A God Who Runs When You Run

What if the divine is not somewhere else?

I was supposed to go to the gym this morning. Instead, I pulled my wellies out of the garage and headed for the countryside.

It’s November in Warwickshire, which means the fields are beginning their annual transformation into something resembling cold chocolate pudding. We’ve had a fair amount of rain lately, and some of the footpaths are well on their way to becoming ankle-deep exercises in maintaining one’s dignity. I chose a route I don’t often take which is a longer circuit through the fields. I set off with a line from Philip K. Dick’s novel VALIS knocking about somewhere in the back of my head.

When you run, the god runs with you.

An intriguing proposition, especially for a fellow who spends a considerable amount of time wandering around the countryside talking to himself about the nature of reality. People probably often think I’m talking to God when they pass near me in the fields.

Before I’d even left town, however, another voice had entered the conversation. It was already eleven o’clock. This route would take longer than my usual circuit, perhaps two hours, maybe more. There were things I could be doing back at the studio. Things like writing, publishing, or organising.

My inner productivity accountant was standing on my left shoulder, clipboard in hand.

This was particularly annoying because I’d recently decided to take a holiday from my habitual relationship with time. With Ruth away in Japan, I’d been experimenting with doing things a little differently. Not a holiday from activity, but from the constant calculations that accompany so much of it. How long will this take? What else could I be doing? Is this a sufficiently worthwhile use of the morning?

I reminded myself that wandering is part of my work. I’m a writer, a philosophical correspondent, a fellow who has arranged a good portion of his life around the curious business of noticing things and thinking about them. Going out into the world isn’t time stolen from the work. It’s part of how the work happens.

The accountant remained unconvinced, but I ignored him and carried on.

Gradually the houses fell away, replaced by open fields, hedgerows, and the soft percussion of wellington boots negotiating a muddy path. Somewhere in the distance the A425 continued to add it’s ambient sound even as the birds were becoming easier to hear. The landscape opened up, and with it came that familiar sensation of something loosening in my thoughts.

I began wondering whether I’d misunderstood Dick’s running god.

Perhaps the interesting thing wasn’t that God accompanies us when we move. Perhaps it was that we’ve spent so much time imagining ourselves separate from the world that the possibility of moving together strikes us as a revelation.

The trouble with looking behind things

Much of VALIS is concerned with the possibility that ordinary reality is concealing something.

Dick’s characters inhabit a world that may be a fabrication, a prison, an elaborate deception maintained by forces whose existence can only be glimpsed through occasional failures in the machinery. The apparent solidity of everyday life becomes suspect. What matters is not what we see but what might be operating behind it.

I understand the attraction.

I’ve spent enough time exploring Gnosticism, Hermeticism, chaos magick, and various other esoteric traditions to appreciate the possibility that reality might have hidden dimensions. There’s a peculiar pleasure in suspecting that the universe possesses secret passages, that familiar objects and ordinary events occasionally reveal something of a deeper architecture.

Give me a mysterious symbol, an improbable coincidence, or a cryptic passage from an ancient text, and I’m perfectly happy to disappear down the rabbit hole.

But Dick’s running god offers a rather different image from the Black Iron Prison. Here, the divine is not necessarily concealed behind the visible world, waiting for someone clever enough to discover the entrance. It moves with the runner, participating in the activity itself.

That small shift changes the nature of the investigation. Instead of searching for the intelligence operating the machinery, I find myself considering the relationship between the machinery, its operation, and whatever we mean by God.

I was entertaining this possibility while making my way further into the countryside, listening to my boots squelch along the path. The mud was still manageable, though I knew from previous winters that some of these fields would eventually become almost impassable. Whatever the ultimate nature of reality, it was currently doing a remarkably good impression of wet earth.

I had to watch where I put my feet. The universe, apparently, was in no mood to wait while I completed my metaphysical enquiries.

God, nature, and the other-than-human

Spinoza has been hovering around the edges of this conversation for some time.

His famous expression Deus sive Natura—God or Nature—offers a way of thinking about divinity that doesn’t require a supernatural being standing apart from creation.

