How Can God Be a Higher Power When God Is Existence Itself?
Calling God a higher power quietly smuggles a ladder into reality. Someone stands below. Something stands above. Distance appears. Direction appears. Hierarchy sneaks in through language before thought has a chance to question it.
Yet if God is the only thing that exists, hierarchy collapses on contact.
A higher power implies comparison. Comparison requires at least two things. God plus something else. Creator plus creation. Observer plus observed. The moment this split is accepted, God becomes an object among objects, merely larger, stronger, or more authoritative than the rest. That version of divinity is impressive, but it is no longer ultimate.
Existence itself has no altitude.
If God is existence, then nothing stands outside it. No vantage point remains from which God could be viewed as higher or lower. The phrase higher power only makes sense from the perspective of a self that imagines itself separate, small, and contained. God appears higher because the self has first imagined itself as lower.
This is not a moral error. It is a perceptual one.
Power suggests force applied across distance. God-as-existence does not apply force. It does not act upon reality. It is reality acting as everything it appears to be. Gravity, breath, thought, confusion, devotion, resistance, clarity—all equally arise as expressions of the same indivisible field.
Nothing is empowered by God. Everything is empowered as God.
The need for a higher power often emerges from vulnerability. Humans face uncertainty, loss, fear, and finitude. A transcendent overseer offers comfort. Guidance feels safer when imagined as descending from above. Yet this comfort depends on separation. God must be elsewhere in order to rescue from here.
Nonduality removes the rescue narrative entirely.
What remains is intimacy without hierarchy. God is not watching life unfold. God is unfolding as life. No supervision. No intervention. No cosmic management style. Just continuous self-expression without a centre.
Prayer then shifts meaning. It no longer reaches upward. It settles inward, outward, everywhere at once. Not a request made to a higher authority, but a softening of resistance to what already is. Devotion becomes alignment rather than submission.
When God is understood as existence itself, the word higher loses relevance. Nothing can be higher than everything. Nothing can be closer than what is already happening.
God is not above you.
God is what is looking through your eyes, questioning the very idea of above and below.
Morgan O. Smith
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Morgan O. Smith 