Seeing your god as metaphor makes the god transparent to the transcendent. If you see your god as fact and history, you are bound in time, in form, and death and dying. The transcendental function of religion and mythology is to open a portal in your to the timeless indwelling god or divinity within. When we wrap our God in history, and then make him the Unique one and only God, we trap ourselves in the suffering of history.

One difference between the Buddha and Jesus is that the Buddha’s legend is a teaching itself, and Buddhism does not depend on an actual historical Buddha or Siddhartha Gautama. When the Teaching of Jesus is separated from its historical anchor, the portal to transcendent is opened.

It’s the difference between listening to radio stories and TV stories. When you listen to a radio story you interact with it, complete the words with your imagination, visualizing the Lone Ranger instead of passively receiving the TV story of the Lone Ranger. When you make your God a metaphor, you interact with Him like in a radio story. You and the God are One in the story.

TV separates you from the story, so you always feel separate from God, in evil, if you will. This creates time so you can find God and peace in the future. But right now, you are separate from the story on the TV. You are created by the TV story. You don’t interact with it as a co-creator.

I talk about the different gods, Shiva, Quan Yin, Jesus, Buddha because as metaphor they all point to the One that has no second, and that is YOU. God dwells within you as you. But in order for you to realize this, there has to be a radical shift in your view point from being on the rim of the wheel of the world taking all the shit, to being at the center of the wheel. Our Western culture conditions us to believe we are all on the rim of the wheel getting the mud. Eastern teaching is about the hub or the axis of the wheel, and it is You. This is a shift from the periphery to the center of consciousness.