It's Always Now

I’ve been seeing a lot of news stories lately in which people (or politicians, if they qualify) are claiming that one thing or another is part of “God’s plan.” For example, the oilwell blowout that’s destroying the Gulf of Mexico is part of “God’s plan,” according to some. And various candidates for elected office are claiming that they’re running because it’s part of “God’s plan” for them personally.

Oddly enough, these kinds of statements are being made by self-professed Christians. I had thought Christianity was a monotheistic religion, but apparently I was wrong: According to probably the most rigorous monotheist ever, Plotinus, God doesn’t plan, and saying that He/She/It does plan is saying that God is multiple.

Instead, Plotinus says, God causes reality to exist by a timeless, eternally instantaneous, simultaneous, spontaneous sort of explosion of creative goodwill.

Frankly, the idea of God planning things is pretty silly. First, you have to imagine that God doesn’t know precisely what’s going to happen; instead, the all-knowing deity must form an intention to make something happen, then decide what is going to happen, and only then actually make it happen.

It’s only from the point of view of time- and space-limited beings (e.g., humans) that one thing appears to follow another, and thus that one thing appears to cause another. Through a kind of back-fitting, we thus imagine that an omniscient God knew ahead of time that a given phenomenon was going to be the cause of a certain effect; in other words, that God “planned” it that way.

This way of thinking posits that God has “foreknowledge” of events and thus gives rise to all the arguments about predestination and free will. But it’s actually an act of anthropomorphism: We’re imagining a God who “sees” things from a human-like perspective and needs to control, manipulate and micromanage like a power-drunk CEO.

In fact, there can be no “fore” knowledge if there’s no before or after; as I like to say, “It’s always now.”

One implication of this difference of perspective that I haven’t heard discussed much: From our time- and space-bound point of view, there’s a lot that’s “not here” or “not yet,” and this is precisely what enables humans to practice dishonesty on each other, if they’re so inclined.

For example, I could offer to sell you some shares in a gold mine, promising that there is in fact a mine where I say it is and that it will in fact produce gold when I start digging there. Or I could tell you that nasty little brown-skinned people are tunneling into your garden and planning to steal all your goodies and ravish your wife and children, and you need me to stop them.

From your time- and space-restricted perspective, you might not be able to verify what I’m saying, so you might just take my word for it based on your desires or predispositions. But from the point of view of what Meister Eckhart called the “eternal now,” everything is present. So no one can deceive God.

Plotinus and Plato (and Eckhart and lots of other people) taught that the “highest part,” so to speak, of the human being exists in that “eternal now,” but our fragmented, matter-focused way of life keeps us so distracted that we’re disconnected from it — unaware, in fact, that any such part of ourselves exists.

The whole point of real philosophy (and true religion, which is the same thing) is to transform ourselves so as to (re-)connect with that highest, timeless part, which is in fact the true self and the central unity of the self and the one part of the self capable of knowing God. So to put it bluntly, anyone who claims to know “God’s plan” doesn’t know God.