The Illusion of the Other · read in full · Three of Ten

In this book

Chapter Three

How God Became External

If God is everywhere, then God is not elsewhere.

You have stood somewhere quiet — in a thunderstorm, beside the ocean, under a night sky — and felt something older than argument watching you. That feeling is where God began. Not above the world. Inside it.

Before asking what God is, it helps to understand where God was placed. And to understand this gently — because for many people, God is the most important relationship in their life. What follows is not an attack on that relationship. It is an examination of the architecture that surrounds it, and what that architecture has cost.

For much of early human history, the sacred was not experienced as distant. It was immediate. Nature was not a backdrop but a living field — threatening, sustaining, mysterious. Storms, seasons, birth, illness, death — these were not events to be explained from outside. They were the world expressing itself. The sacred was woven into everything before it was lifted above everything.

The movement toward an external God did not begin as a mistake. It began as an attempt to make sense of forces that felt overwhelming.

From Presence to Power

As communities grew, so did their explanations. What once felt like a living field of forces slowly became personified. Thunder became a god. Fertility became a goddess. Time, death, war, wisdom — each was given a face and a will.

Personification made the world relatable. It also made it governable.

Once the sacred was imagined as having a will, it could command. Once it could command, it could be obeyed. And once obedience became central, the relationship shifted — from participation to hierarchy.

Over time, God moved upward, both in concept and in imagery. God came to be understood as “above,” “beyond,” “outside” the world. The sacred was no longer woven into existence. It ruled over it.

This shift was gradual. But it came at a cost.

The Split

When God is placed outside the world, a division is introduced: creator here, creation there.

This seems intuitive. A potter is not a pot. An architect is not a building.

But the analogy breaks exactly where it matters.

A potter exists independently of the pot. But if God is understood as what everything depends on — as what is ultimate — then God cannot stand in the same relationship to the world as a maker to an object. A maker can walk away from what was made. If God is everywhere and in everything, there is nowhere to walk away to.

Once God is imagined as a being among beings — even the highest one — something decisive happens.

God becomes one thing, and everything else becomes another.

Unity is replaced by distance.

Participation is replaced by obedience.

The sacred is no longer the ground of being. It becomes an object of belief.

Authority Replaces Understanding

Once God is external, access to God must be mediated. Knowledge of God must come from somewhere — scripture, doctrine, priesthood, tradition.

This is not initially harmful. Communities need shared stories and structures.

But authority has gravity. It pulls meaning upward.

Truth becomes something delivered rather than discovered. Morality becomes something commanded rather than understood.

The individual’s task becomes alignment with an external will rather than clarity about what is actually going on.

A person can now say, sincerely and without malice: my relationship with God is right, therefore my actions are justified.

This does not require cruelty. It requires certainty.

What Was Lost

Something essential was forgotten in this shift — not deliberately, but structurally. Not by bad people. By all of us, gradually, over centuries.

What was lost was the sense that being itself is sacred. Not by decree or belief, but by virtue of what it is.

When God is external, the world becomes provisional.

This life becomes a test rather than a participation.

The sacred is postponed — to heaven, to the afterlife, to judgement — rather than recognised as present.

And when the sacred is postponed, suffering becomes easier to tolerate. Not because anyone chose to be cruel. Because the architecture made a quiet suggestion: the real thing is elsewhere. This life is temporary. The suffering here is not the point.

That suggestion was not invented by cruel people. It was inherited by kind ones. And kind people, holding that suggestion, found it just a little easier — not to cause suffering, but to look past it.

Not their own suffering.

Other people’s.

This is the structural cost. Not cruelty. Something quieter. Permission to look away.

A Quiet Question

If God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-present — what exactly is God outside of?

If nothing exists beyond everything, then placing God outside everything makes no sense. If God is everywhere, then God is not elsewhere.

The external God does not need to be attacked. It quietly becomes incoherent under the weight of its own descriptions.

Toward Immanence

Rejecting an external God does not mean reducing everything to dead matter. That is a false choice.

The alternative is not atheism. It is immanence.

Immanence does not deny God. It denies distance.

It says that God is not separate from what exists. Not standing apart as a ruler or a judge. Identical with being itself — not as poetry, but as the simplest description that makes sense.

If this is correct, the world is not something made by God and then left to run.

It is the ongoing expression of what God is.

And we — conscious beings within it — are not spectators. We are the world becoming aware of itself.

This is Chapter Three of The Illusion of the Other, in full. This book has no short edition: its chapters are already at the short edition’s length, and every word in them is the argument.

Artist: G · Studio G, Cape Town

Duration: 30+ years · Exhibition: over a million words

Contact: iam@the420code.org

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