“The kingdom of heaven is within you”. (quote from ol’ J.C. himself, so it has to be true. )

By all means, let’s dump the churches’ stances on God, along with all their other dogmatic teachings. I want to throw out the bath water and keep the baby, and it sounds like you are on that track also.

Universal Consciousness, or Ultimate Reality, is not an objective thing out there to be probed proven, or believed or disbelieved. Universal Consciousness is us, and we are it.

We can usefully talk about personal subjective experiences of transcendence, non-duality, and at times perceived agency. The existence of the so-called "god spot" in the brain is well understood, for example.

I also understand the power of symbols and the fact that the subconscious deal primarily in symbols.

But I very much resist relabeling things for which we have perfectly fine and accepted words, as god -- a word about which many people have very specific ideas, often of a personal interventionist nature.

In any case, the rhetoric around such things is vague and pliable and at times hard to articulate. Adding more subjectivity to that seems like heading in the wrong direction.

If you have a personal hobby of "inner journeying" (whatever that means exactly to you) that's fine, I'm not going to diss it. But call it what it is ... a personal subjective experience of a powerful benevolent presence or whatever. Don't make yourself yet another person who claims to have finally found the True God.

Words like god, inner - outer world to me are difficult in that they have so many definitions. It reminds me when people use the world "spiritual" which is frequently used as a way to cover up / soften some type of theistic belief. Why not use plain language. To date we have no evidence for the existence of god or some unknown, "inner place". What we do know is that we are an amazing biological creature who's thoughts are a result of neurological and chemical process that have developed over eons.

Some people believe god is part of each of us. I think it is sort of a self-love concept, but also that each of us can act in a god like way (practice acceptance, kindness, empathy, and love of others). If it works for you great.

Where is this inner world you speak of?

You're basically saying god exists in your head because you think god exists in your head.
That's like saying I believe I have a car because I dreamed i was driving a car last night.
What is actually happening is that you are acknowledging the reality of your mental visualisation of the concept of god.
That in no way means any god(s) are real, just that you have a real conception of what one could be.

Yes, that is mystical.