There is a splendid example of materialist propaganda in Soviet anti-religious imagery: the poster “There Is No God!” with a cosmonaut above the domes of churches. But something tells me its creators were rather dishonest with us.
On the poster we see that same Hero, who tells us through his feat: there is no God.
Of course, the god he was speaking about does not exist. That is far too primitive and dark a conception of numinous experience. At the same time, however, the poster gives us a new Hero. Why not a god? He is majestic, raised above the church, even larger in scale than the rocket.
Here is our god: a different kind of human being. A person who has mastered nature through reason and skill and taken another leap in development. Here he is, the god who is meant to replace the old dead god of the churchmen.
What I remember from childhood is watching a rocket launch on television. It was sheer delight, the same kind of numinous experience people have in church. There they are: living gods!
Unfortunately, this experiment was never fully understood and descended into ordinary “Pharisaism”. Instead of the inner god as a principle of existential being, people were given the human-machine, without a soul or god.
Attempts to prove the existence or non-existence of God are futile. God is not an entity somewhere outside you. God is your experience, a state within you.
God is love, said Jesus. Love is the Law, added Crowley. Love is God, corrected Osho. Here we see a clear shift in the object of contemplation: from God as an object to God as a state.
So what is God? Where should we look for him? Certainly not in churches or among foolish priests who believe in a literal six-day creation. God is in everyone; you only need to remember him. For that, it is enough to recall your first encounter with the Sublime. Strangely enough, for me it was the image of space and cosmonauts, something that still fills me with an inexplicable feeling of belonging to everything. For you, too, an image of the divine may lie somewhere entirely different—not in external gods but in that childhood experience that still takes your breath away and brings tears of tenderness to your eyes. That is the most genuine experience of communion with God.