The English word “God” carries heavy baggage. It often conjures the image of an all-powerful being, usually male, sitting above creation and watching over human affairs. The word “religion” too carries its own weight – evoking sects, boundaries, and institutions rather than lived experience.
Yet many of the world’s greatest sages and teachers spoke of realities that cannot be reduced to either “God” or “religion.” The Upanishads described Brahman – not a deity, but the boundless essence of existence. Guru Nanak proclaimed Ik Onkar – the One Reality, timeless and formless, both immanent in creation and beyond it. Islamic mystics invoked Al-Haqq, the Truth that underlies all. Christian mystics like Meister Eckhart spoke of a Godhead beyond God – pure Being itself.
The poet-saint Kabir stripped away ritual and dogma with uncompromising clarity. “Between the seeker and the sought,” he said, “there is no ‘two’.” For him, the Divine was neither Hindu Ram nor Muslim Rahim, but the living truth pulsing within all – the breath inside the breath. Similarly, the great Sufi teachers like Rumi and Ibn Arabi spoke of a Beloved beyond names, a Reality that can only be tasted through love and annihilation of the ego.
These visions point not to a being but to Being itself. They are not about dogma or ritual but about direct experience – of unity, truth, and transcendence. They cannot be neatly contained within categories of religion, nor can they be fully translated into the limited word “God.”
In losing this depth of language, we risk reducing profound truths to sectarian labels. What these traditions actually reveal is the timeless, formless source of all that is – a reality that unites rather than divides, liberates rather than confines.
Perhaps our task today is to recover this deeper understanding: to look beyond words and boundaries, and to hear once again the wisdom that points us to our shared origin and our shared humanity.
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An ordinary life 
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