Let’s examine the statement “God knows everything.” This idea is meaningless and misleading. The rules for creativity are the same for God as they are for us—we have to know nothing before we can know anything. Divine, undifferentiated potential is no-thing. It is empty and void and yet pregnant with the ability to become. In the beginning, according to Genesis, “Darkness was upon the face of the deep.” The vast, undifferentiated potential of God’s own being is where God had to start in the creative process. It is into that potentiality that God spoke the Word, and the worlds were brought into being.

Not-knowing creates a space within which all things are possible. Not-knowing breaks down the barriers that keep us imprisoned in the known. The known is a parched desert—nothing grows there. Once a thing is known, it ceases to live. Not-knowing is the key to life. You can’t exist in a state of not-knowing and believe that God knows everything. If God knew everything, everything would cease to be. It is God’s not-knowing that keeps the universe growing and evolving. It is the very thing that generates life.

Consider that our greatest awakening occurs in the space created by not-knowing. Why would it be different for God? We are the microcosm of the macrocosm. What is true for us is true for It. If we believe in statements like “Man, know thyself” and “We are created in God’s image and likeness,” then we have to afford God that which provides the opening within us—not-knowing.

Only in a society caught in the glamour of the intellect, a society that values knowledge and information above all else, can you find the concept that God knows everything. When knowing everything is the highest concept of good, then naturally the god of that society must epitomize that concept. But the mystic knows better. The mystic knows that in order for God to be the creator of all life, there must be that within God which creates the emptiness within which life can occur. Unless the universe holds that space within Itself, the whole thing would grind to a halt.

The one thing that is guaranteed to produce movement (life) is a vacuum. When we stand in the place of not-knowing, we effectively create a vacuum in the universal mind, the Mind of God. God then rushes in to fill the vacuum that we make ourselves to be.
But in order to understand this concept, we have to think in terms of power, energy, and force.

God is not an external entity. God is the living, sentient being in Whom we live. The only thing that keeps us from the experience of God is the belief that we exist as a separate self. This is the lie perpetrated by our own senses. When we turn away from the senses and go into the silence within ourselves, we begin to experience God as a presence. And by that I mean a living power that knows and experiences us to the degree that we know and experience It. God’s love is a two-way street—love begets love, although, “we love because He first loved us.”

Taking the phrase “first loved us” out of the context of space and time, which is what we have to do if we want to know God, “first loved us” means that we exist in a field of love, a conscious energy that is always here and now. “First loved us” means that we did not create it—it was already here when we arrived. But when we get quiet within ourselves and open up to it, we allow love to occur in the world. This is our place in the scheme of things. As Unity teacher Eric Butterworth put it, “We are an inlet and an outlet of God.”

— excerpt from The Five Vows by Michael Maciel