God
God is a word. It is the word to refer to the creation of 'this', the creator of the universe, but it must first be recognised that there cannot be anything outside of the 'universe' (Latin for 'one story'), and the creation of it is therefore the process of it, as can be observed in the continuation of its creation. The universe creates itself. God is therefore another word for the universe itself — the whole of it. 'God' is a nice short word instead of saying 'process of the universe'.
You cannot exist separate to God, everybody and everything has to be God. We are but holograms of the whole, thinking we are separate. There is no human greater than another; there is nothing more the universe than anything else.
But the universe itself, if conceived of as a being and existing only in its entirety, is not of itself space or time. It is the universe that creates time by its very existence, but it is not governed by it like a controlling external force. It is only a mind within the universe that produces the concept of past and future, because the universe at its very base is necessarily timeless, which means that everything, including the future from our perspective, has already happened for it. This is the all-encompassing concept of God; omniscient and omnipresent, and possibly couldn't be any other way. It is impossible to comprehend from our viewpoint.
The universe itself could be considered a living organism if you consider how much life there must be scattered throughout it. With there being billions of galaxies, each one containing hundreds of billions of stars, and the stars creating life which our very existence shows it does, means that the universe in its entirety is possibly a living thing in itself. This is one way that God can be considered a being.
If the universe is considered to be alive, and therefore a being, then our linking with it would be our identification with God. Because we are human beings, this linking would be the anthropomorphizing of God. But to extend any human traits or values onto the universe as a whole, clearly is a silly thing to do, as is any ridiculous gender applications. God's cock!
All the Gods in our literary evidence, from the Hebrew one to the Greek and Hindu many, depict them hopelessly affected with human emotions: jealousy, anger, vanity etc, because these emotions are what are known to those writers in their observations of themselves, and which they simply project out onto the process itself. If God was like a human being, a male and had a penis, he who would be pissing himself laughing at the ridiculousness of it all.
No, God is just the word used to describe all the processes which result in what we experience. The present moment, the reality (all that is our existence), this is what has been created by the processes of the universe and is what the word God is attributed to. Our minds conceptualise our reality with past and future, but only the present actually exists. Our conceptual model uses time to construct the universe in our imagination. The unfolding of the universe, the laws of physics, the Tao, all can use this word 'God'.
The love of God is a love of all that has been created, of all that is, with a pure acceptance and abandonment to it that is an absence of judgement and absolute trust that the way is good, that the way is God. This is the notion that is at the heart of all the religions.
"I am who I am" is God saying to Moses "I am", and Moses continuing with "…who I am". When God speaks to Moses, there is only Moses there. It is saying that whoever asks the question of who God is, they themselves are the answer.
God isn't out there; God is everything, within everything.
The creator of this is time. Time has created everything and is still doing so. Time is God. The speed of light is heaven.
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If it is assumed that this process is good, or the right way (Tao), then to be with God would mean to abandon oneself to life and trust that whatever is happening, it is the right way; it is good. Accepting what is, would be all that is required, and the word for that would be 'love'. Anything else is arrogance and silly imaginings.
The true abandonment of ourselves to life (and death), and the acceptance of what is happening, the full acceptance of the love that we are cocooned in, is our homage to God and true worship. The relaxation that comes from this acceptance produces the feeling of love and the mental stillness and contentment that results from it, is being with God. This is grace. God is love.
God is the laws of nature. God is the process of the universe. We are in that process and need do nothing than follow the way to be with God. That means being relaxed and trusting; our God selves, not our limiting, too subservient selves that is our conforming to society.
I am good equals I am God. The word good is synonymous with the word God; God is good. This is etymologically debated, but on a preternatural philosophical level, can only be true. How else could 'this' even exist.
If the question is "how did 'this' come to be", then to answer we would be describing how we got here and what here is, with the inevitable what happens next. The short answer or rather word which summaries this answer, is God. The detailed description would be the language of science, in so far as it has got, and its unravelling of the universe which is detailed in the concept of evolution and atomic formation etc. This description will therefore be synonymous with the word God. The evolution of everything — the forming of the universe — the creation.
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Everything ever written about Gods portray them with human ego's because they are the fiction from the writer's imagination and are therefore but a reflection of the writers who only have experience of themselves.
In mankind's early history when there was no great store of knowledge to call upon, the conceptualisation of the world and its explanation would have been ridiculously difficult. Whatever is referred to is given a name, and that name will then be used as a tool of communication between the people. The phenomenon that is observed and given a name might be analogised with characteristics observed within ourselves, as this would be a common reference point and an easy mnemonic. This inevitably leads to anthropomorphizing, and later the phenomenon becomes indistinguishable from this, and so a god is born. The god becomes inseparable from what it is representing and is further confused the more it is retold, and later generations lose the correct way of using the word. The word god has become an anthropomorphised description of a natural phenomenon. As there are a lot of phenomena to describe, there become a lot of gods (the Hindu pantheon demonstrates this most), but they are all but descriptions of one thing — the universe — which is all interdependent and interactive, and this recognition becomes the basis behind the concept of monotheism — that there is one way and all is made from the process of this one way: there is one God.
God is the word which represents this way and has become anthropomorphised simply by authors in a male dominated society using the word 'He' etc, and other human references, when trying to convey concepts which are very difficult to describe, using primitive languages and even poorer writing skills. Even a modern human who has polished his reading and writing skills way beyond the capability that would be possible for an ancient scribe, has great difficulty in communicating this, as this writing itself probably proves.
