Tom, thanks for your considered response to my article. I’ve picked out some of your sentences/phrases (in Bold, below) and interleaved my responses (in italics)

…the God you describe in the last paragraph sounds to me a lot like the traditional God of the West: the unmoved mover outside of time and space.

Not just of the West, but also of the East and the Middle East. I’m very sure, given your background, that you are familiar with Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy, in which he distills the essence — the Highest Common Factor, he calls it — of the major religions of the world, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Taoism, Christianity and Islam into four fundamental doctrines (excerpted here from his introduction to Isherwood/Prabhavananda version of the Bhagavad Gita):

“First: the phenomenal world of matter and of individualized consciousness — the world of things and animals and men and even gods — is the manifestation of a Divine Ground within which all partial realities have their being, and apart from which they would be non-existent.

Second: human beings are capable not merely of knowing about the Divine Ground by inference; they can also realize its existence by a direct intuition, superior to discursive reasoning. This immediate knowledge unites the knower with that which is known.

Third: man possesses a double nature, a phenomenal ego and an eternal Self, which is the inner man, the spirit, the spark of divinity within the soul. It is possible for a man, if he so desires, to identify himself with the spirit and therefore with the Divine Ground, which is of the same or like nature with the spirit.

Fourth: Man’s life on earth has only one end and purpose: to identify himself with his eternal Self and so to come to unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground.

In Hinduism the first of these four doctrines is stated in the most categorical terms. The Divine Ground is Brahman, whose creative, sustaining and transforming aspects are manifested the Hindu trinity. A hierarchy of manifestations connects inanimate matter with man, gods, High Gods, and the undifferentiated Godhead beyond.

In Mahayana Buddhism the Divine Ground is called Mind or the Pure Light of the Void, the place of the High Gods is taken by the Dhyani-Buddhas.

Similar conceptions are perfectly compatible with Christianity and have in fact been entertained, explicitly or implicitly, by many Catholic and Protestant mystics, when formulating a philosophy to fit facts observed by super-rational intuition. Thus, for Eckhart and Ruysbroeck, there is an Abyss of Godhead underlying the Trinity, just as Brahman underlies Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva.”

…if the object of all our desires is ultimately beyond us — doesn’t that make existence futile?

See the Fourth feature of the Perennial Philosophy as stated by Huxley (above), which says “Man’s life on earth has only one end and purpose: to identify himself with his eternal Self and so to come to unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground.”

Unitive knowledge is variously called Satori, Moksha, or Nirvana, similar to “state of grace” in Christian theology, the “peace that passeth all understanding.”

(Not a futile effort, I’d say.)

Thomas Aquinas spent his life trying to harmonize the natural and supernatural — physical and metaphysical — and at the end realized it was a failed enterprise.

The second feature of the Perennial Philosophy (“ human beings are capable not merely of knowing about the Divine Ground by inference; they can also realize its existence by a direct intuition, superior to discursive reasoning. This immediate knowledge unites the knower with that which is known.” has particular relevance here.

Says Huxley, “St. Thomas Aquinas was saying exactly the same thing when, after his experience of infused contemplation, he refused to go on with his theological work, declaring that everything he had written up to that time was as mere straw compared with the immediate knowledge, which had been vouchsafed to him.”

I think the spiritual and material, sacred and secular, pious and profane, are one and the same.

The Hindu monk, Swami Vivekananda, said, “ (If) All is the Self or Brahman, the saint, the sinner, the lamb, the tiger, even the murderer, as far as they have any reality, can be nothing else, because there is nothing else.”