prejudices—that is, unreasoned, uncritical opinions, like fanatical patriotism and race-worship—darken our reason. Love tainted by a desire for possession and personal gratification is like an over-ripe persimmon, full of color but insipid in taste.
done in tile in the 18th century,
is a wonderful illustration of
manifestation emanating from the Center.
Nature presents us with powerful illustrations of creation, destruction, continuous change, cycles of life and death, and so on. Those people who have the power of vision to see through the “veils” of existence might see, as the great Muslim mystic Ibn ‘Arabî could see, an unending progression of coming-into-being and going-out-of-being. In “Creation According to Ibn ‘Arabi” Toshihiko Izutzu uses an analogy to explain Ibn ‘Arabî’s complex philosophical point:
It is as if you saw millions of lights flickering against the background of an unfathomable darkness. If you concentrate your sight on any one of these illumined spots, you will see its light disappearing in the very next moment and appearing again in a different spot in the following moment.
Izutsu quotes the great mystic as he reveals how people who have been “unveiled” might perceive all creation as the continuous self-manifestation of God:
As to the people of “unveiling,” they see God manifesting Himself with every Breath, no single self-manifestation being repeated twice. They see also by an immediate vision that every single self-manifestation gives rise to a new creation and annihilates a creation (i.e., the “creation” that has preceded), and that the disappearance of the latter at every (new) self-manifestation is “annihilation” whereas “subsistence” is caused by what is furnished (immediately) by the following self-manifestation.
So that we might not be lost in the seeming flux of this perception, Izutsu sums up for us:
Thus in Ibn ‘Arabî’s thought, everything in the world (and therefore the world itself) is constantly changing, but underlying this universal flux of changing things there is Something eternally unchanging.
This certainly is a powerful mode of seeing God everywhere…and always.
In her essay “The Underlying Order: Nature and the Imagination,” Kathleen Raine mourns the impoverishment of human knowledge and experience which has resulted from secular scientism:
The materialist hypothesis—for it is no more—attributes order and reality to the outer world, leaving mind itself, consciousness itself, as the mere mirror or receptacle of impressions.
Modern secular man finds no burning bush, no Presence which commands “Take thy shoes from off thy feet for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.” But in losing the capacity for awe, for wonder, for the sense of the numinous, the sacred, what we lose is not the object but that part of ourselves which can find in trees or churinga-stone or the dread cavern of the pythoness the correspondence of an aspect of our humanity of which these are the objective correlative, the correspondence, the mirror, the “signature.”
We can never un-know what the scientific investigation of nature has presented to us. It has described in the minutest detail and the grandest scope that image in the “…glass of nature.” But until we have experienced the unity of all things not as a natural fact but as a living presence we shall never, in the early mystic Traherne’s words, know the world “aright”.…
Within the tradition of spiritual knowledge…the underlying order is not some system of natural laws but being itself, at once the “person” and the “place” of the universe.…
The unity of this Being—of Being itself—is not that of a mechanism but of a consciousness, “in whom we live, and move, and have our being”…and we wish we could experience more of that whole of which each of us is at once an infinitesimal part and an infinite center.
a painting by Ferdinand Hodler
circa 1904
Arthur Versluis contends, as does Wendell Berry, that it is not the teachings of Christianity which are to blame for the current environmental crisis. In the essay “Hierophanic Nature” he maintains that it is scientism that is to blame for the loss of the sense of the sacredness of Nature:
…In reality, the origin of modernity lies not in the Judeo-Christian tradition so much as in the jettisoning of that tradition in favor of scientistic ratiocentrism. The truth is, Christianity has always contained within it an esoteric understanding of nature as hierophany, and it is upon this understanding that we will focus.…
It is well known that in shamanism all over the world there is said to be a secret language of nature.…This archaic unity between humanity and nature reflects a primordial state that, in Christian terms, cannot be other than paradisal.…
Christian Hermeticism, or theosophy as displayed in the writings of Paracelsus, Böhme, Saint-Martin, Baader and Oetinger, also understands that there is a “secret language” of nature—but for them it is an emblematic language rooted in alchemical imagery and, even more, in the science of correspondences. This theosophical tradition derives its basis from a concept expressed in the Tabula Smaragdina (the Emerald Tablet): what is below reflects what is above. In other words, there is a correspondence between spiritual truth and what we see in the natural world. One sees this in the many parables of the New Testament, which use natural images to reveal the most transcendent of spiritual truths about the human condition.…
…Environmentalists or ecologists today present arguments about the biosphere, and about the earth as a single living organism, but such arguments still present nature based on materialist premises; they entail no concept that nature might be understood in light of a unified religious understanding. Some criticize Christianity as having been responsible for the birth of the modern world and its destruction of nature, but in fact it was the progressive erosion or disintegration of a religious center in the Judeo-Christian world that gave birth to modernity. The absence of Christianity—in any complete sense—is responsible for the divorce between humanity, nature, and God that many now feel, and its reestablishment alone can restore the hieros gamos, or sacred marriage between man, nature, and God in the West.
Water is a multi-faceted symbol representing life, purity, sanctity, knowledge and the soul. As with so many other symbols in Nature, it has become for modern man no more than a commodity. Titus Burckhardt explains in “The Symbolism of Water”:
Modern man completely separates not only “the beautiful” from “the useful,” but also “the beautiful” from “the real.” This way of thinking is like a split in one’s consciousness, and it is difficult to say whether it is cause or effect of a state of affairs which, on the one hand, drives man systematically to destroy, on an ever-widening front, the natural balance of things and, on the other, impels him periodically to flee the artificial world which in this way he creates.