For Spinoza, God is not an external ruler who occasionally intervenes in the affairs of the universe. God is the infinite reality of which all particular things are expressions. We exist within the very reality we’re trying to understand.

It’s not a particularly sentimental theology. Spinoza’s God doesn’t take a personal interest in whether I make it through the next muddy field without falling over.

Still, I find something liberating in the idea. The trees, the birds, the damp soil, the passing clouds, the peculiar creature walking through it all wearing wellington boots: each belongs to the same unfolding reality. There’s no requirement to escape nature before encountering what might be sacred.

I’d been reading Francesca Ferrando this morning, and her posthuman philosophy was accompanying me along the path. Ferrando challenges the familiar humanist arrangement in which humanity occupies the privileged centre of existence, with the rest of the natural world positioned beneath us, something to be understood, managed, improved, or exploited.

That manner of thinking has been useful for justifying all kinds of destructive behaviour.

We’ve become rather good at congratulating ourselves on having risen above nature while steadily undermining the ecological conditions upon which our own continued existence depends. A curious achievement for a species that considers itself exceptionally intelligent.

Ferrando invites us to reconsider the relationship between the human and the other-than-human. We’re participants in a network of interdependent lives, not spectators surveying a world that exists for our convenience. This was much easier to appreciate out among the fields than sitting at my desk contemplating the theory.

As I moved further away from town, I found myself thinking about the shaman and the warlock, two figures that recently made an appearance in my little republic of inner identities.

There was a time when I might have spent considerable energy trying to decide which of them represented the authentic me. I would have assembled arguments, examined the symbolism, perhaps even constructed a philosophical framework explaining why one was more appropriate than the other.

These days, I’m happy to let them both come along. The philosopher and writer can join us too, along with whichever other inhabitants of the internal republic fancy an outing.

What attracts me to certain shamanic traditions, and to Daoist thought in a different philosophical register, is their capacity to unsettle the boundary we habitually draw between ourselves and the natural world. I like the possibility of encountering the world as something alive with relationships rather than as a collection of objects awaiting human interpretation.

And I find myself drawn to the image of God endlessly encountering itself through its own varied expressions.

A tree being a tree. A bird being a bird. A human being making an almighty fuss about what it means to be human.

It’s a grand metaphysical speculation, of course. I have no particular evidence that the universe is conscious or that my muddy progress through a Warwickshire field constitutes an episode in the self-exploration of God.

I don’t especially need to prove it. I’m interested in what the idea allows me to notice.

The hedgerows, the birds, the cold air entering my lungs, the constant exchange between my body and its surroundings. I was already involved in relationships I could barely begin to describe.

And all this had been happening long before I started thinking about Spinoza.

A god who gets cold

By this point in my walk, the temperature had become a more pressing philosophical concern.

It was about four degrees, and my hands were complaining about the cold. I’d been walking long enough for the cold to settle into my fingers. I was just about to put my hands in my pocket when my smart glasses informed me that they were cold too and needed to warm up before they could be of use.

Imagine that!

Here I was, a self-proclaimed soft cyborg, wandering through the countryside equipped with wearable technology that allows me to record aspects of the world as I encounter them, and my technological augmentation had decided that four degrees was an unreasonable working environment.

My biological equipment, meanwhile, was expected to carry on.

I’d left the glasses case at home, so there wasn’t much to be done. They would have to endure the conditions along with the rest of us. Although I did wonder whether anyone in the engineering department had considered that people might want to wear their smart glasses outdoors in November.

The incident brought Maurice Merleau-Ponty to mind. He spent much of his philosophical career challenging the idea that consciousness is a detached observer operating a biological machine. Our bodies are not simply vehicles for carrying our minds around while the important intellectual business happens upstairs.

We encounter the world bodily.

The cold wasn’t an item of information I was receiving about my environment. It was happening to me. My fingers were cold, my breathing responded to the air, my feet adjusted to the slippery ground, and my attention shifted accordingly.

