Me, too. But, for much of my adult life, knowing God, knowing mind, or feeling connected to something grander than myself escaped me, eluded, even evaded me. Then, one day, something happened to me and I made a remarkable discovery. Meister Eckhart was right: “The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me.”

So, I write this blog today assuming two things: 1) That God is; and 2) she is knowable. I call God, God but, you might prefer something else as in Being, Transcendence, the Eternal, the Mind, whatever…I have long suspicioned she has many names and aliases.

I’m hardly looking for widespread agreement on these suppositions. Some of you will agree and that’s fine. Others of you won’t and…well…that’s fine, too. If you don’t share these assumptions, you’ll not likely read anything else in this post you agree with either.

What follows in bold text are a few of those things I’ve learned about knowing God or living a Divine life, or being enlightened, or awakened, or, as the Christians love to say, “being saved.”To know God is simply the deep, inner feeling of inexplicable oneness with what is, a kind of wholeness and connectedness with life itself…with God.  I love the way Eckhart Tolle puts it:  ”The word ‘enlightenment’ conjures up the idea of some superhuman accomplishment…it is really just your natural state of felt oneness with Being.”

Here’s what I’ve learned:

Knowing God is the purpose of human existence. It’s why you showed up. It took me half a lifetime of searching before I got this.  I had always thought, and had been taught, there was some “grand purpose” for which I appeared on planet earth…some job nobody else could do…would do…that I was supposed to do. So, I wasted a big chunk of my life looking for what it was.  Perhaps you’ve lived with similar expectations.  When I awakened from this illusion however, I realized there was nothing I was supposed to “do.”  The Divine had done it all. I had shown up to simply enjoy it–that is, to just be.

When you get this, you’re at peace.  The search is over.  The expectations are lifted. Life begins to be genuinely celebrated.  Then, you go on to “do” whatever you wish while enjoying who you are in the process. It is only after you stop looking for what it is that will define who you are…that one big moment or task or recognition that the ego in you craves and so deludes you into believing awaits you just around the “next” corner that you begin to live.

We show up for one reason and one reason only–to walk with God, as did Enoch of old (Gen. 5:24). This is an anthropomorphic way of describing what is the natural experience of deep connectedness with God.  If you read all of Genesis 5, you realize the writer is making the point that Enoch’s contemporaries were born, lived, begat, and died…but, they never got it.  That is, they never quite figured out the simplest, yet the most profound truth about life. It’s all about knowing the Divine, being one with oneself and with what is.

There is something else.  Knowing God takes no effort whatsoever. Effort is the stuff of religion.  Virtually all of them, too. While most religions seem to start out right – that is, with the purpose of helping people know and feel oneness with themselves…with life itself…with the Divine – it isn’t long before they turn this grant from God into some kind of loan that must be repaid with obligations, offerings, obedience, and so forth.

So, with those who’ve left religion for reasons associated with abuse (and those may number in the millions), the real reason most people have left organized religion (but have not left their spiritual longings), is because they’re frankly tired of trying to know a God their religion says requires still more sacrifices…still more duties…still more doctrines to debate over…still more rules to keep…lifestyles to conform to…and so on.

My advice is: don’t make knowing God into a problem…into a performance…into some kind of duty or ritual.  Know that you know God already.  Knowing God is nothing more than the progressive realization of Presence itself, which is why Jesus said, “The kingdom of God is within you” (Lk 17:21). You could not get any closer to God than you are now. So, know that every thought of God, every impulse is grace itself…IS God.

Give your attention to the inclination you feel to know God. I love what Thomas Merton said, “As soon as people are disposed to being alone with God, they are…no matter where they are:  in the monastery, in the city, in the country…in the woods. At the moment it seems they are somewhere in the middle of their journey, they have actually arrived at the destination already.”

Give your attention to the questions you have about God, too…even the doubts. See where that takes you. Your religion might tell you that you should accept the things you’ve doubted or questioned on the basis of faith alone. But, that’s nonsense.  God does not ask you to ignore your questions or disregard your doubts. Faith does not preclude doubt.  Real faith is learning to live in ambiguity…with paradox…with questions for which there may be no answer.

Your questions might frighten the faithful. But, I assure you that your questions are welcomed by God.  She created you with a mind.  Use it.  As I say in The Enoch Factor, “Doubt is no more disbelief than questions are compromise.” The most faithful followers of any faith have been those whose minds doubted, questioned, and so contemplated the inexplicable mysteries of life.

Meditate more often than you medicate.  It is so unfortunate in our western world but, as Christiane Northup has said, “The only acceptable form of western meditation is hospitalization.” I suppose it is conceivable that life would give you whatever you need–even a hospital bed–to help you look within–which is, of course, the only place where you could ever really find yourself or experience the Divine presence. The rabbis say, “God has but one synagogue…the human heart.”

