I said at the end of my last entry here that I would offer my answers to the above questions in the weeks ahead, so I’m going to get about starting that now.
The first of my 21 questions were these:
What is the nature of God? If there is a God, what is Its True Nature? Is It a “personality” existing somewhere in another dimension, with desires, needs, intentions, preferences, dislikes, judgments, responses, joys, sorrows, and proclivities identical or similar to those of human beings?
My own understanding is that the aspect of life in the universe that many people call “God” is not a “person” in the classic sense; not a Human Being Writ Large. Rather, It is simply (and gloriously) the Essential Essence that permeates everything, the Prime Source of unlimited intelligence and the Prime Force of unlimited creation.
God is at once both The Creator and The Created, a Pure Energy that impacts upon Itself. It is First Cause. It is Every Effect. It is the seat of all wisdom, the wellspring of all desire, the fountainhead of all power, and the origin of all reality.
It is, in a single word, Love.
Its wisdom is activated, Its desire is fulfilled, Its power is evinced, and Its reality is fully, grandly, and gloriously made manifest through the experience and the expression of Love.
Does this Essential Essence we call “God” have a personality?
Yes, I believe It does.
God’s greatness and God’s magnificence is God’s formlessness. This does not mean, however, that God is not a “personality” to whom we may pray and with whom we may interact. It means, in fact, exactly the opposite.
It is God’s essential formlessness that allows God to assume any shape and any form in any moment that it serves the ends of Love for God to assume.
Thus, God can take on the energy of a father’s figure, a mother’s comfort, a friend’s loyalty, a confessor’s compassion, a peacemaker’s courage, a survivor’s strength, a teacher’s patience, a compatriot’s camaraderie, a lover’s intimacy, and a beloved’s constancy.
So we see that the fact that God is not, at Its basis, a bigger-than-life human being does not mean that we no longer have anyone to pray to, or to intercede with, or to form a personal relationship with. Quite to the contrary. God can be all things to all people, and if we want a personal God we can pray to, a parent-like God we can ask advice of, or a powerful God we can intercede with, God can and will fill all of those roles for us.
God is all things to all people because God is all things in all people.
God is life itself, which is the expression of Love in physical form. Every expression of life is an expression of Love. It may not appear that way through the eyes of limited perception, but it is surely, profoundly, and eternally true.
So I am saying here that the aspect of life that many people call God is energy, undifferentiated. And I am saying that it can differentiate in any form that serves the ends of love. Or, to put this another way, in any form that expresses Itself as Itself in its True Nature.
I think we are looking straight at a model of this kind of energetic phenomenon in today’s medical science…in what are called stem cells. We are told that stem cells are undifferentiated cells of a multicellular organism that are capable of giving rise to indefinitely more cells of the same type, and from which certain other kinds of cell arise by differentiation.
The undifferentiated stem cells of the human body can differentiate (that is, take the form of) brain cells, heart cells, lung cells, or cells of any part of the human body.
I think of God, metaphorically, as the Stem Cell of the Universe. If something as magnificent as a stem cell can exist within the human body, what kind of manifestation of energy can exist in the cosmos?
I think that energy is an element of life that impacts upon other energy. And I have come to understand through my mental visits with Divinity (the source of wisdom and clarity, unconditional love and absolute understanding that exists within all of us) that God is a process. Divinity is an interaction — intelligent, creative, and useable by those who understand Its properties, Its purpose, and Its promise.
I could, of course, be wrong about all of this. I am hoping and trusting that my views as shared here will not be used as a platform for the launching of verbal tirades or insults, word-level assaults or assassinations of character, hurtful sarcasm or personal attacks on anyone else’s views or beliefs, religion or ethnicity, philosophy or understanding.
I have this idea that we are all adults here, and can have our discussions about these topics in a respectful and courteous, civil and well-mannered way.
Our differences do not have to produce division, and our contrasts need not generate conflicts. Let us enjoy these explorations together, to see where they take us, and to give us all a chance to demonstrate — whatever our other differences may be — that we all agree on one thing: it is both possible and preferable to disagree agreeably.
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