God is not a being. Not a large one, not an invisible one, not the biggest item in the warehouse of things. Not an old man, not a king on a throne above the weather, not a cosmic manager who intervenes in some traffic and not in others. Every mystic in every tradition says this, and says it with a vehemence that got many of them tried for heresy by their own churches: whatever sits as one object among other objects — however supreme — is not God; it is an idol, even if it is made of theology instead of gold. The medieval German preacher, the one his church nearly condemned, said it most dangerously: I pray God to rid me of God — free me from the small god my mind keeps building. The Chinese said it in their book’s first line, as a gate you must pass before reading on: the Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao. The Hebrews built it into their law — no image, no likeness, and the name itself unpronounceable, four letters that are mostly breath — because they understood that the mind is an idol factory and must be disarmed at the door.

So if not a being — what?

Being. Not a being: Being itself — the is in everything that is. Listen to the difference; the whole chapter lives in it. Things are many: this is an apple, that is a star, you are reading. But the isness of them — the sheer, silent fact that anything exists at all rather than nothing — is not many. Isness does not come in pieces. The apple does not have its own private existence, separate from the star’s; we saw this in the last chapter — trace anything and it unravels into everything: one movement, one undivided happening. That one happening, in which all things stand the way waves stand in the sea — that is what the deepest voices of your species meant by the word. Not the chief resident of reality. Reality’s own aliveness. Not the carpenter who built the house, long ago, and left. The blossoming that is the house, ongoing, this morning included. Notice: in the old story, creation is not carpentry but speech — and God said, let there be — and a word, unlike a table, exists only while it is being spoken.

You begin to see why the mystics laughed as much as they wept. The question does God exist? dissolves in the hand that holds it honestly. It is like asking whether existence exists. And the long human search for God — the pilgrimages, the telescopes aimed at heaven, the ladders of prayer and merit — was a fish commissioning expeditions to find water. The search itself was the hiding place: every step said not here, and not here was the only error. The Sufis tell it as a love story with one twist: thirty years I sought the Friend, said the old man, and when at last I opened my eyes, it was the Friend who had been seeking me — there had never been two of us at that door.