Hi Reader,

Last week we looked at this word, "everything." It's like Superman ice cream: hard to tell what flavor it is, or even which one it's trying to be, and also it's a bit silly.

The plural flavor of everything is the collective: take all the individual stuffs that exist and talk about them all together.

The singular flavor of everything refers to the interconnectedness (and interbeing) of all things, including past and maybe future. And I'll even say it refers to all that as expressed in this moment, which is the only experience of that everything there ever is.

That's the thing I'm okay with calling God.

Now, there's at least a whole universe's worth of other stuff to say about this God. Anything that can be said, and everything that has ever been said, is about this God. In a way I'm not even interested in that rabbit hole. Really I guess I'm just trying to peer all the way to the end of the road so that I can forget about where I'm going and just enjoy the journey. (This is a fool's errand, by the way, and simultaneously an ouroboros, but more on that next week in a bonus newsletter!)

The thing is, because so many people already use the word God to refer to something other than what I'm talking about here, I want a new word. I want a name.

So I'm gonna name this God. Oh, the hubris.

One of our old religions in which tradition I was raised already gave us a name for God: Yahweh, which means "I am." Oh, and they capitalize it for dramatic effect: I AM. This is a really good name, actually. It's close to the simplest expression of the spiritual (i.e. not-empirical) experience of God: the experience of being, right here and now, in this moment. I AM is your pure awareness, my pure awareness, the pure fundamental awareness of reality. Everything that exists arises inside of I AM.

But, like I said, I AM is a spiritual name for a spiritual experience.

It looks to me like there are two perspectives from which to "look at" reality: it can look like an empirical-ish place arising in a spiritual "container"; or, it can look like a spiritual-ish place arising in an empirical "container."

It's a coin's toss as to which is truer, so maybe they're simultaneously true in some paradoxical way. I mean, that seems appropriate, right?

Anyway, I AM takes the first perspective. My name for God is going to take the other one.

And what way is there to be more direct about it than to just say what it is? We're talking about everything, and specifically everything singular. So, my name for God comes from the Singular Everything: SE. (I pronounce this "seh.")

It's not particularly catchy. It doesn't roll off the tongue. But neither does, you know, life in general. So I think it fits.

It's a little squidgy to use pronouns for SE. SE is kind of a what, and kind of a who, and kind of an it, but really SE is the simultaneous instantiation of all whats, whos, and its. So I'm going to double down and just try not to use pronouns of any kind to refer to SE.

So, yeah. Meet SE. You've always known SE, and SE has always known you. In a way, you are SE, because without you SE wouldn't be what SE is. You are indispensable, necessary, inevitable. So that's cool.

I don't have any earthshattering conclusion here. I don't think SE is a "good guy." I don't think SE is holy. (Well, not quite: SE is holy in the sense that SE is the only thing that exists, so is simultaneously the most holy and the most profane thing in existence; but really those words just lose their meaning when there are no other things to compare to.) In any case, I'm not going to worship SE. I don't think SE really cares one way or the other. Well, that's not quite true: I know that SE cares about you at least to the extent that I do, and more fully to the extent that anyone and everyone does, because SE is all of us. SE creates us, and we create SE.

No, there's no earthshattering conclusion, because SE is super ordinary. Like, toooootally ordinary. Synonymously ordinary.

But that's just one way of looking at SE, of course. One way amongst infinite ways.

How are you going to look?