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Rabbi Rami Guides are brief, often humorous, no-nonsense explorations of issues facing spiritual seekers. Written for people of any faith or none, Rabbi Rami Guides hope to start conversations rather than end them.

DO YOU BELIEVE IN GOD? Wait a moment before you answer. It's too easy to say "yes" or "no" to this question, and the question itself is vague to the point of being meaningless. Before you can answer "yes" or "no" to a belief in God, you have to know just what it is the questioner means by the word God.

For example, if you ask practicing Jews, Christians, and Muslims if they believe in God, chances are most of them will say, "yes." But if you then ask them, "Do you believe in God, a singular divine being who yet embraces three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?" the very same Jews and Muslims who affirmed a belief in God just a moment ago, suddenly will stand with the atheists and declare their nonbelief in this God.

In other words, the word God in and of itself tells us nothing, and saying one believes or disbelieves in God is equally meaningless. Before you can affirm or deny a belief in God, you have to define the term. And when you do, things get so much more complicated.

I dislike complication. While I find the world to be marvelously complex, complication is something else. Complication arises not from the nature of the world, but from the nature of the human mind seeking to define the world. Returning to the example of the Trinity, for example, it doesn't take long to discover that this doctrine, while central to most of Christianity, is nearly impossible to define or explain. Why is God one–in–three? How is God one–in–three? What is the relationship between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? Are they equal, or is God the Father somehow more than God the Son or the Holy Spirit? Did one come before the others? Trinitarians believe that the Son is "begotten" by the Father. Does that mean the Father is greater than the Son? And does the Spirit proceed from the Father alone, as Orthodox Christians insist, or from the Father and the Son together as Catholics insist?

These are serious arguments. Indeed, this last was one of the reasons the Christian world split into Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches in 1054. But the arguments only make sense if you affirm a Trinitarian theology in the first place. Muslims and Jews find the entire argument moot since they cannot imagine a God who is one–in–three or three–in–one. Hindus would find the argument unnecessary since they believe all things, physical as well as spiritual, are manifestations of the one God, Brahman. And Buddhists would consider this a great waste of energy since they don't posit a Creator God in the first place.

So when someone asks you whether or not you believe in God, make sure to have the questioner clarify what she or he means by God. Without such clarification the question is meaningless and unanswerable.

I start with this because this book is a guide to God, and you need to know what definition of God I am using if you are to decide whether or not reading this book is going to guide you somewhere you wish to go. Lucky for you, this is the Rabbi Rami Guide to God so you don't have to wade through centuries of theological argument within and among the world's religions to find out what the word God means in this context. All you have to do is ask Rabbi Rami what he means when he uses the word God.

Lucky for me, I am Rabbi Rami so I don't have to bother with all that theological speculation either. I can simply tell you that by God I mean the Source and Substance of all reality. God is all there ever was, is, and will be; God is both infinite potential and finite actualizations of that potential. To be as clear as I can be, for me God is all that is, and all that is may surpass all we know there to be.

My God is the God of the Perennial Philosophy, a recurring wisdom that crops up among the mystics of every age and in every culture. Hence, the Rabbi Rami Guide to God isn't a guide to the Jewish God, the Christian God, the Muslim God, the Hindu God, or any other deity of any other of the hundreds of religions we humans have imagined over the millennia. It is Rabbi Rami's guide to Rabbi Rami's God, who I just happen to think is the one true God.

It is important to remember this. If you are looking for insight into the Gods of one religion or another, or if you are fearful of entertaining any idea of God other than your own, let me save you some time, money, and effort: this book is not for you. Don't read it. It will only upset you, and life is upsetting enough without me bothering you. So, no hard feelings; just finish this sentence, close the book, and walk away. Bye.

If you're still reading you have no one to blame but yourself. I warned you: this is a guide to the God of the Perennial Philosophy, and while it will draw on the teachings of Perennial Philosophers from many religions, it is unconcerned with the official theologies of those religions.

Reading this guide will not make you a better Hindu, Jew, Christian, Muslim, Baha'i, Sikh, Pagan, or Wiccan. In fact it won't even make you a better person. Reading rarely does that. But if you engage in some of the spiritual practices mentioned in this guide, you might make yourself a better person.

So let me be clear: I am a Perennialist. I believe that human beings are capable of directly experiencing God because I believe we are always and already an expression or extension of God. I don't believe one religion is right and others are wrong. I believe that any religion when seen through the lens of the Perennial Philosophy, which most often means through the eyes of its mystics rather than its clerics, can lead you to God and your innate oneness with God, when God is understood as the Source and Substance of all reality.

The Rabbi Rami Guide to God, like all the other books in the Rabbi Rami Guide series, is a blend of theory and practice. I provide the theory, but you must do the practices. No one can experience God for you. You have to do this yourself. Like any guidebook, this one only points toward something. If you want to get to know Paris, for example, it is wise to bring a guidebook, but it is essential to wander the streets for yourself. The same is true here: if you want to know about God, read this guide. If you want to know God directly, practice.

THE TERM perennial philosophy was coined in 1540 by Agostino Steuco. Steuco argued that many of the pre-Christian teachings of ancient Greece and Rome supported Catholic teaching as well. A loyal son of the Church, Steuco wasn't interested in articulating a truth outside Catholicism, only in showing that Catholicism was not at odds with earlier wisdom, but a more mature and divinely revealed flowering of it. Today's global understanding of the Perennial Philosophy was articulated by German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Leibnitz (1646–1716). Leibnitz argued that there is a universal and eternal philosophy underlying all religions (not just Steuco's Catholicism) that is reflected most clearly in the mystical teachings of every religion.

Not every religion lays claim to a mystical tradition, and even those that do are often disinclined to focus on it. But for our purposes, suffice it to say that mystics are those who engage in contemplative practices designed to bring them into direct contact with Reality—what I am calling God. A mystic is not all that concerned with theology, preferring to eat the meal rather than argue over the menu. And when they do, when they "taste and see" the reality of God (Psalm 34:8), they discover that what they are tasting is what all mystics are tasting, even if they call it by different names.

Giving Steuco and Liebnitz their due, it was Aldous Huxley who made the Perennial Philosophy part of the contemporary spiritual conversation with the publication of his book The Perennial Philosophy in 1945. The book was a collection of texts and teachings from the world's religions that suggested a shared wisdom that each of them possessed. Two years later, in an introduction to Christopher Isherwood and Swami Prabhavananda's translation of the Hindu spiritual classic Bhagavad Gita, "the Song of God," Huxley articulated four universal points of agreement among mystics of every faith:

FIRST: The phenomenal world of matter and of individualized consciousness—the world of things and animals and men and even gods—is the manifestation of a Divine Ground within which all partial realities have their being, and apart from which they would be non-existent.

SECOND: Human beings are capable not merely of knowing about the Divine Ground by inference; they can also realize its existence by a direct intuition, superior to discursive reasoning. This immediate knowledge unites the knower with that which is known.

THIRD:

FOURTH: Man's life on earth has only one end and purpose: to identify himself with his eternal Self and so to come to unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground. (Bhagavad-Gita, NY: Signet Classics, 2002)