I wasn’t contemplating coldness as an abstract quality. I was cold, and that fact had become part of the thinking.

This seems almost embarrassingly obvious, but philosophy has spent a lot of time trying to work out how the mind relates to the body, as though the two were separate parties negotiating an awkward domestic arrangement.

Walking makes that separation difficult to maintain. A steep rise changes my breathing and attention. An uneven surface demands adjustments before I’ve consciously formulated an intention to make them. The direction of my thoughts shifts with the terrain.

I suspect this is part of why I enjoy thinking in motion. Ideas emerge amid sensations, interruptions, changing scenery, physical effort, and the occasional reminder that I should have brought gloves.

I’m not using my body to transport my mind to somewhere conducive to thinking. The walking itself is involved in whatever thinking takes place.

Which brings me back to Dick’s running god.

If the god runs when we run, does it get cold when we get cold?

It’s a slightly ridiculous question, but once I’d entertained it, I found myself wandering into considerably less comfortable territory.

The wounded cosmos

One of the stranger themes running through VALIS is the suggestion that the cosmos might not be the harmonious, perfectly ordered creation we so often imagine.

Dick entertains images of a living universe whose intelligence may be wounded, bereaved, or incomplete. The divine is not necessarily an omnipotent observer surveying creation from a position of perfect serenity. It may be caught up in the same troubled existence as everything else.

I find this both compelling and disturbing.

A living universe sounds attractive enough when we’re imagining trees, rivers, birdsong, and the pleasure of walking through open countryside. It’s easy to enjoy the thought of universal interconnection when the light is beautiful and the body is cooperating.

The picture changes when we consider illness, grief, fear, and the countless forms of suffering that accompany living.

If God runs when we run, what happens when we fall? Does the divine participate in the injuries and losses of existence as well?

I’ve always found something peculiar about the idea of a creator who understands suffering without ever having to experience it. Dick’s wounded cosmos offers another possibility: an intelligence whose experience, if such a thing exists, is inseparable from the countless lives unfolding within the world.

That would include the joy, certainly, but also the grief. The exhausted body, the frightened animal, the lonely person sitting awake at three in the morning, the fragile ecosystem struggling beneath the weight of human activity.

Yet there’s a problem with this picture, and I don’t want to wander past it too quickly.

When I imagine a suffering universe, am I discovering something about reality, or projecting my own vulnerability onto it? Perhaps the image appeals to me because I find it easier to relate to a wounded divinity than to an incomprehensible, indifferent cosmos.

I’m possibly suffering from that old human habit of making gods in our own image, even when we imagine we’re doing precisely the opposite.

We give the universe our emotions, longings, loneliness, and need for companionship. Then, encountering those qualities in our description of the universe, we congratulate ourselves on having discovered a cosmic intelligence that understands us.

Perhaps we have. Or perhaps we’ve encountered our own reflection in a very large mirror.

I don’t think the possibility of projection makes the image worthless. Myths and metaphors can illuminate experience without functioning as literal descriptions of the universe. The wounded god might tell us something about the way we understand vulnerability, even if it tells us nothing verifiable about the ultimate structure of reality.

Once we’ve imagined suffering as part of the divine life, it’s tempting to begin treating suffering itself as sacred. Pain becomes spiritually necessary. Loss becomes a lesson. The injuries of the world acquire a grand significance that threatens to make them seem less urgent.

I’ve never been comfortable with explanations that are too eager to make suffering meaningful.

The frightened animal doesn’t need me to construct a metaphysical system in which its fear participates in the sorrows of God. It may simply need me to leave it alone.

The person in pain may need help rather than an account of their place in the divine drama. And a damaged ecosystem requires something more practical than our admiration for the interconnectedness of all things.

This is where Ferrando’s posthuman philosophy returns with a rather pointed question. If I genuinely understand myself as one participant among other living beings, how does that understanding change the way I behave toward them?

There’s a difference between finding interdependence an attractive philosophical idea and accepting the responsibilities that follow from it.