Although I am a devoted follower of Christ, I regularly practice eastern meditative disciplines.  There is much Christians could learn from the spiritual traditions of the east. Ignore those Christian leaders who warn you against meditative practices or yoga or whatever. They’re only admitting they live more from a place of fear and suspicion than they live by faith. For me, and many other practitioners of the Christian tradition, I have the highest regard for those spiritual traditions that, while different from mine in many ways, have enriched my journey nonetheless.  In fact, the more I learn from other traditions the more devoted I am to my own and the more I realize the similarities in all of them.

While Benedictine monks in the Christian tradition know this, most other Christians do not. But, Jesus himself regularly practiced meditation just as his eastern counterparts. What do you think he was doing for forty days and nights as he wandered in the wilderness? (Lk 4:1-13).  On a hunting expedition?  His temptations grew out of his inner impulses.  And, to deal with them, he had to go within in order to find his way out.

You will have to do the same.  Learn to meditate.  To meditate will mediate God’s presence faster than anything I know. Lao Tzu said, “Where there is silence, one finds the anchor to the universe.”

Know that every experience carries within it an expression of the Divine presence.  I am not suggesting that everything you might encounter in life is sent by God.  But, I am saying that everything that happens in life can be the occasion for connecting deeply with the Divine. When I experienced a profound shift in my spiritual life a few years ago, I did so with the realization that life has a way of unfolding as a series of synchronous events that, seemingly coincidental or even random, are actually conspiring together to bring you into union with the Divine. This understanding has been transforming my reaction to and interaction with every experience of life–the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Make it your daily spiritual practice to bring your awareness into the present moment.  When you are here (and not somewhere else in the mind), you will be at peace…in presence. If you haven’t discovered this already, you will likely learn that one of the greatest challenges to living with a felt sense of oneness to God is disciplining the mind and so training it to the “here and now.”

To be in union with God may take no effort but to know that union and so enjoy its blissful benefits…well…that will likely take a lifetime.  Which is why it’s important to get started now and why the sixteenth century Carmelite monk, Brother Lawrence, called this “practicing the presence of God.” Think of this in the way Ernest Hemingway said to think of yourself: “As an apprentice in a craft where you could never become a master.”

Again, don’t make a problem of this.  Just know that knowing God unfolds naturally as you train yourself to give attention to every thought, impulse, or inclination you feel to know God. Recognize the thoughts.  Acknowledge the inclinations, however faint they may be.  It is here you will find peace, enter presence, and so know God.

The ancient sages said that Enoch walked with God (Gen. 5:24).

If he did, so may you.

You’d have thought I just made off with the Mona Lisa from the Louvre.

I promised to protect it, to handle it with as much care as a paleographer would an ancient text—no bending of the edges, no underlining, circling, or writing in the margins—things I typically do with my own books.

Negotiations failed, however. “Put it back,” she ordered, “and get your own.”

So, I did. Wasn’t expecting much, either. “What could Eat, Pray, Love contain,” I asked myself, “that would cause her to guard it like it was the Holy Grail?”

I barely arrived at the first scene, however–the one where Gilbert is sleepless, sprawled across a cold bathroom floor at 2AM–and I was hooked. In a failed marriage, she cries out to God, the first of many conversations the author, Elizabeth Gilbert, has with God.  From there, she acts as a guide on a journey the two of you take through Italy, then India and Indonesia, in search of her soul, in search of a life that matters. There’s no pretense with Gilbert, which is why I like her. You’re invited to peer into her soul, and your own as well.

Sitting in a corner cafe; sipping the finest wine made of the Sangiovese grape; sharing secrets and disappointments, readers feel like they’re best friends with Gilbert. That’s because it’s easy to believe in her. When she describes her marital failings, not those of her spouse, she’s brutally transparent. When she talks about her love affair with David, even before her own divorce is final, she hides nothing. It is this honesty that makes what she says about faith, about God, just as believable.

In an era of religious dishonesty, corruption, and cover-up, where the morning news is as likely to reveal the latest religious scandal as it does the political or economic ones, it is understandable why westerners are weary of the dishonesty in much of organized religion today.

Weary enough to leave, that is. According to the American Religious Survey, thirty-four million Americans  want nothing to do with religion, a system that has repeatedly demonstrated a far greater interest in saving itself than in saving the world.

Still, there are many spiritual seekers. All they really want is an uncomplicated relationship with Transcendence. What you call God is irrelevant to them. So are the doctrines and distinctions that divide instead of unite people.

What’s most amazing is that religious leaders still don’t get it. Instead of softening their rhetoric, their endless dogmas, doctrines, and distinctions, they become more fixed, rigid, separated and exclusivist. Meanwhile, scores are leaving this insanity, perhaps to protect what little remains.  In exchange, they read Eat, Pray, Love, where insanity meets Sanity, where respect and inclusiveness are actually practiced, where they can relax, take off their shoes, enjoy themselves, others, and God.

