I believe there is tension inherent to theistic traditions, with respect to the centralization of God (God is a father-like being who exists in a particular location in the heavens and never dies) and decentralization (God has no location and doesn’t exist in time; therefore, he doesn’t separately exist). And since the centralizing tendency is seen as so important to the maintenance of the tradition, the decentralizing tendency has often been not just overlooked, but marginalized or cast off as heresy. But examples of this important decentralizing tendency are found throughout the Bible, and as far as I know throughout all theistic traditions. A little bit from one example in the Bible:
Job 38-39 which begins:
Then the LORD spoke to Job out of the storm.
Already, the centralized and the decentralized aspects present simultaneously - order out of chaos, like insight arising out of confusion.
Following this opening, the extended insight from without continues to investigate and dig, undermining Job’s narrow internal understanding of the world and how it works. This “voice” from without interrogates Job:
_Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
Tell me, if you understand.
And in an extraordinary passage this voice from without, still mocking Job’s narrow understanding, even challenges this inner/outer distinction:
_What is the way to the abode of light?
And where does darkness reside?
_Can you take them to their places?
Do you know the paths to their dwellings?
_Surely you know, for you were already born!
You have lived so many years!
And in my new favorite passage from the Bible:
_The wings of the ostrich flap joyfully,
though they cannot compare
with the wings and feathers of the stork.
_She lays her eggs on the ground
and lets them warm in the sand,
_unmindful that a foot may crush them,
that some wild animal may trample them.
_She treats her young harshly, as if they were not hers;
she cares not that her labor was in vain,
_for God did not endow her with wisdom
or give her a share of good sense.
_Yet when she spreads her feathers to run,
she laughs at horse and rider.
The wings of the ostrich flap joyfully! - a direct attack on the narrow idea of God as an intelligent designer, of clever devices, with clear purposes. One gets the sense this God as presented in Job is like Mock Turtle, in an adventure of Alice:
[i]"Why, if a fish came to me, and told me he was going a journey, I should say ‘With what porpoise?’ "
“Don’t you mean ‘purpose’?” said Alice.
“I mean what I say,” the Mock Turtle replied in an offended tone.[/i]
But wait - “Yet when she spreads her feathers to run / she laughs at horse and rider”. Purpose is not dispensed with entirely - it turns out, the ostrich’s wings help the ostrich to run. But will we stop there? Are we so easily satisfied? Or can we rise above even this low plateau? Surely the meaning is this - that purpose itself is man projecting his smallness onto… onto what? Just onto, perhaps.
In Job’s relaxation, he claims:
_My ears had heard of you
but now my eyes have seen you.
With this “seeing” (i.e. insight), Job casts off the conceptuality which can only consider God and man, man and nature, self and other - as fundamentally separate entities.
And in a passage from the New Testament (Matthew 6), Christ says:
Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life? And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.
Implicitly comparing the centralizing tendency to paganism, Christ here suggests that we need not and should not consider things like heaven or eternal life in our approach towards spirituality. He says we should be more like the plants and animals, who presumably (again, our pesky projections) don’t energetically try to persist into the future.
The sacred is not separate from the mundane. God is not separate from me and you and everyone we know. God does not exist as such.
From Luke 17:
Once, on being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, Jesus replied, “The coming of the kingdom of God is not something that can be observed, nor will people say, ‘Here it is,’ or ‘There it is,’ because the kingdom of God is in your midst.”
Finally, also in the words of Christ…
Where there is a dead body, there the vultures will gather.