Spinoza, Dick, and Ferrando make troublesome travelling companions. Spinoza’s impersonal God, Dick’s wounded cosmos, and Ferrando’s posthuman ethics don’t fit neatly into a single account of reality. And I absolutely love the friction between them.

One invites me to reconsider the separation between God and nature. Another unsettles the comforting assumption of divine perfection. The third reminds me that whatever I believe about the nature of existence, there are other beings here whose lives matter independently of my theories.

I can entertain the possibility of a wounded cosmos without having to declare the universe conscious. And I can take vulnerability seriously without needing to make it holy.

Still, the image of a god who shares the conditions of existence has stayed with me.

A god who runs when we run might also be a god who stumbles, gets tired, grows old, and occasionally wonders what on earth is going on.

Which, come to think of it, sounds rather more like the universe I actually inhabit.

Twenty minutes inside my own head

At some point during the walk, I realised I’d been talking almost continuously for twenty minutes.

This isn’t unusual. My Wisdom Walks often involve a running commentary on whatever philosophical problem happens to be occupying me. I record thoughts as they occur, following associations without worrying too much about whether they’ll eventually become anything.

It’s a practice I’ve come to value, but this morning something struck me as kind of absurd.

I’d travelled out into the countryside to contemplate my participation in nature and had spent much of the journey talking about nature rather than attending to it.

I was still inside my intellectual bubble.

So I stopped talking and listened.

Orange leaves lay scattered along the ground, while others continued hanging from the trees. The vegetation along the banks of a little stream had turned brown, making its preparations for winter. Distant traffic intruded occasionally, but there were quieter sounds I’d barely noticed while conducting my one-man philosophical symposium.

I heard a bird of prey somewhere in the distance. I couldn’t see it, and before long its call was swallowed by the noise of a tractor.

So much for the serene soundtrack of spiritual communion.

But I liked that. The countryside wasn’t presenting itself as a carefully arranged scene for my enlightenment. It was busy being a countryside, complete with agricultural machinery, distant roads, seasonal decay, cold air, and creatures going about their own affairs.

The bird had its business. The farmer had his. Somewhere along the footpath, I was engaged in mine.

Whitehead’s process philosophy came to mind, with its emphasis on becoming, relationship, and activity rather than a world composed entirely of fixed, independent objects.

I’ve been exploring a related image in my thinking about consciousness: the whirlpool.

A whirlpool has a recognisable identity, but that identity exists through movement. It isn’t a permanent object around which water happens to circulate. The circulating water is what constitutes the whirlpool.

I wonder whether the self might be something similar, a temporary pattern within the ongoing activity of existence. Recognisable enough to answer to a name, but never entirely separate from the processes that sustain it.

And if that’s the case, participation isn’t something we occasionally achieve through special spiritual practices. We’re already involved.

Even sitting perfectly still, we’re breathing, metabolising, perceiving, remembering, responding, affecting and being affected by the world around us.

I found it amusing that I’d spent twenty minutes developing an argument about participation, only to stop talking and discover that nothing required the argument to continue.

The world had been getting along perfectly well.

The silence hadn’t made it more real. I’d simply started noticing more of it.

My boots were collecting an impressive amount of Warwickshire, the tractor was going about its business, and somewhere in the surrounding countryside a bird I couldn’t see continued its day.

The universe remained stubbornly uninterested in explaining itself to me.

The curious business of living

Further along the route, I found an abandoned dress shoe lying in the woodland.

Just one.

I wondered how it had got there. It put me in mind of Cinderella, although I couldn’t imagine what sort of woodland encounter might result in someone abandoning a single formal shoe in the middle of the Warwickshire countryside.

Earlier I’d noticed a piece of what appeared to be someone’s car. Elsewhere along the route were the old abandoned trucks I’ve photographed from time to time over the years.

These are the sorts of things that catch my attention.

Ordinary objects in unexpected places invite the imagination to get involved. A shoe in the woodland becomes the beginning of a story. A rusting truck suggests a history that may never be recovered. A discarded fragment of machinery hints at some minor incident that occurred without leaving an explanation.

