Is God a solid (what is God made of)?

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It’s a fun question to think about. Not a fun question to try to answer. I’ll walk you through some of the logic I came up with when I contemplated this question many years ago.

What are humans made of? Flesh and bone? Try again. In the same way you don’t think about silicon and copper when you’re using your computer, your lived experience only vaguely consists of the physical parts of your body. You don’t crack open an electronics textbook when you need to fix your operating system.

You’re not your thoughts, if you carry through a path of introspection, what Buddhists call vipaśyanā, you’ll eventually realize the core truths of Buddhism. Self is illusion, existence is suffering, and nothing is permanent. This doesn’t mean that self doesn’t consist of anything, just that the stuff it does consist of is illusory and impermanent. The introspection journey will give you many varied and deep experiences of those aspects, and you can dive as deep into them as you care to.

Existence, at it’s very core, is what happens when something interacts with something else. When the elaborate bundles of cells with their impossibly complicated interactions all come together as a human being, it creates what we call consciousness, the sensation of an agent in control.

When you break it down as thoroughly as this, the amazing thing isn’t the core truths. Those are the simplest and most natural things in the world. What’s amazing is the illusion, that we manage to persist for decades, that our civilizations can last for hundreds to thousands of years, created by people so thoroughly deluded as to the opposite. That selves are not illusory, that we can build lives that don’t suck, that we can build permanence. None of our efforts could possibly do anything to change the simple and natural truth.

So then what is God? Does God simply not exist, in the face of these truths? Many Buddhists feel this way. But think back to those selves. They are illusion, but illusion is our entire world, there is nothing that isn’t illusion. Heck, many of us spend 14 hours plus staring at devices specifically designed to create illusions! It is more deluded to believe you can escape illusion than it is to just accept it, and learn how it works. This is why it’s important to experience for yourself the mechanics of the illusion.

And so this is one way you can understand God. As an illusion creating a greater illusion. Solids, liquids, gases, specify how matter interacts. If you heat up a solid past the melting point, it turns to liquid, then to gas. When we imagine things, we add order and beauty to those things. When you think of an ideal car, is it a dirty, disgusting mess? Of course not, it’s a pristine C3 Corvette.

And humans get more and more capable over time, their societies gradually get more sophisticated and inventions more powerful. Our thoughts and dreams get bigger along with them.

When you refine the illusory ‘stuff’ of the mind to the highest and purest levels, that’s God. Whenever our minds become capable of imagining a greater God, that becomes the new God. Of course, this illusion, being the greatest thing we could imagine and create, has agency of its own, infinite agency.

Ancient peoples spoke of their God ‘breathing’ things into existence. As the most simple and natural activity, giving life to a previously lifeless chaotic nothingness. We dream, we organize, we fight the reality of impermanence and suffering, and that’s what God does. Just as God dies when the people who believed in Him die, God is reborn when new people find a new way to believe.

Just as we have thoughts but do not consist of them, spirituality is of God but not entirely Him.