We are about to get filthy, baby.
I’m going to use a very dirty word. Half of you will leave this site in disgust.
Trigger warning: Pregnant women, the elderly, and fans of Justin Bieber should walk away now
Ok?
Here is the dirty word:
God
Whhaaaattttt? What’s wrong with me? This is a family site, dammit!
The G word has become an insult in many circles. Even the so called spiritual ones, mention it and people will be turned off. Many people go out of their way to say they are “spiritual, not religious” to make it clear they don’t worship some idiot god.
The term has been used so thousands of years by idiots who had no idea what it means, so much so it has lost all its meaning.
God now means:
- That weirdo who likes to watch you masturbate. Yeah baby, you touch that…..thingy
- That angry asshole who is willing to murder people for the smallest of mistakes
- The bigot who hates women, cripples, homosexuals, lower castes, people of other religion, no religion; everyone, basically
- The school master, whose only job is to look at all your mistakes and punish you. Naughty boy, looking down a woman’s blouse when you should have been working! Here, get ready to be caned
So God is an angry, sexually deviant asshole with the self discipline of a four year old. Prayers start at 11am!
Or…. is he? Suspenseful music plays
What is God then?
I don’t know. And neither does anyone. The thing is, the Divine is unknowable by definition.
That’s why words like the Spirit, the Unknown, Being, Universal Intelligence, are better choices (but of course they have their own problems).
The problem is, anytime you use the G word, people will form their own mental images of what you are talking about. And the Divine cannot be understood by the mind, since it is far beyond the thinking mind.
The God that most people worship…
… is actually their ego.
The ego is vengeful and demonic, always willing to attack others, to show them their place, to kill anyone who disagrees with it.
The ego is the devil, but most religions have elevated it to God.
The ego creates a God just like itself, and worships it. And that is why it hates the real God, for it knows it is wrong, and fears retribution.
The Abrahamic religions got part of this right– what most people worship is a mental representation of God, one that is very twisted and perverse. The word idol represents this mental model, and is the reason the old religions were against idol worship. They were warning against worshipping a mental ideal of God, because the mind cannot understand God in a million years. I will leave it to you to decide if they succeeded in this endeavour 😉
The mind is a very limited instrument, like a microscope; it is very good at what it does, but it does not have the computing power to understand what is by definition infinite and unknowable.
My belief about God
God is the underlying Spirit, the Divine presence in all of us, the fabric of the universe.
We are all God. God is our breath, our very consciousness. It is our very essence, a part of us, our truest being.
And that is why saying crap like You should be scared of God. God will judge you is so stupid. As is thinking God can get “angry” at anything we do.
To be angry or judgemental requires an ego. An ego is born of the mind. The mind filled with darkness is the home of the ego.
And as we have seen, the Spirit is beyond the mind. Even a mind filled with Light is not God, but it can at least understand, at a deep level, that it is part of something bigger, that it won’t die when the body and the mind die.
In the Divine, there is no ego to react to you. God also doesn’t “love” you in the normal sense of the word. God is Love. The Love we feel for our fellow humans, without any expectation, or the joy we feel when see a beautiful sunset or river, or the compassion we feel for the suffering of our brothers, that is God.
God could better be described as a state of being, a state of consciousness. There is no “God” out there. It is just a state of being that anyone of us can reach. Anyone of us can touch this God Consciousness at any time, though mental preparation is required.
Personally, like Eckhart Tolle, I prefer to use neutral terms like the Spirit or Being, to avoid all the baggage with the G-word.
The last, but very important, thing I’d like to say to you is: The level of awareness isn’t as “impossible” as many gurus try to teach. Especially since the Spirit itself wants to help us and will often go out of its way to clear our path.
Addendum:
While I think these ideas are very basic, I find some resistance to them, even amongst people from Eastern backgrounds, so I decided to see if anyone else had similar ideas.
I found this great article by Lawrence Yeo, God Is a Spectrum of Being.
Lawrence says most people think belief in God is an either or thing:
But instead, it is a spectrum:
People’s beliefs may lie anywhere on that line based on their experience, background and life circumstances.
And I find that people may move along this spectrum, including myself who has moved from hard core atheism to my current state a few times 🙂
Lawrence ends with:
The question of “Do you believe in God?” is one that caters to rigid certainty. The question of “What do you think of God?”, however, is one that allows you to update your beliefs as your experiences shift.
I found that Quakers also have this fluid idea of God:
Most Quakers believe in… something. It’s when you ask if that something is “God” that the answer becomes more complicated.
Do you mean the God of the Abrahamic tradition, worshipped by Jews and then Christians and then Muslims over several millennia? Many Quakers do understand divinity through that framework, but some feel that it does not offer a complete understanding. So you’ll often hear Quakers talk about “Spirit,” for example. One Friend’s understanding of Spirit might be very similar to an Abrahamic understanding of God; another Friend might understand Spirit in a very different way. Generally speaking, though, Quakers do believe in something very much like what participants in Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12-step programs would recognize as “a power greater than ourselves” in the universe
A power greater than ourselves, one that guides and enlightens our path, is a great description of the G word.