Mudtown Lion would have made a magnificent conspiracy out of the whole arrangement.

I took a photograph and carried on walking.

I like being able to leave the mystery there. There’s no need to decide what everything means or force an interesting encounter into a larger theory. Sometimes the pleasure is simply in noticing something peculiar and letting it remain peculiar.

For much of my life, I’ve been engaged in some version of the search for myself. Trying to determine who I am, what I believe, what I’m supposed to do, and which identity best captures the essential nature of the person having all these thoughts.

I’ve assembled frameworks, adopted labels, abandoned them, revisited them, and occasionally constructed elaborate philosophical arguments explaining why none of them was entirely satisfactory.

At one point, I was so busy trying to discover the authentic version of myself that I began to suspect I’d turned the search into a full-time occupation.

More recently, something has shifted.

I’m less interested in finding a final explanation of myself before getting on with living.

The various identities can coexist. Writer, philosopher, blogger, facilitator, wanderer, warlock, shaman, whatever. They belong to the different ways I encounter the world, and I don’t feel the same need to arrange them into a definitive hierarchy.

The shift seems to be happening in my relationship with philosophical and spiritual questions too.

I still enjoy the investigation. Give me a good metaphysical puzzle and I’ll happily wander around inside it for hours. But I no longer feel that the mystery of existence has to be solved before I can properly inhabit my own life.

For years, I approached identity as though a final discovery might be waiting somewhere at the end of the investigation. Once I understood who I really was, I could get on with being that person.

Looking back, I sometimes wonder how much living I postponed while attempting to establish the proper terms under which it should proceed.

I’m already here, doing things, having experiences, changing my mind, making commitments, occasionally getting lost in a philosophical rabbit hole and emerging with something useful.

The curious business of living continues regardless of whether I’ve completed the intellectual paperwork.

I can walk through the countryside thinking about God and come home having discovered a muddy path, an abandoned shoe, and a bird I never managed to see.

There was a time when I might have considered that a rather disappointing result for a philosophical expedition.

These days I’m inclined to call it a good morning.

The work of wandering

Of course, the productivity accountant hadn’t entirely disappeared.

As the walk continued, my thoughts returned to the practical business of earning a living as a writer and independent creator.

I have the Textual Underground, where notes accumulate and unexpected connections emerge. I have the weblog, a public hearth where fragments, essays, photographs, and philosophical experiments can find their way into the world. And I have conversational tools that allow me to return to a wandering thought while it’s still alive, rather than leaving it stranded in a notebook until some future afternoon that never quite arrives.

There’s a continuity developing between the walk, the thinking, the archive, and the published work.

I’m recording these thoughts as I walk. When I get home, I can turn the recording into a transcript, return to the interesting threads, follow the occasional digression, and see what might emerge. A fragment perhaps, or an essay, or a photograph with a few sentences attached.

I don’t have to remember everything or spend hours reconstructing the original thought from a handful of cryptic notes.

And because the archive remains available, an observation made today might encounter something I wrote three years ago and take the conversation somewhere I hadn’t anticipated.

I love this way of working. It suits the way my mind moves.

But I’ve occasionally been challenged about the danger of turning every experience into content, of treating life as raw material for a publishing operation.

I understand the concern. I’ve seen what happens when the demand to produce begins colonising every moment of the day. A walk becomes valuable because it generates three blog posts and a handful of social media updates. A conversation is assessed for its usefulness. An experience is scarcely over before we’re considering how to package it.

I don’t particularly want to live that way.

On the other hand, I’m a writer, and writing is part of how I live. I pay attention to things because they interest me, because I’m curious, because the world keeps presenting me with material I want to explore and share.

And, as I remarked during the walk, a brother’s got to eat.

The romantic image of the wandering philosopher is easier to sustain when someone else is paying the bills.

I want to make a living from the things I create. That means writing, publishing, sharing, finding readers, and doing the practical work of keeping the enterprise financially viable. I’ve spent enough years working independently to know that making something and hoping people discover it isn’t much of a business strategy.

