Divinity Within Ourselves: God as Mind Projected onto the External World

By D. Derek Lyons

Divinity Within Ourselves proposes that belief in God naturally arises from the operation of the human brain, particularly from the consciousness of mind itself. Just as our brains project our sensations and perceptual constructs onto the external world, we too apprehend our minds as a whole as immanent in individual objects and the background space of the universe. Belief in God partakes in the inherent unifying processes of the brain, which incorporate our past and present experience of pure mind into our daily lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Jun 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9781645367024

D. Derek Lyons

The author has been a patent attorney for over 30 years, now with a practice in the New York City area. He was born in Wichita, Kansas, in 1951, the first of seven children. He went to Lehigh University, where he majored in math, physics, and psychology. He has painted in acrylics and sculpted in clay. He currently reads, thinks, and writes. He is married with one child.

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Aphorisms

About the Author

The author has been a patent attorney for over 30 years, now with a practice in the New York City area. He was born in Wichita, Kansas, in 1951, the first of seven children and was steeped in the ceremonies and theology of the Catholic Church. He attended Lehigh University, where he majored in math, physics, and psychology. He has painted in acrylics and sculpted in clay. He currently reads, thinks, and writes. He is married with one child.

About the Book

Divinity Within Ourselves proposes that belief in God naturally arises from the operation of the human brain, particularly from the consciousness of mind itself. Just as our brains project our sensations and perceptual constructs onto the external world, we too apprehend our minds as a whole as immanent in individual objects and the background space of the universe. Belief in God partakes in the inherent unifying processes of the brain, which incorporate our past and present experience of pure mind into our daily lives.

Dedication

To my daughter, Clara, who said that I would not have written this book if she had been willing to listen to what I had to say.

Copyright Information

Copyright © D. Derek Lyons (2019)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.

Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Ordering Information:

Quantity sales: special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the address below.

Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

Lyons, D. Derek

Divinity Within Ourselves: God as Mind Projected onto the External World

ISBN 9781643780207 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781643780214 (Hardback)

ISBN 9781645367024 (ePub e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019939362

The main category of the book – Religion / General

www.austinmacauley.com/us

First Published (2019)

Austin Macauley Publishers LLC

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New York, NY 10005

USA

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Chapter 1

Introduction

There are many stories about God. This book tells yet another story. But the story here is not entirely novel. Rather, this book retells a story that has been known for at least two hundred years. Like virtually any narrative, the story told herein includes both fictional accounts and realistic elements, and arises from both imagination and experience. Some events and objects portrayed likely correspond more closely to reality than others.

All of our stories are partly fictional, even the scientific ones. We impose interpretations on our experience and thereby alter that experience, particularly the meaning that the experience has for us. The creation of narratives informs our existential search for meaning. We continually look for another story, whether that new story helps us cement our views of who we are and our place in the universe or whether the new story opens unexplored vistas and expands our sense of who and what we are.

This book is a story about the origins of God, the meaning of God, the place of God in our universe, and conversely, the place we have in God’s universe. The story of God presented herein constitutes mainly a story of us.

The story is in the nature of speculative philosophy. The approach uses the findings and explanations of science, particularly in the field of neurology, to explain beliefs we have in the existence of God.

The ideas herein do not partake of scientific verifiability. The ideas are not testable scientific hypotheses. The observations are rather phenomenological, about the logic of phenomena in our minds.

The story here follows in the tradition of humanistic philosophy and more particularly reformulates the ideas of the early nineteenth-century philosopher, Ludwig Feuerbach. In The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach wrote, Man has his highest being, his God, in himself… The feeling of God is nothing else than man’s highest feeling of self. God is man, man is God.

The present reformulation arose in part from some acquaintance with popular books in the field of neurology, including Phantoms in the Brain by V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee, The Executive Brain by Elkhonon Goldberg, Self Comes to Mind by Antonio Damasio, Brainscapes by Richard Restak, and Proust was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer. As to Chapter 5, on the egoic self, I cite A New Earth by Eckhardt Tolle. For principles of art I draw largely, but not exclusively, on the philosophy of Arthur Berndtson as presented in Art, Expression, and Beauty.

Perhaps most essentially, the ideas herein arose from the experiences of Jill Bolte Taylor as recounted in her book My Stroke of Insight. Dr. Taylor provides an objective and unprejudiced history of her mental disintegration, owing to a stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain, and her later rebirth or re-education. Her insights are used herein to fundamentally account for mystical experience, and the interpretations and feelings giving rise to a belief in God.

The premises, observations, and speculative constructs set forth herein do not aim to attack religion but to reconcile its practice with current or recently published views of the mind. Some people may feel otherwise. One reaction to such feeling is discussed below in Chapter 6, The Peace of God.

Pursuant to my basic conclusion, religion is good for us, for our neurologic and sociologic well-being. Religion unites and maintains our mental function and thus facilitates our getting along in the world.

