I would interpret this as suggesting that there is something underlying the existence of the physical universe that we can see, and that God is ‘local’ in some way. I would translate this into my panentheism, which posits that the ‘entity’ that wills our universe into existence is also somehow spread throughout it. I would equate this entity with all sentient beings, as well as some experiencing agents that we do not perceive.
Our perception and our language are things we regularly trip over, which are fragile instruments through which we attempt to touch the fullness of reality. Both are limited and easily distorted; perception frames what we can register, while language tries to fix that fleeting experience in symbols. Because of this, we often turn to allegory, metaphor, and narrative as our vessels of meaning. These forms are the bridges we construct between what we sense and what we can say, carrying fragments of insight across the gap between the ineffable and the comprehensible.
Yet, the cultural climate shifts in cycles. There are times when mystery, ambiguity, and nuance are welcomed and when uncertainty itself feels sacred, and myth is understood as a language of truth beyond literal fact. And then there are times, like much of our present age, when everything must be categorized, verified, and reduced to data. Mystery is viewed as ignorance, and metaphor as a soft substitute for precision. In such phases, we forget that understanding is not merely the accumulation of proofs but a living relationship with what exceeds our grasp.
I often think of the hidden networks of fungi as an image for this relationship between human consciousness and what we call God. The mycelium spreads underground, unseen yet essential, weaving through the soil to connect trees into a vast forest mind. It nourishes life, recycles decay, and holds the ecosystem together in ways no single organism could comprehend from its own limited vantage point. Likewise, we might be expressions of a divine intelligence and a distributed consciousness through which life sustains, transforms, and speaks to itself. What we perceive as separate selves may be like the mushrooms that briefly surface: visible expressions of a vast, unseen continuity that is always at work beneath the surface of our awareness.
Perhaps the tension between our need to define and our need to wonder is itself part of that network’s rhythm—its breathing in and out. In moments of openness, we are allowed to feel the pulse of that hidden web; in moments of rigidity, we forget, until the system humbly reminds us through collapse and renewal that we are not standing apart from it, but within it.