Squaring the Circle of God

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” ~Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

God is not a bearded man in the sky, nor a cosmic judge tallying your sins. The anthropomorphized deity—crafted in our image, bloated with human flaws and petty desires—is a relic of a belief system that’s crumbling under the weight of its own contradictions.

To move forward spiritually, not religiously, we must redefine God as the Infinite Interconnectedness of All Things. Anything less is nothing at all. This is about shedding attachments to outdated myths and embracing a reality where the divine is the pulse of existence itself—raw, boundless, and indifferent to our egos.

William James nailed it when he said, “The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.”

The insanity of our world—its wars, its tribalism, its obsession with control—stems from clinging to a God made in our likeness, a deity we can manipulate or blame. This anthropomorphic God is a cage, locking us into outdated cycles of fear and division. To break free, we must practice healthy nonattachment by letting the Phoenix of nonattachment rise out of the ashes of our attachments. Burn the old idols. Let them go. Build something beautiful out of chaos and ash.

The idea of God as an interconnected concept isn’t new, but it’s radical in its demand for humility. It asks us to stop pretending we’re the center of the universe. As J. MCucker put it, “Rivers do not drink their own water; trees do not eat their own fruit; the sun does not shine on itself, and flowers do not spread their fragrance for themselves. Living for others is a rule of nature, we are all born to help each other—no matter how difficult it is.” Nature doesn’t hoard; it flows. God, as the web binding all things, isn’t a solo act—it’s the rhythm of give and take, the dance of particles and galaxies, the unspoken contract of existence. To live spiritually is to align with this flow, to stop grasping at outdated “truths” and start participating by cocreating new, ever-evolving truths.

But here’s the thing: this shift isn’t comfortable. It’s a knife to the ego. As Eric Hoffer wrote, “It is the pull of opposite poles that stretches souls. And only stretched souls make music.” To see God as an interconnected whole, you must hold both the light and the shadow, as Jung said: “Anyone who perceives his shadow and his light simultaneously sees himself from two sides and thus gets in the middle.”

This isn’t about picking a side—good or evil, belief or atheism—but about standing in the tension of both. It’s about seeing yourself as both the thread and the weaver in the cosmic tapestry. That tension, that stretch, is where the music of the soul begins to sing.

Mark Twain’s sharp wit cuts through the haze, “The easy confidence with which I know another man’s religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.” Religious certainty—whether it’s worshipping a sky daddy or smugly dismissing all faith—is a trap. It’s the opposite of discovery.

As Rick Rubin said, “Living in discovery is at all times preferable to living through assumptions.” To redefine God as The Infinite Interconnectedness of All Things is to live in discovery, to question every inherited belief, to let go of the need to be right. It’s edgy because it demands you to face the void of your own ignorance and find meaning not in answers, but in the questions that naturally arise.

Clinging to any fixed idea of God—whether it’s a deity with a whitelist or a cold, materialist void—buries you in the past. Spirituality, not religion, is about staying alive, in the moment, staying open. It’s about squaring the circle: reconciling the infinite (God as all things connected) with the finite (your fleeting, messy life). You don’t do this by praying harder or arguing louder. You do it by letting go, by living in the Now, and by seeing yourself as both insignificant and essential to the whole.

As Bukowski said, “I wish to believe but belief is a graveyard.”

This isn’t a call to abandon faith but to redefine it. Stop pretending God is a personified puppet pulling strings or a cosmic vending machine for your prayers. God is the Infinite Interconnectedness of all things—every atom, every thought, every act of kindness or cruelty. To move forward spiritually is to embrace nonattachment, to let go of the need to control or define the divine. It’s to stand in the middle, stretched between light and shadow, making music in the tension. Anything less is just white noise in a dark matter universe.

Square the circle by remaining ahead of the curve. Keep things in perspective by trumping ego-driven attachment with soul-driven nonattachment. Admit to yourself that we as a species created God as a “technology of ecstasy” to help us with our mortal angst and existential ennui. God was merely the absolute Somethingness that we ushered in to trump the absolute Nothingness of our own impermanence. Which is fine. We just need to admit it, elevate ourselves above the tragicomedy of an anthropomorphized deity, and simply redefine God as the Infinite Interconnectedness of All Things.

We do this by always remembering, as Joseph Campbell said, “God is an infinite sphere, whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.”

So let all your dogmatic baggage slide off you like dead skin. Parochialism is mere water off a duck’s back, comical and laughable. Read all the Bibles and Korans and Bhagavad Gitas and Talmuds and Tao Te Chings and then let them burn in the heat death of your own unconquerable Phoenix Fire. Rise out of their ashes with a muscle memory so powerful that false and outdated Gods bow and weep at the feet of your true and updated Infinite Interconnectedness of All Things.

Image source:

Saint Veronica with the Veil, touched by The Clayshaper

About the Author:

Gary Z McGee, a former Navy Intelligence Specialist turned philosopher, is the author of Birthday Suit of God and The Looking Glass Man. His works are inspired by the great philosophers of the ages and his wide-awake view of the modern world.

This article (Squaring the Circle of God) was originally created and published by Self-inflicted Philosophy and is printed here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Gary Z McGee and self-inflictedphilosophy.com. It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this statement of copyright.