That’s why this book, now a major motion picture, is so popular. In the end, it matters not whose religion is right, especially if it doesn’t guide you to live in this world, or with yourself, or help you to get along with others.

It is away from this kind of religious madness that seekers of the Sacred are walking.  Today, their paths are taking them toward something real, toward that which connects them to others and to God, and away from the labels and differences that have divided people for eons.  To many, Gilbert and writers like her have become unique spiritual gurus on this path toward what I think of as “the sacred art of knowing God.”

Jesus said, “The way to life is narrow…and few there will be who find it.” If that’s true, Eat, Pray, Love is the quintessential promise that seekers of the Sacred will find the narrow way–even though it’s off the beaten path.

How else would you explain the phenomenal success of Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love (soon a major motion picture), or the writings of the Dalai Lama, Deepak Chopra, or others like them? Just because people are fed up with organized religion doesn’t mean their appetite for spiritual things has been swallowed up, too.

I know because I was one of these millions who dropped out of active involvement in organized religion.  But, unlike the majority of the other 33,999,999 dropouts, I was a religious leader when I did.

I grew up in the church, the son of a Southern Baptist minister.  When I graduated from college, I went to seminary and, after several years of study, I began my career as a professional minister.  It wasn’t long however, before I discovered the church was more lost than the world it was trying to save.

Go into many churches today and, instead of finding an institution interested in saving the world, what you may find is an institution vastly more interested in saving itself.  For example, people go to church to find God.  Instead of finding God, however, followers are often saddled with a catalogue of “do’s” and “don’ts” as onerous as the US tax code.  They are told what to think, how to believe, as well as how they’re supposed to live.

In many places, the church is still the most segregated place in America.  Where I grew up, some forty or so years ago, many of my neighbors attended the Baptist church my father served. That is, if they were white Baptists; the black Baptists had a church of their own. Or, they attended one of the other three, mostly segregated churches that occupied one of the four-corners of Main Street.  Today, however, your neighbor is just as likely to be black as white, or Muslim as Christian.  Maybe people are leaving  the church because they’d prefer to live in the real world—the de-segregated one.

Then, there are those church leaders who seem obsessed with having the biggest church, the largest crowds and the most expensive campuses.   While 40,000,000 people died of starvation in the last decade, churches spent $10,000,000,000 (that’s ten billion) on campuses.

Perhaps some churchgoers departed because they’d rather their charity actually make a difference in the world.

If you went to church looking for relief from the stress and burdens of living, you might have found more of the same, only dressed as beliefs and dogmas, rules and expectations  Then, there’s the debating, disagreement, and division that goes on between churches, as well as between people in the same church. I call it the “We’re right! You’re Wrong!” syndrome.  Each group insisting their beliefs are right which, by implication means, everyone else’s beliefs are wrong.  “We’re in; you’re out!” “We’re the chosen ones; you’re not!”  Maybe those who came looking for some sanity in life are leaving the church to preserve what little remains.

What about the seemingly endless clergy scandals? It may be several years yet, before we know the full impact of this demonic debacle.  I suspect scores of people are just plain fed up with an institution that “would condemn gays and lesbians for coming out of their closets,” as someone characterized it, “while hiding clergy pedophiles in its own.”

Some fifteen or so years ago, I, like millions of others, dropped out of active involvement in the church.  Soon thereafter, I began wondering where to go to find God.   For a few years, I went nowhere.  I just wandered around in a kind of spiritual wilderness.  Then, one Sunday afternoon, completely unexpected as well as outside the church, I had a deeply profound spiritual awakening. I even describe it in my book, The Enoch Factor.

Among the many realizations to which I awakened, was this:“You don’t have to go to church to know God.”  For reasons too obvious to mention, this isn’t the kind of message the church, or any religion, wants spread around.  But, it’s true nonetheless.  There is no religion, not even the Christian religion, holding the title deed to God.  God’s grace is not limited to a select few.  The moment any religion believes it is, you can be sure that religion knows nothing of God.

If there is anything Jesus, and the Buddha, made abundantly clear it is that the Wind blows where it wills.  You can hear it, see its effects, as well as feel its power, but you could never contain it.  In other words, the moment I stopped trying to find God, God found me.  I love the way Deepak Chopra once framed it. “God is not difficult to find; God is impossible to ignore.”

Even the title to this article–Finding God after Religion—seems to imply there’s something you must “do” to know God.  But, the real truth is this: there is nothing you need to do to know God. You know God already.  The mistake virtually all religions make, including Christianity, is to confuse beliefs for faith and, as a consequence, condition people to think there are things they must do, duties they must perform, etc., for God to be pleased and her presence to be known.

