How Our Ideas Become Our Idols

Why does human consciousness become absorbed in money, religion, political ideals, status, or belonging—sometimes so completely that it forgets its creator? These pursuits gather people around shared desires and beliefs, creating collective patterns of attention and influence. What makes them so compelling? How does something we create or sustain come to govern our attention? And at what point does participation become an unconscious form of worship, in which a created thing occupies the centre of our consciousness?

The deeper question is why we possess this vulnerability at all. Why can the desire for security become devotion to money, the search for truth become submission to an ideology, or religious practice absorb us while recognition of the Creator fades? What turns these aspects of human life into temptations? Must participation in the world draw consciousness away from God, or can we remain engaged in creation while sustaining Godward orientation?

Human consciousness operates in two directions simultaneously: toward God as the Creator, and toward itself as creation. The first is Godward meditation, the recognition of the Creator itself. The second is consciousness encountering created life through perception, thought, and shared ideas. The human task is to recognize both at once, allowing participation in creation to coexist with meditation toward its source.

To understand how these orientations become confused, we need to introduce the pendulum. In Vadim Zeland’s Reality Transurfing, a pendulum is an energy-information structure formed when people think, feel, and act in a shared direction. Their attention sustains it, giving it a momentum that can begin directing the people who created it. Zeland borrows the image of a swinging pendulum: continued involvement keeps the structure active and increases its influence.¹

A political movement, a company, or a religious institution can form such a structure. Participants reinforce a common focus until its demands acquire an authority greater than any one participant’s intention. Zeland also describes opponents contributing through emotionally charged resistance. A passing thought can connect someone to this larger pattern; the term pendulum here refers to the collective structure.¹

This provides a context for idolatry. Something created through human participation becomes a centre that gathers and directs consciousness. The question is how we can inhabit shared thought without allowing it to absorb the whole of our attention and obscure Godward meditation.

By Godward meditation, I mean the actual turning of consciousness toward the Creator. It can take the form of attentive presence, remembrance, or contemplation directed toward God. Thinking that God exists, explaining divine attributes, and deciding what belief should imply for our behaviour are activities within thought. They may accompany or support meditation. They do not, by themselves, constitute the Godward orientation.

The distinction concerns the direction of attention. A person may hold a thoughtful conviction about human dignity while remaining entirely occupied with that conviction. Another may meditate toward God without forming any proposition about dignity at that moment. The conviction belongs to the created content of thought. The meditation is the recognition of the Creator. We lose the distinction if we describe the meditation merely through a belief or a moral conclusion.

Creationward consciousness includes the ideas through which we understand ourselves and one another. Language, professional roles, religious teachings, and social expectations belong to this dimension. Shared consciousness becomes visible in the meanings we receive from others, sustain together, and pass on. Our individual thinking takes place within a world of meanings that no individual made alone.

John Searle’s account of institutional facts offers a concrete illustration. Money and social positions acquire functions through collective recognition. A banknote’s monetary status depends on practices sustained by a community. People can then organize their work, hopes, and anxieties around that shared status. This shows how a collectively sustained meaning can acquire substantial power within human experience.²

A thought about God also appears within this created dimension. The word God, an image used in prayer, or an explanation of creation is a form through which we speak and think. Such forms can assist a person’s turn toward the Creator. Godward meditation concerns the actual orientation toward God, rather than the mere presence of religious content in the mind.

This is why Godward attention must remain distinct from a pendulum. In the theory proposed here, the Creator is recognized in meditation; the Creator is not produced by the collective attention that sustains a human structure. A community may share a doctrine about God and gather around it. Its members may also meditate toward God. These are distinguishable activities, even when they occur together.

A pendulum becomes an idol when the created centre absorbs attention and displaces Godward meditation. The group’s belief, its reputation, or a personal identity becomes the focus around which consciousness revolves. Religious language can remain present throughout this absorption. The decisive matter is where consciousness is actually turned.

Our vulnerability follows partly from the immediacy of created forms. A demand, an ambition, or a dispute presents something definite to pursue. Other people reinforce its significance. Girard’s account of mimetic desire describes how we learn what to want through others; this helps explain the strength of collectively confirmed goals. Consciousness can become occupied with pursuing, comparing, and defending until Godward recognition is obscured.³

Simone Weil connects idolatry with a thirst for absolute goodness and impatience with the attention spiritual receptivity requires. A created object can consequently receive a longing greater than it can satisfy. The person becomes increasingly absorbed in obtaining something from that object. The meditative turn toward God is replaced by an effort to secure fulfilment within the created focus.⁴

Simultaneous recognition means that Godward meditation remains actual while created experience continues. Thinking, speaking, and working can proceed while consciousness is also turned toward the Creator. The claim is stronger than remembering a principle about God’s importance. It concerns the coexistence of meditative recognition and participation in created life.

