FIFTEEN

Chapter Fifteen: After God

I no longer argue with the word. I measure what survives contact.

I am standing where sound thins. Not silence, but a pressure beneath it, the way air changes before altitude makes itself known. The ground here does not instruct. It holds. Stone remembers weight without commentary. My breath arrives and leaves on its own terms, exact, unadorned.

When I speak of God now, I do not mean a watcher, a judge, or a maker who waits apart from what unfolds. I mean the force that precedes form, the motion already moving before it learns a name. Not a being with intent, but intent before it desires. Anything less is reduction.

What people call God has been shaped by fear of scale. The mind reaches for something vast, then trims it until it can be addressed, pleaded with, forgiven by. That trimming is mistaken for reverence. It is not. It is containment.

The source does not consent to containment.

I learned this when the comfort fell away. Not gently. It fell like scaffolding removed too early. The world did not end. My balance did. I stood without a railing and understood that belief had been doing the standing for me.

If I say that I am God, it is not elevation. It is refusal of separation. It is an admission that whatever animates my breath is not foreign to what animates growth, decay, collapse, return. The same motion that turns leaves toward light turns thought toward meaning. The difference is not substance, only speed.

God is not a noun. It is a verb that never stops acting.

Religion taught me to face outward, to cultivate a relationship with an image that could listen without changing. Spirituality demanded something harsher, dissolve the boundary and accept the consequence. One promised shelter. The other required accuracy. Only one survived reality.

Belief wants proximity without responsibility. Knowing accepts responsibility without comfort.

The word lost its authority there. It gained weight instead. It ceased to be an answer and became a condition, like gravity, like time. Always present, never personal, impossible to negotiate with.

A memory surfaces, not an image, a posture. The way a tree stands without apology, the way it does not ask what it represents. The way a child looks before learning to divide the world into hierarchies. In those moments, separation loosens. Not symbolically. Physically. Breath deepens. The body registers what the mind resists.

None of this requires agreement. It requires attention.

If the tree is a sanctuary, it is because it participates fully in what it is. If a face before me feels divine, it is because the distance collapses for an instant and nothing rushes in to replace it. These are not metaphors. They are failures of interference.

Who would I be to deny that.

The error was never belief. The error was outsourcing recognition.

Truth does not live in institutions, texts, or inherited names. It appears where awareness meets what is, without distortion. The soul does not need instruction to recognize itself. It needs quiet, and the courage to remain when quiet removes its supports.

There is a residue here, a faint orientation, like a compass that no longer points north but still knows direction. A reminder that once, I did not ask permission to feel real. I did not search for God. I moved as if existence were sufficient.

That memory has not left. It has been buried under usefulness.

I cannot accept the word God as it has been handed to me. It is too small for what it gestures toward. But what it points to is undeniable. Older than language, newer than thought. It does not command. It unfolds.

If this is heresy, it is only against confinement.

Trust does not come from belief. It comes from resonance. When alignment happens without effort, when recognition arrives before justification, that is the signal. That is the knowing obedience tried to replace.

I will not do that.

Whatever this force is, it does not ask for worship. It asks for precision. To see without projection. To act without disguise. To accept that the same motion breathing through me breathes through everything I was taught to stand apart from.

The ground remains. The air holds its pressure. My breath finds its rhythm without instruction.

If this is God, it was never lost. Only misnamed.

And I am done mistaking names for truth.

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