Finding God after religion? Remember the following:  In eastern thought, there’s something called “the law of least effort,” or “do less and accomplish more.”  If you will give up the “doing,” and, instead, just enjoy “being” I think you’ll make a great discovery.  The psalmist said, “Be still and know…”  In my own experience, I have found when I’m present (and that’s my spiritual practice) I’m immediately in Presence, the real and sacred sanctuary of God.

What more would you want?  What more would religion ever give you?

Out-of-the-blue and instantaneously, something happened to me or, more accurately, in me that literally transformed the way I felt about life, including that of my own and the way I viewed the world and everyone in it.  It changed my view of and experience of the Transcendent, too.

The event was simple and ordinary. I don’t recall having a vision of anything. In fact, I saw nothing at all. Yet, in an instant, I saw everything, too.  I did not see God, but there is a sense in which I did, too. Deep joy was so unmistakably real and near to me.  Instantly I felt in the presence of God and that feeling has been with me ever since.

Today, no matter how out-of-control things may be around me, there is in me a sense of calm, peace, and a feeling that everything is just as it should be.  Peace, contentment, and tranquility are my normal states of consciousness. Joy, too. I know this all sounds like a huge enigma and, in many ways, it is. I cannot explain it otherwise.

Easterners often speak of something they call “the law of least effort.”  What they mean by this is, “Do less and accomplish more.”  Now, such a notion is strange to westerners who are taught from the cradle that they must do more and more and still more and then, and only then, should they expect to be duly rewarded for it.

What I’ve learned, however, is that this is not the behavior of grace at all.  When Grace is understood and experienced, and it isn’t understood and hasn’t been experienced by many religious people, grace is really about doing nothing and enjoying everything. I like to tell the story of the poor beggar who was rummaging through a garbage heap looking for his next meal when, suddenly, he finds a discarded lottery ticket. To his chagrin, he discovers it bears the winning numbers to a multi-million dollar jackpot.  Grace. It occurs when you least expect it, and often to those you believe to be the least deserving.

Since that day of awakening, my life has not been some fairytale but I would be dishonest to say anything else but that it has been pretty close.  I once heard a highly regarded spiritual teacher from the east say, “In my world nothing ever goes wrong.”  Everything in me revolted against such an absurd statement prior to my spiritual experience.  Today, however, I cannot say that about my own life, but I understand it much more now.

The best I can say is that, for me, life is no longer the struggle or the burden it used to be. Instead of swimming upstream, one of many metaphors that would aptly describe my life prior to the awakening, I now flow with life.  How could I not be at peace when, instead of resisting what is, I now accept, often forgive, but always flow with life itself?

I’ve called this my “spiritual awakening” because, in many ways, it was as if I woke up and started living.  In eastern religions, it could be called a “satori.”  Satori is a Sanskrit word meaning “sudden insight,” “awareness,” and “consciousness.”  It is often the word used to describe a transformative experience.  What happened to me on that couch may not be filled with a lot of drama, fireworks, lights and sounds, but, whatever it was it changed my life forever.  And, for the better.

I realize how absurd this must sound, like something out of the Twilight Zone. And, I suppose, for that very reason, I said nothing about it for years.  But, the presence was so unmistakable that I care no longer what others may think of me when they hear me talk about it.  I must tell this story.  Maya Angelou has this saying, “There’s no greater agony that bearing an untold story inside of you.”  Well, I bore mine for many years.  But, the day finally came when I decided I had to share it.

I first heard of Enoch – this ancient spiritual teacher out of Jewish folklore and mythology – when I was in seminary doing graduate work. I describe all of this in the book so it isn’t necessary to go into the details here.  But, one of my professors, a Jewish scholar himself, spent an entire class period introducing us to Enoch.

Jewish historians remember Enoch in much the same way Easterners remember their spiritual avatars – as one of those rare human souls who attained a spiritual consciousness, or awareness, that seems to escape virtually everyone else.  For example, Enoch is said to have “walked with God.”  Although I cannot be certain of this, I suspect that must mean the same thing as “enlightenment” in Buddhism, what New Agers might describe as the “God-realized life,” or Christians would describe as a person who had experienced an “epiphany.”

I was fascinated by Enoch but, as life does to all of us, I soon laid aside my interest in him and moved on to more pressing matters.  That is, until the day my father died.  Not only did the story of Enoch come back to me, but I felt his presence in the ICU room with me. During that undeniable sensation, all of the pain and sadness I was feeling about my father dying of a stroke lifted.  There, in the presence of death, was this beautiful feeling of stillness…a kind of OK-ness…of peace both in me and around me.

I knew right then and there that one day I would write about this experience.  I did not know when that would be, or what I would say, or even why I would say it.  I only knew I would someday tell the story.  Ten years or so later, I did.  I began writing and, within a span of twenty months, I had given birth to The Enoch Factor: The Sacred Art of Knowing God.