God, The Main True Thing

As I stepped off the bus this morning to walk to my office, I had what felt like an epiphany, an answer to a conundrum: The God Conundrum.
    I think it was provoked by the memory of an interchange I had over a period of months a few years ago with a devout Muslim named Maliha. For the last minute on the bus I had been regretting that I seemed to have cut myself off from Maliha by virtue of my having vigorously denied the truth of Islam.
    And I was likely thinking of being cut off because of just having read in Irvin D. Yalom's The Schopenhauer Cure how psychotherapy group member Philip has explicitly followed Schopenhauer in willing (like a porcupine) to cut himself off from others, but has been unsettled by recent interchanges into wondering whether he is right to follow Schopenhauer in this.
    Maliha had usually ended her emails by saying, "Take care of you." This reminded me that I care about Maliha too, as she seemed to care about me. She'd also a few times said that we were each of us on our own path to God, we had that in common. As I stepped off the bus, I must have been asking myself what was "God" that both a devout Muslim and an atheist could be on the path to it?

The answer came back at me so quickly and easily, it had that well-oiled feeling characteristic of epiphanies, the feeling that it's so clear and easy it has to be right. I'll try to express it, so you can judge for yourself.
    It came to me that God is The Main True Thing. Like Paul Tillich's "ultimate concern," which everyone has, "the main true thing" too is common to everyone; that is, to all "bipeds" (as Schopenhauer usually referred disdainfully to humans), to everyone with a human brain. We all want to (must) settle on what we regard as the main true thing.
    Many children just adopt as the main true thing whatever their parents have laid on them by virtue of the First Amendment, whether explicitly granted (as to U.S. citizens) or just assumed by cultural default (as in the Near East, if not in most countries). Others go on a quest for it, like Maliha and me; we're on a path, we don't think we're at the destination yet, we're still wending our way.

But there are two main branches of this path. Maliha has taken one, I the other. Her branch is roughly that there is a supernatural order that is more real (infinitely more real) than the natural order that we experience here on Earth during our eye-blink of a corporeal lifetime. And we can get in touch with this order, or at least align ourselves with it through moral and meditative practice. I understand that Maliha's path is to discipline herself in those practices.
    The other branch of The One True Thing path, the one that I have taken, is that there is no supernatural order, nothing "out there" or "above here" to get in touch with. Our eye-blink of a lifetime is all there is for each of us. Death is final. As Schopenhauer put it (from Epicurus apparently, according to Yalom in Staring at the Sun), "After our death we will be what we were before our birth." [quoted on p. 210 in Yalom's The Schopenhauer Cure]

Take care of you too, Maliha, on your path to The One True Thing. We are on it together, in our divergent senses of what The One True Thing is.