The One, the Many, and the Absence of Gods

People sometimes ask about my spiritual beliefs and I struggle to answer concisely. My views are not conventionally religious, yet neither are they atheistic in the straightforward sense. I find myself somewhere between mysticism, pantheism, symbolism, and philosophy.

What makes the question difficult is that there are at least three different levels involved: metaphysics, experience, and symbolism.

Metaphysically: One Reality

At the level of metaphysics, I am essentially a monist.

Whether expressed through neutral monism, process philosophy, pantheism, or something similar, I am drawn to the idea that reality is fundamentally one. Mind and matter, subject and object, self and world appear to be distinctions within a larger whole rather than independently existing substances.

I am not committed to a mechanistic universe devoid of meaning or consciousness. Indeed, I find views such as panpsychism or cosmopsychism intellectually attractive because they take consciousness seriously rather than treating it as an inexplicable accident.

I remain open to the possibility that reality itself possesses a mental or experiential aspect. What I am not persuaded of is a cosmos governed by distinct supernatural personalities who intervene in the world and engage in personal relationships with human beings.

Phenomenologically: No Divine Persons

This is not merely a philosophical conclusion. It arises from experience.

I was raised within Christianity. Later, I explored paganism. Throughout my life I have been exposed to religious symbols, myths, practices, and ways of thinking that might have encouraged experiences of gods, spirits, saints, or divine presences.

Yet such experiences never occurred.

As a child I could imagine Jesus. I could picture a radiant figure in my mind’s eye. But there was never any sense of another consciousness addressing me. The image was present; the “other” was absent.

The same was true when I later became interested in paganism. I loved mythology and still do. I found the gods fascinating, powerful, beautiful, and psychologically profound. Yet I seemed to be one of the few pagans who could not “feel” individual gods as distinct entities.

My spiritual experiences, insofar as I have them, are unitive rather than relational. They involve nature, interconnectedness, awe, participation, and the feeling of belonging to a larger whole. They do not involve conversations with divine beings.

I therefore cannot honestly claim experiences that others report. I do not encounter God. I do not encounter gods.

I encounter the world as sacred.

Symbolically and Aesthetically: The Many

Yet this does not lead me towards a rigid simplicity.

In fact, I often find myself attracted to religious multiplicity.

If the ultimate reality is infinite, then no single image could possibly represent it adequately. No archetype, deity, doctrine, or symbol can exhaust what it points towards.

This is one reason I find the world’s mythologies compelling. A multitude of gods, symbols, and sacred images seems more appropriate to the infinite than a single authorised image.

The warrior, the mother, the king, the sage, the trickster, the dying god, the world tree, the cosmic ocean, the divine child: each illuminates some aspect of reality while leaving others untouched.

The plurality itself becomes meaningful.

I am therefore not a polytheist because I experience many gods. I do not.

Rather, I am sympathetic to symbolic plurality because I believe the ultimate exceeds every representation.

One image risks becoming an idol.

Many images remind us that all images are partial.

Conclusion

If I had to summarise my position, I would say that I am a monist metaphysically, a mystic phenomenologically, and a pluralist symbolically.

I do not experience gods or divine persons. My spiritual experience is consistently unitive: an encounter with reality as a whole rather than with supernatural beings. Yet this does not lead me to privilege a single image of the divine. Quite the opposite. If the ultimate is genuinely infinite, no one symbol, archetype, deity, or doctrine can adequately represent it.

This has led me to an unexpected conclusion. The iconoclast and the mythic pluralist may be responding to the same intuition. The iconoclast rejects all images because none are sufficient. The mythic pluralist embraces many images because none are sufficient. One arrives at silence, the other at a multitude of symbols, but both are attempts to avoid mistaking the representation for the reality.

The disagreement, then, is not necessarily about the nature of the ultimate. It is about how best to honour its inexhaustibility. For some, that means no images. For others, it means a thousand. What seems least convincing to me is the claim that any single image, concept, or divine figure could ever be enough.

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