So You Want to Know What God Is? – Lessons from a Reluctant Buddha – Part I
So maybe you’ve wondered what God is actually like? Perhaps you’ve grown up with stories handed down from generation to generation about the nature of God? I say God is not hard to find, It’s right in front of you, all the time. You just have to look anywhere really. Look at your hands or look to the sunrise and you’ll see the same thing: the body of God. God is not a man or a woman. That is just our tiny minds projecting our own forms onto the formless. I call God IT, because It is beyond things like man and woman.
I decided not long ago that I would write a book on how everything works. And by everything I mean the big issues of life. Why am I here? What is God? Why do we die? I don’t pretend to have the definitive answer to any one question but I can promise you that I have studied and observed and questioned everything I have ever been told or seen in my life and it’s lead me to a unique relationship with the divine. I leave it up to my readers to decide if the insights gleaned on my inward journey to the divine are worth sharing. Ultimately that is the only test of an idea, does it stand the test of time and resonate with many people?
What can we see when we look for God? If you’re a religious person you don’t need to look far. The answer is in your books, you just have to look deeper, to look past the official opinions of the so called religious authorities and others who would seek to filter or control your access to God. What I can tell you is that you don’t need to go to a special building to talk to God or let him know that he is a superhuman badass who we owe are respect and allegiance to because he can crush us like little bugs. This is a primitive understanding of God and with any luck this perception of the All Mighty will be dying out soon. God does not need you to tell him how cool he is all the time. He already knows it. Think about it for a second and recognize what you’ve always known: no all powerful being would need to require the worship and subjugation of his creations. It simply allows its creations to make their own mistakes and reap the consequences. It sets simple laws in motion, the laws of cause and effect. This is what the Buddhists might call Karma, though that word has been poisoned by inessential ideas.
What tends to happen with religions is that more often than not they alienate people from the true nature of God. They act as filters to God, as gatekeepers to what God wants you to think and do. This is an unnatural and unhealthy relationship. God needs no intermediary. IT doesn’t need interpretation. A kind of corrosion sets in over time. The original message of most religions is quite simple and beautiful. Do not hurt others. Love others and yourself. But over time people layer their own opinions over the original message much as corrosion sets in, obscuring the original metal. These layered interpretations must be set aside as quickly as possible if you want to truly understand how God works and what Its plan is for you.
Religions are nothing more than our best collective expression of our understanding of God at single point in time in our evolution. In others words its the best we could come up with at the time. God is like this: He’s a man in the sky and he throws lighting bolts. You don’t believe that right? That’s because it is ridiculous just as our current limited understanding of God will look ridiculous to people one hundred thousand years from now. That’s a long time. The planet works in millions of years. That’s a drop in the bucket. This is how the Norse perceived God and the American Indians. Over time our concepts evolve as we understand more things about the nature of the world around us. Our understanding of God must evolve as well. There were times when we believed in fairies and elves, as if they were real things but we don’t believe that any more expect when we are children. We evolved and the religions based on simple understandings of the spirit passed with those notions. The same will happen to our modern day religions at one point, whether their followers today believe that our not. You just have to have the right perspective to see it. I could be proved wrong. Perhaps one of today’s religions will last for ten thousand or even twenty thousand years, but any gambling man just has to look at even a little bit of history to bet against that. And that is not a bad thing. At each stage in our evolution God shows us a bit more of ourselves and itself. It gave us technology and the ability to look out into deep space and into the very small. In the past people thought diseases were caused by bad spirits. Now we know that diseases are random things carried by viruses and germs. Our intelligence grows with each passing generation and provided that if we can manage to not kill ourselves though global war or whatever horrors we develop in the future like Quark bombs then we will continue to understand more and more until eventually we make a leap in understanding and everything changes. We see a world that our ancestors would never understand. Why then should we cling to old Gods? Let them pass away like all things. Let God show Its next form. Let us take the gift of knowledge the true monks, the spiritual masters understand, not the priests and bishops. They know God is everything you see all around you. There is nothing outside of God. God has no beginning and no end. It is every atom in the universe. You could say that God’s body is the universe and that there is nothing outside of God.
When I say that hopefully our archaic modes of thinking will be passing from the Earth, I’m a patient man. I look at the world in thousands and tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of years. That gives me a slightly different perspective. What can that length of time tell us about ourselves? It tells us that we are finite and that all things around you are not permanent but transient, including religions. If the big religions of today are not here in two thousand years that is “soon” for a universe that measures itself billions and hundreds of billions. In others words that’s a good long run. Nothing to be ashamed of. People like to think that their religions as endless, but that’s never been true and will never be true. Many religions have come and gone. “Well none as long as mine,” says the Christian. Well, yes, actually, the Egyptian religion was around for two thousand more years than you and it’s safe to say that many of their people were pretty sure it was the ultimate expression of his divine will and yet that religion passed from the Earth as all must. You see the gurus have never been confused about God in any religion. The know the same things and they can be summed up in just a few phrases that I’ll share with you now:
God is endless.
God is all things.
There is nothing outside of God.
I am God and you are God, or fragments there of, like fragments of a hologram.
As it was in the beginning, is now and ever will be.
Time does not exist.
All is one.
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