As to the philosophic approach taken herein, the discussions are argumentative, exploratory, and rhetorical. I offer no mathematical proofs and no scientific verifications. Instead, I provide only a further contribution to a widespread disagreement among philosophers, scientists, and other people. As for metaphysical truth and theology, each of us must make our own individual choices. We inevitably make our own choices as a result of natural brain function. Metaphysical beliefs and religious beliefs are personal and subjective. What we believe in these areas naturally best serves us, to maintain our mental function, to integrate and validate our experience, and our conceptions of that experience, enabling us to feel whole and healthy.

My motivation for writing this book stems, in part, from a desire to answer the principal question of Richard Dawkins in his book The God Delusion: What is it about the human mind, that is adaptive for survival, that makes the mind receptive to religious belief? A succinct answer is: the brain itself. The homeostatic or self-maintenance, accretionary, and projective operations of the brain give rise to a feeling, which becomes identified through culture and language as God. The learned meme-complexes of theology and ritualistic religious practices, as they are learned, are superimposed onto and inextricably bound up with our core spiritual belief in God.

Perhaps a deeper motivation for this book, proceeding from a fundamental need of the human brain, is to construct a personally acceptable narrative of self.¹ We all wish to explain who we are and how we came to be, at least those of us with a modicum of self-reflection. Some of us have several versions of a personal narrative, the selection of which depends on our exigent social circumstances. These personal narratives become modified and updated pursuant to our ongoing experience, and our changing understanding of what we need to be, what we need to project to others, in order to get along in the social worlds we inhabit.

The story of God each of us has, at least those of us who think about religious beliefs and customs, constitutes an extension of this need for personal narrative. The story of God forms a fundamental part of our own personal narratives, which we can and do share with others in religious ceremonies and celebrations. God, thus, serves in no small part to unify us with one another. We do not feel alone because the presence and grace of God is the same for all of us. While our individual personal histories, after birth, consist largely of unique experiences, we can all share in spiritual feeling and religious ritual. God brings us together where individual circumstances force us apart.

The story of God I offer herein satisfies my own mental needs at this time. The story fits in with my present understanding of who we are and what we are about. But my understanding and my needs may well change down the road. And then this story might no longer pertain to me and my world. But maybe it will help someone else.

Peace of God, peace of mind, to us all!

---

See the chapter on the egoic self.↩

Chapter 2

Mystical Experience

When we feel closest to God, when we feel God’s presence, we are at one with the universe. As God is in or around all things, we feel the energy of God, the presence of God everywhere. Creation exists as a manifestation of God.

When we are with God, our normal everyday cares and woes, our trials and tribulations, our hopes and fears, to the extent that we are aware of them, fade to insignificance. Our daily lives seem tiny and unimportant before the immensity of God.

We also feel a sense of peace and serenity. We have nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing we need, when we are in God’s presence. We are right where we want to be, with the infinite goodness of God.

We may additionally feel a sense of bliss or ecstasy in our communion with the eternal Divine. This feeling is deeper and more satisfying than the happiness we usually experience when we obtain an object or attain a goal that we have desired.

God is all in the here and now. Our past lives, our regrets, successes and failures, do not concern us. As to the future, our goals and fears of potential problems become irrelevant.

We might additionally feel, from our perch on God’s shoulder, a sense of compassion for the rest of humanity, other animals, and the universe in general.

It has been said that mysticism underlies all religions.¹ The experiences of mystics purportedly reinforce, and possibly initiate, religious belief.

In War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy provides two examples of mystical experience. The description evinces an inside point of view, as if the narrator and, accordingly, the reader had a ringside seat in the conscious mind of the character described. In the first case, Prince Andrei is struck down in battle and finds himself lying on the ground. Looking up at the sky, he perceives the war and necessarily all the activities of humanity as of little consequence in comparison with the infinite, personified in Andrei’s mind by the deep blue sky. Andrei feels at peace, a sense of blissful communion with the universe. Napoleon happens by and gazes down at the fallen Russian. In the magnanimity of his victory, Napoleon remarks to an aide on the bravery of Andrei in defeat. But from his side Andrei sees Napoleon, in all his egomania and ignorance, as an insignificant creature in the face of the eternal infinite.

The second portrayal of mystical experience in War and Peace resides in a description of Andrei in love with Natasha. In Andrei’s mind, everything pales beside his love for Natasha. For a person in the throes of sexual love, objects and events lose their unique significance and acquire meaning only in their connections to the beloved. Everything in the external world reminds the person in love of the one supreme object of affection and the beatific qualities of the beloved. (In the parlance of W.T. Stace, discussed below, love embodies the oneness of the universe. To the extent that the lover perceives a multiplicity of objects, those objects all unite with each other, suffused with and radiating love for the beloved. Love manifests itself as immanent in all of creation.)

We can interpret mystical experience as described by Tolstoy as the mystic coming into intimate contact