Icon of Christ the Holy Wisdom of God

How do we come to realize the true God within us? This is the product of a creative act that comes from within – from the infinite. For Neville Symington this realization of the true God lays:

‘a foundation in the personality of respect for the Self. I have spelt “Self” here with a capital letter because it is the THAT. I am IT … THAThood is my nature, it is my being – the THAT demands respect. The THAT in me is the THAT in you and demands respect.’

Here conscience and symbolism are two aspects of the true God. Conscience is the subjective evidence of the Absolute aspect of our being. The true God invites us to follow our conscience, and this contrasts with the false god where the associated terms are words like “driven”, “obligated” or “compelled”. Conscience is rather a free act and is respecting the Absolute which we all share. In this way following conscience then benefits others – not just ourselves. Similarly, if we say “No” to the promptings of our conscience then we harm ourselves and others.

Symington also links the idea of symbolism to the true God where we can begin to understand how things that are inner – going on inside our psyche/spirit – become played outside of us – in other words projected. There is something interpersonal going on where the outer represents the inner. There can be a creativity and playful spontaneity in our use of symbolism. The false god destroys the inner and symbolism, but the true God is its creator.

Symington offers an interesting dilemma around the difficulty of realizing the idea of absolute Truth

‘A psychotherapist was presenting his work with a patient to a committee that was trying to assess his work. In discussing his work, it was clear that he considered suicide as an evil to be avoided. The chairman of the committee said to him, in a laid-back tone: “But don’t you think this patient was free to commit suicide if he wanted to?”’

Symington reasons that under a false-god morality the only answer would be to say that God forbids suicide as he does murder. For the person who says they don’t believe in God then the only arbiter of truth becomes subjective feelings.

“If I want to kill myself or indeed anyone else then why shouldn’t I?  I can do entirely as I please. I can destroy my own mind if I want to, it is my business.’

Symington sees that this outlook is very pervasive in the contemporary especially Western world and he calls it: ‘The degenerate child of the Judeo-Christian God’. It is based in narcissism, and a relativism, and at times even a collapse of values. It can be seen that conscience here is lacking, and so the person who acts violently towards themselves is lacking respect for the Self, and through their actions causing harm to others. The action is destructive and not creative – for ‘a truly creative thought is closely related to conscience’.

The world tends to split into a very fundamentalist type of solution on the one hand and on the other hand a form of chaos, but from these two opposing views a different type of understanding is possible. This arises from reflective thought, experience and holy wisdom where God is accessed through a creative act, and where how we are in the world is guided by a conscience that tries not to harm.

There is faith in ‘an intentional something that originates from within each living being’.