If you see God as a being, like a human being, it is because you have anthropomorphized your concept, using yourself as the model. God is by this means manifested into human form. God will have the characteristics of a human being when viewed from the perspective of a human being; if we were some other creature, then the characteristics of that creature would be overlaid. It is a way of perceiving what we are in and what we are. The methods of that perceiving are through our physical manifestation, and the mental concept that is produced from the sensations produced by that manifestation, will influence the concept that we have of God. We only have ourselves to synaesthese with anything, and that is all that is being done.
The anthropomorphising of gods has caused us to try to understand the universe in human terms, because we are human, and use our intellect to do so which we also project upon it, as in the case of intelligent design, because that is how we would do it. The morphing makes us see the universe in terms of man, which is a subjective viewpoint, when what we really need to do is see everything from a non-human perspective, which will be the objective viewpoint. This is what science tries to achieve. It hasn't succeeded yet but has done a better job than any religion has.
The definition of God as a being is a totality concept. It is all part of the same story: one story — uni-verse; the story is now as much as it is then, and it is as much the ultimate end of the story as it is now; uni-verse — one turning.
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My first encounter with God as an entity was when I was in my pram. There was a bright light that I at first tried to avoid, and then looked at directly. It was the sun!
The sun's disk pulsates and shimmers in a violent manner when you look at it directly, the edges of its flat disc dancing with savage power. It was obviously something very powerful and beyond the normal experiences I had been having. I believed that I was looking into the face of God, which from the point of view of it being a creator, is actually correct. It is the sun that has created the Earth and all life upon it, and me looking at it. It is very special, and although I did not have any concept of God, I did have an inkling of there being something greater, and the sun was unavoidably important and significant.
I was afraid because of the enormous gravity of the situation, the very real fear of God, but I knew that I was worthy and justified. I was a baby; I was pure, and I knew this. I looked at it with defiance and anticipation, prepared to suffer whatever would happen; prepared to die or much more. I faced up to God and expected something to happen, but nothing did. As I grew up I wondered why the adults took so little notice of it, and like the aura's that I saw, because of the dismissive ignoring, I assumed none of it was important and was slowly subsumed into the mundane along with everyone else.
I have always been able to look at the sun directly, and still can; even at midday, though I don't do it now. Maybe it has something to do with innocence or the trust that goes with it. Maybe it is because I had this very early encounter that allows me to do it, and paradoxically also allowed me to see people glowing in the pitch blackness of a mine when I was six. If you have never done it, then don't try to. You will irreparably damage your eyesight. No one told me not to look at the sun until it was way too late.
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God = Tao. The right way. The good way. The way of God. The way we are being led. The path down which we and everything else is guided. The way the universe unfolds. The process of the universe.
Nature is good. It is impossible for us to judge nature's way as we are a part of it and can only comply with it. Our word good is synonymous with nature. Nature = God. It is what is happening.
The word evil is the antonym to what is good. Evil would therefore be whatever is contrary to the way of God; whatever tries to stop the unfolding of the universe!! Or maybe exceeding due limits? Perhaps it means resisting the inevitable changes of the process of the right way: Tao. Most of us are guilty of that. Going against the natural way could therefore be considered evil. But good and evil would be the parameters within which we can describe our universe, and anything that is described as evil would be from the perspective of an individual and biased towards an expectation of what their belief system (mostly coming from their society), says it should be. This judgement is dependent upon the understanding of the universe possessed by that individual. This judgement cannot be wholesome. Everyone behaves according to what is good to them and obey their own rules, and it is just a different perspective and set of rules which can define another's behaviour as evil.
Ultimately everything is good because everything is God, and so evil cannot be a true description (a defining of the universe, dividing and naming). Evil could be considered to be man's insecurities, trying to keep things the same and resisting change, defending his ego. Ultimately it cannot exist because the universe cannot be wrong. The limits that are being exceeded are from society, not nature. God cannot be evil. It is just our language that makes it possible and our ignorance that allows it. If you can see all of it bouncing off each other, you can see that there is no evil. Admittedly it can get hairy in places, but zoom out far enough, and it's just part of the way. It is only a limited mental concept at the end of the day.
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But the word God has become corrupt. It means too many different things to too many people. The use of it will always be isolating and compromising the meaning to a proportion of people. The same would also be true for consciousness, ego, spirit, mind, soul etc.
I think if we don't all have a clear understanding, it is because the words have become confused, and it needs to be cleared up. We need a thorough definition of these words which are uncompromisable, or a whole lot of new words to take their place. Is this possible? There is no reason why we can't all have understanding. It is history and ego making a mess of it all. If we cling to our childhood inculcated concepts of God that were accompanied by stories of Santa Claus and fairies and any amount of fiction lied to us as fact, then there is no hope and wars and ignorance will continue.
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You only have experience of yourself; your experience of God is ultimately your experience of yourself. Your concept of God making things happen is your filtered story, which you will edit and blinker to show you what you believe. Faith in God equals faith in yourself, faith in your story. God is the One Story.
When in that divine state of awareness God, you are the senses of God, the organic vestibule which is an aura of consciousness and is the field of communication, making you the messenger to and from God; making you an angel of God.
When you talk to God, you don't actually talk. You are not speaking to another human being, so why would you use a human language? It is a state of mind, not mental dialogue. At this level any societal reference is impossible, and most undesired.
Any concept you have of it is ultimately rubbish. Any concept at all and you have stopped listening to God. True listening to God becomes a release from concept — just being the universe. It is impossible to have a concept of God.