Zen approaches things from the very other extreme: wherever there is sacredness, God is. Wherever there is holiness, God is. Not vice versa — not that God’s presence makes any place holy, but if you make any place holy, the presence of the divine, of godliness, is immediately felt there. So they have tried to bring the sacred into everything. No other religion has gone that far, that high, that deep. No other religion has even conceived the idea. In Zen there is no God. In Zen there is only you and your consciousness. Your consciousness is the highest flowering in existence up to now. It can go still higher, and the way to take it higher is to create your whole life in such a way that it becomes sacred.