This wonderful essay lays out for us in vivid detail the beauty of the symbols, the importance of them for our inner life and the consequences of ignoring the connection between inner and outer:
Water has more than a purely physical or biological meaning; the spiritual realities, of which it is the symbol, are never attached to it arbitrarily, but are directly and logically derived from its essence. The contemplative beholding of Nature which, through essential and constant appearances, perceives the timeless prototypes or causes of these appearances, is not something that is merely sentimental, nor is it bound to time and place, and this despite the fact of the modern world, from which this kind of contemplation seems to have been banished. We say “seems,” for such a contemplation of things is too deeply rooted in the human heart to be able to disappear completely. It even continues unconsciously, and it would not be difficult to show how the mysterious attraction of water as something sacred, as a symbolic and manifested expression of a psychic or cosmic reality, lives on in art, especially in painting and poetry.
For Reza Shah-Kazemi not only is beauty itself a Divine archetype but necessarily, the experiencing of beauty must also have its correlative on a transcendent plane. Thus every experience of beauty is an opportunity, to be fulfilled or lost, for the remembrance of God:
But whereas in the case of formal beauty, participation in the archetype is rigorously objective and unconditional, in the case of aesthetic experience, participation in the archetype is critically dependent on the subjective capacity of the individual to make of his experience a spiritual foretaste of heavenly felicity and thereby a “remembrance of God.” Beautiful vision on earth should foreshadow the Beatific Vision in Heaven, it should heighten one’s resolution to conform to the requirements of this celestial reward; it should, in other words, lead one to God. The experience of beauty, far from being a question of merely aesthetic sensibility, is essentially an invitation to union: union with the Divine Principle, which both projects Beauty and attracts by means of Beauty. One speaks of being entranced, enthralled, enraptured by beauty: these terms clearly indicate the spiritual potential inherent in aesthetic experience, for the individual is not fully himself in the face of a beauty that overwhelms him; indeed, a certain mode of extinction can even be said to have taken place.
For more on Taoist art in general, and Taoist landscape painting in particular, see the chapter “Taoist Art” in The Essential Titus Burckhardt.
J.C. Cooper reminds us of the importance of balance and equilibrium in life and illustrates this by a discussion of the principles of Chinese gardening in which yin and yang are each given their proper due thus achieving a harmony that is beneficial to the spirit:
Nowhere is the balance of the yin and the yang in Nature shown better than in the development of the typical Chinese garden, which was essentially Taoist in origin. The Han Emperors had earlier created vast artificial landscapes and parks with mountains, ravines, forests, rivers, lakes and open spaces to provide a habitat for hordes of game for hunting, but during the time of the Six Dynasties and the Tang, when Taoism prevailed, there developed the quiet intimacy of the Taoist garden, intended to reflect heaven on earth. It became a symbol of Paradise where all life was protected and sheltered.…
While landscapes portray the vastness and grandeur of Nature, the garden reveals the intimate aspect.…
In the past in China, though man was the mediator between Heaven and Earth, he was not the measure of the universe; his place was simply to maintain the balance and harmony between the yin and the yang. It was Nature which was the Whole, the controlling cosmic power. The garden helped man in his work of maintaining harmony; it also had an ethical significance and influence. According to Ch’ien Lung it had “a refreshing effect upon the mind and regulated the feelings,” preventing man from becoming “engrossed in sensual pleasures and losing strength of will.” Its pleasures were simple, natural and spiritual.”
Joseph Epes Brown talks of the interconnectedness of all living beings and the vital importance and symbolism of sacred rites:
In the Plains area, to give an example, one of the most profound rites is that of the smoking of the pipe. In this ritual smoking of the pipe, all who participate are joined in a communal ritual, and when it is finished, everybody who has shared in the smoking of the pipe recites the phrase, in Lakota in this case, “mitakuye oyasin”—“we are all relatives.” We are all related, because in this rite we have all become one within a mystery that is greater than any of its parts.…
All spiritually effective rites must accomplish three cumulative possibilities which may be termed purification, expansion in wholeness or virtue, and identity. A ritual means which embodies these possibilities may be found in the sacred nature and use of the Plains Indian tobacco pipe, the smoking of which constitutes a communion. The shape of the pipe with its stem, bowl or “heart,” and foot, is identified with the human person. In purifying the pipe before a ritual smoking there is an analogy to man’s own purification; for in concentrating on the hollow of the straight stem leading to the bowl comes the understanding that one’s mind should be this straight and pure. In filling the bowl of the pipe a prayer is said for each grain of tobacco in such a manner that everything in the world is mentioned. The filled bowl or the heart of man, in thus containing all possibilities, is then the universe. Finally, the fire which is put to the tobacco is the Presence of the ultimate all-inclusive Principle, Wakan Tanka, the “Great Mysterious.” In smoking the pipe, through the aid of breath the totality of all creation is absorbed within this ultimate Principle. And since in the pipe there is a grain of tobacco identified with the one who smokes, there is here enacted a sacrificial communion of identity. With this understanding, the phrase “we are all related,” recited by the individual or group after the smoking, takes on the deepest possible meaning.
The essays in this book represent the teachings and perspectives of major religious traditions on the relationship of the Divine and the human through the always accessible intermediary of nature and the sacred. Though each one is different it speaks of the same Truth. The Jewish Saint, Levi Yitzchak of Berditchov, sums up the theme of “seeing God everywhere” beautifully in the following poem:
Where I wander You!
Where I ponder You!
Only You everywhere, You, always, You.
You, You, You.
When I am gladdened—You!
And when I am saddened—You!
Only You, everywhere You!
You, You, You.
Sky is You!
Earth is You!
You above! You below!
In every trend, at every end,
Only You, everywhere You!
