In an excellent article on the Humanists UK website, Jeremy Rodell quotes Albert Einstein:

A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe – a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as separate from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to the affection for those nearest us…

There are moments when one feels free from one’s own identification with human limitations and inadequacies. At such moments one imagines that one stands on some spot of a small planet, gazing in amazement at the cold yet profoundly moving beauty of the eternal, the unfathomable; life and death flow into one, and there is neither evolution nor destiny, only being.

This comes very close to my own sense of the ground of being as not simply another name for a personified God, but (as Paul Tillich himself saw) the metaphysical source, Being itself, (forgive the capitalisation!) from which anything comes to be at all. Perhaps the closest expression I had found before I read Rodell’s article was the Tibetan Buddhist Dzogchen sense of the pristine awareness that is the fundamental ground itself.

Rodell goes on (ibid.):

Almost all humanists would agree that the scientific method is by far the best way to understand objective truths about the world, including brains. But subjective experience is not, by definition, open to direct observation by anyone other than the person experiencing it, though it is undeniably both ‘real’ to that person and, as far as we know, unique, as we can’t get into the minds of others other than through their descriptions, or their artistic expression.

This “experiential spirituality” (Rodell’s phrase) is the realm of contemplative practice, surely. Our practice is very simple, no more than a matter of being set free from the entanglements of discursive thought in order to find ourselves consciously resting in the “groundless ground” of all that is. This is our home, after all; we can never fall out of being, and if philosophers like Philip Goff and Annaka Harris are right (not to mention the Dzogchen teachers like Longchenpa) even consciousness itself is fundamental to coming-to-be. The part, in effect, is not other than the whole!