People on the spiritual path know that God loves all beings, and they know as well what would happen if all beings loved God. Spiritual practitioners also know what happens when a practitioner falls in love. However, they may not know what happens when God falls in love.

Today there are a number of nuanced forms of the basic philosophy of materialism, all of which view the world as nothing more than physical forces interacting. Let me refer to them collectively as reductive materialism. Opposed to reductive materialism are the worldviews that acknowledge the causal influence of an immaterial mind and consciousness. I think that if reason is to prevail, the non-reductive worldviews that argue for the position that our thoughts influence our actions and thus have causal efficacy in the world and that the world itself is inherently meaningful win the day. Allow me to briefly reason why.

Ascetics are known for distancing themselves from the world by their austerity. However, as frightful as a life of austerity may at first seem to the worldly, there is something undeniably attractive about asceticism. In the very least, the mystery of how one appears to live “without”—or “within”—peaks our curiosity. We are either enchanted by this prospect or driven to debunk it. In either case it speaks loudly to us, and while ostensibly a life of deprivation, asceticism declares just the opposite, “Go within, or go without.”

Consciousness doesn’t just mean perception or awareness. We can use the example of a light. A light itself is luminous and it also lights other things. In a similar way, consciousness sheds light on other things and it is itself luminous.

Descartes' conclusion that humans are devoid of conscious experience runs counter to the deeply rooted sense in all of us that we all have conscious experience—quallia, sentience, sapience—and that such experience is the essence of any meaningful life. John Searle says it well when he writes, “ . . . if your theory results in the view that consciousness does not exist, you have simply produced a reductio ad absurdum of your theory.”