Fresh Thinking, Inspiration, and Vision on the Process of Spiritual Transformation

God is the possible. Seen this way, we all have a relationship with God, whether we think we believe in God or not. Every human being has a relationship with what they have not yet thought about, what hasn’t yet entered their feelings, and what has not yet manifested in the forms of their life.

Different people relate to God, the possible, differently. Some people’s relationship with what has not yet happened makes them believe that there is nothing truly new that could happen. They generally believe that their experience will just keep going the way it is. There will be no miracles. They have life all figured out, and even though the results may not make them happy, those results are predictable. If you ask such a person to entertain the new and different—a thought, a feeling, or the possibility of circumstances that have never been before—they are likely to reject it. We have the opportunity to have a different relationship with the possible.

We usually think of the possible as being in the future. The future is an interesting concept. I’m not sure it actually exists in the way we think about it. The idea is that there is a linear progression, and things are moving out of the future into the present, to then fade into the past. Or we see ourselves as moving through time from the past, into the present, and on to the future. But it is hard to prove that the future exists. Has anyone visited the future and come back to report on it? Our mind can ponder what it may think of as the future. But we cannot really go there. By the time we experience life it is in the present.

Maybe the possible isn’t really in the future. Maybe there are possibilities with us now in a pre-manifest state. It could be that all of what has not yet happened is waiting in that pre-manifest state like the millions of eggs that a woman carries in her ovaries. One of those possibilities is born in the present moment.

I cannot prove by observation this way of understanding the possible because, by definition, it’s not here yet. You can’t see the pre-manifest. Isn’t this how God is? I cannot prove the existence of God by observation, because God is the possible, and the unmanifest, even though we can see what is present which we may understand to be a manifestation of God, or a manifestation of what was only a possibility at some time in the past. What we can observe in our own experience is how our life is different, depending on how we relate to the possible.

The Bible says this about our relationship to God, the possible:

Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man,
the things which God hath prepared for them that love him. (First Corinthians 2:9)

Stripped of religion, isn’t this verse about what is possible? About what can happen when we are on good terms with the possible?

As the verse indicates, the future holds something wonderful for us when we have a relationship with the future that lets us receive the best from it. At first, what is possible is not even perceived in consciousness or feeling, because the future is, by definition, not here yet.

What is our role in all this? It is to open ourselves to a relationship with the possible in such a way that it can be seen and heard, and understood with the heart. When we are open in this way, the possible shows up in our feeling perception and in our thoughts, and perhaps in the people and circumstances around us. But for the possible to have meaning to us, it cannot be just in the world around us without being in our feeling perception and in our thoughts, because we would not see it on that basis. We would not have the joy of what is possible, we would not appreciate the possible, if it were only in our world. It has to enter our heart for it to have value to us.

Our human capacity—our thoughts and feelings and our physical capacity—is made to be a dwelling place for the possible. We are supposed to be a home for the possible so that it may manifest through us and into the world. For that to happen, it takes a bold act of personal courage. It takes believing in something that is not yet here, but could be if were open to it.