The God Force
Before words, before belief, there is a presence—subtle, luminous, and already moving within you.
When the Sacred Word Breaks Open
People flinch at the word God these days. It carries the residue of conflict—wars justified in its name, rigid doctrines, histories that leave a bitter aftertaste. The word itself has become charged, almost radioactive.
And yet something remains.
What William James called the phenomenological reality of the unseen—and what Michael Eigen names the God Force—persists as a living, experiential fact. Not a belief system. Not a doctrine. An encounter.
If the word God feels too heavy, we can set it aside. Many therapists, myself included, speak instead of the numinous or the luminous—terms that gesture toward something felt but not fully grasped, something that exceeds ordinary waking perception.
This is not about subscribing to anything. It is about sensing something.
There is an invitation here—not to believe, but to open. To stretch the psyche just enough to notice that there are currents moving beneath the surface of ordinary life. Subtle, persistent, and at times unmistakably alive.
The Psyche That Moves on Its Own
Years ago, in a clinical study group, I spoke about experiences that didn’t fit neatly into developmental narratives—moments that carried an autonomous quality, as if they had a life of their own.
Not everything arises from childhood.
Carl Jung pointed to what he called a psychoid reality—a domain that is neither purely psychic nor purely physical, but something in between, generating energies that can alter us in ways the ego alone cannot manage.
The room was divided.
Some leaned in, recognizing something familiar. Others withdrew, not out of resistance, but because the experience itself was outside their current range of perception. And that’s all right. Sensitivity to these dimensions varies. It deepens, recedes, returns in its own time.
What matters is this: there are forces within us that are not reducible to biography. They move through dreams, intuitions, relationships, and synchronistic moments. When we begin to attend to them—not with superstition, but with grounded curiosity—something shifts.
Old patterns loosen. New meanings begin to take shape.
The God Force doesn’t argue. It reveals.
When the Light Is Blocked—and When It Returns
Sally came into therapy for dream work. She had heard it might help with a persistent sense of unhappiness and a pattern of broken relationships. But her dreams were thin, almost absent. Nothing held. Nothing formed.
Something was blocking the channel.
Over time, she disclosed chronic cannabis use. It had dulled her inner landscape, muted the very system that generates symbolic life. Once she stopped, things changed—slowly at first, then all at once.
Her dreams returned with force.
They showed a woman emaciated, drained of vitality, her eyes nearly black—not the fertile darkness of transformation, what the alchemists called nigredo, but something closer to psychic depletion. And yet, even there, faint filaments of light flickered.
That was enough.
Over the next few months, new images emerged. Among them, a luminous, egg-shaped form—alive, radiant, unmistakably present. The contrast was striking. What had once been nearly extinguished was now gathering strength.
The God Force had not disappeared. It had been obscured.
When tended, it grows.
Not into perfection. Not into a life free of irritation or grief. We still lose our footing. We still falter. But something changes in how we meet those moments. There is greater awareness, greater capacity to reflect, and greater willingness to learn from what unsettles us.
We become, in a grounded sense, more human.
And perhaps that is its quiet purpose—not to elevate us beyond life, but to deepen our participation in it. To bring light into the ordinary rhythms of living, relating, working, and creating.
If you’re reading this, something in you already knows.
Something recognized the signal.
The God Force is not elsewhere.
It is already moving—subtle, persistent—within you.