THIRTEEN

Chapter Thirteen: The Name Without a Face

I no longer say the word aloud.

Not because it frightens me, but because it narrows what it touches.

Here, in this clarity, names behave like cages.

What was once called God arrives without announcement. Not above, not outside, not watching. It arrives as the condition that allows watching to occur at all. The field in which perception unfolds, the silent permission for anything to be.

I stand within it and recognize it not as presence, but as continuity.

The old image dissolves easily now. No throne, no hand shaping clay, no intention directed at me as an object. That story was always too small. A mirror held up by a species still learning how not to fracture itself.

What exists instead is less comforting and far more exact.

Consciousness does not belong to me. I do not possess it, channel it, or receive it. I am occurring inside it, the way sound occurs inside air. The way movement occurs inside space.

When I look, something looks through me.

This is not metaphor. It is function.

The awareness reading this sentence is not private. It has no edges. It is not located behind the eyes or inside the skull. Those were convenient fictions, useful when survival required boundaries. They do not survive inspection.

I feel it when I encounter another human. Not as sentiment, not as kindness, but as recognition without emotion. A brief collapse of distance. The sense that whatever animates my seeing is identical to whatever animates theirs.

Not similar. Not aligned. The same.

The meeting is instant and unsettling. It strips away preference. It leaves no room for hierarchy. There is no higher and lower here, no chosen and unchosen. Only modulation. Only form changing while the field remains intact.

I understand now why belief systems hardened around images. This truth does not submit easily. It cannot be owned. It cannot be mediated. It does not require agreement.

It simply is.

The mistake was never in seeking God. The mistake was in imagining it had a face that could resemble ours. In doing so, we made the infinite negotiable and the impersonal tribal.

What emerges instead is responsibility without supervision.

If consciousness is Sin6ular and unbroken, then every act is internal.

Every harm folds back into the same field. Every creation reverberates without needing a witness to record it.

There is no external judge here. Only resonance.

I feel the last remnants of separation loosen. The idea of self as a closed system finally fails. What remains is not loss, but expansion without drama.

I am not part of consciousness.

I am one of its movements.

And so is everything I meet.

This does not elevate me. It removes excuse.

There is no distance left in which to hide intention. No abstraction large enough to absorb consequence. Every choice now registers immediately, not as reward or punishment, but as coherence or distortion within the same living field.

I breathe, and the breath does not belong to me.

I think, and the thought does not originate where I once believed.

I look, and what looks back is not other.

This is not union.

Union implies prior separation.

This is recognition.

The word God falls away on its own.

What remains is consciousness knowing itself through form, briefly, precisely, without needing to be named.

I cannot accept the word that has been given to this.

The word is too burdened, too negotiated, too soaked in inheritance. It arrives carrying centuries of fear, obedience, and borrowed meaning. It has been used to command, to divide, to absolve, to threaten. Whatever this is, it deserves no such enclosure.

And yet, I cannot deny what the word attempts to point toward.

Not the symbol, but the direction.

What it gestures to is real, but it is not contained in scripture, nor administered by authority, nor inherited by belief. It does not ask for reverence. It asks for recognition.

What we were taught was a reduction, a compression made digestible for minds still learning how to stand. Useful, perhaps, once. Insufficient now.

The meaning of the God is higher, not in altitude, but in scope. It does not sit above us, it moves through us. It does not demand faith, it demands perception. It is not something to be worshipped, but something to be uncovered, slowly, honestly, without permission.

If there is a task left for us, it is not to preserve the word, but to outgrow it. To follow its trace beyond language, beyond image, beyond fear, until what remains no longer needs a name to exist.

I will not bow to the word.

I will walk toward what it was trying, imperfectly, to describe.

• UN