There is the art, and there is the work of bringing the art into contact with people who might appreciate it.

Sometimes that means developing a book, designing a workshop, maintaining the website, or finding new ways to reach readers. Sometimes it means the rather unromantic business of telling people that something I’ve made exists and might be worth their time.

I’ve no interest in pretending that any of this is beneath the dignity of a wandering essayist.

Nor do I particularly want to spend my days turning every stray thought into an item on a production schedule.

That’s the awkward territory I’m negotiating.

A photograph of an abandoned shoe can be something I took because it amused me, and later become something I share on the weblog. A wandering thought can lead to an essay without the original experience having been undertaken for that purpose.

Some mornings the walking will produce plenty of material. Other mornings I may come home with nothing beyond muddy boots and a better disposition.

Both seem perfectly acceptable outcomes, although I reserve the right to turn the muddy boots into a photograph.

I do need to keep writing. I need things in the publishing pipeline, and I want to make books and other work that can continue finding readers long after I’ve finished creating them. There’s a practical side to making this life sustainable, and I’ve no desire to wish it away.

But the productivity accountant’s clipboard is not the only instrument by which I intend to measure a day.

That was part of the experiment I’d set myself while Ruth was away: changing my relationship with time. I wasn’t trying to abandon work or stop planning. I wanted to loosen the habit of regarding every hour as a container from which a certain amount of value must be extracted.

Two and a half hours spent walking needn’t be justified by what comes out of those hours.

And if an essay does emerge from the walk, I see no reason to apologise for it.

There’s a longer conversation to be had here about time, attention, ritual, and the peculiar ways we decide what constitutes a worthwhile day. I’ll leave that for another wandering.

For now, the productivity accountant can keep his clipboard. He simply doesn’t get to decide what the morning was worth.

The god who doesn’t need finding

By the time I returned home, I’d covered about three and a half miles and spent two and a half hours wandering through the countryside.

The accountant had been right about the time, at least.

I had photographs, recorded reflections, a collection of philosophical questions, and several ideas I wanted to explore when I got back to the studio.

I was also hungry.

My thoughts had turned toward lunch, and the body that had so generously transported my metaphysical investigations through the countryside was making its priorities known. I was already considering the chilli waiting at home.

After all that speculation about divine immanence, embodied consciousness, the living cosmos, and our participation in reality, the body had brought the discussion around to the simple business of eating.

I’d gone out with a question about God and movement. Along the way there had been cold hands, muddy boots, malfunctioning technology, a bird of prey, a tractor, an abandoned shoe, and the ordinary progression of an autumn morning.

I hadn’t found any hidden machinery operating behind reality. Nor had the universe provided a resolution to the metaphysical questions Dick had left rattling around in my head.

But somewhere along the walk, my attention had shifted.

I’d spent less time worrying about where I stood in relation to the universe and more time noticing the ways in which I was already involved in it.

Walking, thinking, getting cold, wondering what was for lunch. The ordinary activities I’d been engaged in before the philosophical questions arose, now seeming rather more interesting than they had at the start of the morning.

I don’t know whether God runs when I run. I enjoy the image, and I find the possibility of a participating divinity worth entertaining. But I’m equally interested in what the experience of walking tells me about being an embodied creature whose existence is inseparable from the world around him.

The air entering my lungs wasn’t mine before I breathed it. The ground shaped my movement as surely as my feet altered the path beneath them. My thoughts arose in response to a world I didn’t create and could never entirely control.

Whatever consciousness is, it doesn’t seem to happen independently of all that.

And perhaps that’s what I’ll carry away from Dick’s running god.

The possibility that the mystery isn’t somewhere beyond the world, waiting for me to find the right doorway. That whatever I mean by God, consciousness, nature, or existence, I’m already caught up in the business of it.

I came home without having discovered what lies behind reality.

There was still work to do, something to eat, and the rest of the day to get on with.

The universe, meanwhile, showed no particular interest in waiting for me to finish thinking about it.

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