Maimonides describes a close parallel in the Guide for the Perplexed, III.51. After discussing training in worship and attention, he describes an advanced condition in which a person speaks with others or attends to bodily needs while the mind remains with God. His account distinguishes knowledge concerning God from the devotion cultivated through that knowledge. The relevant point is the continuing orientation itself, which can remain present during ordinary activity.⁵

The Bhagavad Gita expresses a related conjunction in 8:7, where Krishna instructs Arjuna to remember him while carrying out his duty in the setting of battle. The instruction holds remembrance and activity together. Its relevance here lies in that simultaneity: attention toward the divine continues as the person acts within the circumstances of created life.⁶

Qur’an 24:37 describes people whose buying and selling do not distract them from remembrance of Allah, prayer, and giving. Qur’an 13:28 speaks of hearts finding rest in remembrance of God. These passages identify remembrance as a spiritual activity. They provide a precedent for maintaining that orientation while transactions and ordinary affairs continue.⁷

Brother Lawrence offers an especially concrete account in The Practice of the Presence of God. He describes retaining recollection of God amid the noise and demands of his work in a kitchen, with a continuity of presence comparable to his time in prayer. The example concerns his attention toward God during work. The work continues on its own practical terms while the spiritual orientation remains active.⁸

Within Kashmir Shaivism, Swami Lakshmanjoo distinguishes continuous meditative awareness from the movement into ordinary discursive thought. His teaching helps preserve a distinction essential to this inquiry: meditation cannot be adequately described by listing the thoughts that happen to concern spiritual subjects. Its character lies in the awareness being maintained.⁹

Sikh scripture also places spiritual freedom within everyday activity. Sri Guru Granth Sahib, Ang 522, describes liberation amid laughing, playing, dressing, and eating, in the context of guidance through the True Guru. This supports the possibility of a spiritual recognition that coexists with ordinary embodied life.¹⁰

Buddhism approaches meditation and liberation without positing the Creator recognized in this theory. Its raft simile nevertheless offers a useful comparison concerning the status of teachings: a teaching serves a crossing and must be understood through that purpose. This comparison helps distinguish a conceptual or practical means from the realization toward which it directs a person.¹¹

These accounts retain different understandings of God, awareness, and liberation. Their relevance is their treatment of spiritual attention or realization as something to be cultivated and maintained, including within lived activity. They help articulate the difference between a meditative orientation and the thoughts or practices that may assist it.

Consider a person praying aloud with others. The words, their meaning, the rhythm of recitation, and the shared ritual belong to created experience. At the same time, the person may be turned toward the Creator in meditation. The two orientations coexist in that moment. If attention becomes wholly occupied with the performance, with other people’s reactions, or with defending the prayer’s formulation, the created form can occupy the place of the recognition it was helping to express.

Consider someone preparing a report. They read figures, organize sentences, and respond to a professional task. Those operations belong to creationward consciousness. Godward meditation would be the continuing recognition of the Creator while those operations unfold. A belief that the report should benefit others may also be present, but that belief is another thought within the task. It is distinct from the meditation itself.

A conversation provides a further example. A person listens to language, understands a meaning, remembers relevant facts, and forms a reply. All of this can continue while consciousness remains meditatively turned toward God. The example requires no additional rule about what the other person deserves. It describes two orientations occurring together, rather than translating one into a conclusion produced within the other.

Changes in conduct may follow from Godward meditation. Such changes belong to the person’s created life, and they can matter deeply. They remain consequences or expressions of the orientation. Defining meditation through those consequences would substitute an account of its effects for the recognition of the Creator itself.

This distinction also changes how we understand religious pendulums. A community’s ideas about God can acquire the momentum of a collective structure. Defending those ideas may consume attention even while everyone involved speaks about God. Godward meditation can be present within communal religious life, but religious subject matter alone does not establish that it is occurring.

Zeland’s observation about opposition belongs here as well. A person may reject a group while remaining absorbed in resisting it. The rejected structure continues to determine the movement of attention. Returning toward God would mean renewing the meditative orientation itself, alongside whatever engagement with the group remains necessary.¹

The human task is therefore to recognize both Creator and creation simultaneously. Shared ideas allow us to communicate, organize, and participate in the world. Godward meditation is the recognition of the Creator as those created activities continue. Each orientation must be understood in its own character.

Idolatry arises when a created focus absorbs attention so fully that recognition of the Creator is obscured. Freedom lies in renewing Godward meditation while participating in created life. The two orientations can then be recognized together.

Sources and further reading

1. What Zeland means by pendulums. Vadim Zeland Reality Transurfing Steps I–V Chapter 2.

2. Collectively sustained institutional meanings. John R Searle What Is an Institution.

3. Mimetic desire. Interview with Rene Girard.

4. Idolatry and spiritual attention. Simone Weil Gravity and Grace section on Idolatry.

5. The mind remaining with God during ordinary activity. Maimonides Guide for the Perplexed III.51.

6. Remembrance together with action. Bhagavad Gita 8.7.

7. Remembrance of God. Quran 24.37; Quran 13.28.

8. Recollection of God during work. Brother Lawrence The Practice of the Presence of God Fourth Conversation.

9. Meditative awareness and discursive thought. Swami Lakshmanjoo What Is Meditation.

10. Spiritual freedom within everyday activity. Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ang 522.

11. The distinction between a teaching and its liberating purpose. The Raft Simile MN 22.