Ruminations on God

Aug 20, 2010 10:03 AM

This will likely go into my blog as well.

Ruminations on God

I have been thinking a good bit about God lately.  Some of the books that I have been reading of late have the personified image of God as a part of their belief system.  I don't see anything inherently wrong with this but it is something that I have struggled with since breaking away from the Christian church some time ago.

So, let's dispense with the whole Old Guy in the Sky image that so many people hold of God.  Even theologians in those traditions realize that this is a silly image, often retained from Sunday school, that folks still cling to.  Theologians use words like ineffable and mysterious to describe their God concept and, the more they talk, the more you realize they really have no clue what they are talking about - they are simply building defensive ramparts around their ideas about God.

Reading the mystics is somewhat more enlightening since these people seem to have and encourage a direct experience of God but, what they end up saying, is that the experience is indescribable.  Once they have established  that there are no words for their experience, they then promptly begin to use lots of words, from whatever religious tradition they belong to, to try to describe that experience.  Try reading Evelyn Underhill's book on mysticism sometime if you do not believe me.  Massive tome which rapidly leads one to the conclusion that mystics are verbose people who use a lot of words to tell you that they can not tell you what they are trying to tell because it is not possible.

I realize that is an unfair assessment of mystics and that there are a number of beautiful mystical texts that point us in the right direction but the paragraph above portrays some of the frustration that the seeker faces when he or she is trying to explore these things for himself.

So, what, you might ask, do you think of God.  My simple answer?  There isn't one.

Now, before you brand me an irreligious heathen, I am talking very specifically about this Person that everyone seems to think is floating around out there.  No such Person.  What there is and what I think all these mystics have been tapping into and been unable to describe is a matrix . . . a fundamental energy template upon which creation is based and which is intelligent in a way that we can not even begin to understand or comprehend.  Like the Force in Star Wars, this template seems to have a will of it's own and perhaps even intelligence but what we can know about it is extremely limited since it is literally everything.  Personally, I think that a second's unlimited contact with this universal energy field would literally disintegrate any corporeal being.

The mystic or mage or shaman or . . . . whatever who has an experience of "oneness" or "union with God" or is experiencing some small part of this energy, a tiny tap in to the Force, if you will.  What I have discovered over time is this - while the Ineffable truly is ineffable and our human minds can not even begin to wrap themselves around even a small portion of "God", all is not lost.  One of the fundamental things I think you can say about the universal energy field is that it loves diversity and a huge number of beings, both corporeal and incorporeal exist within that field.  A lot of those beings seem pretty determined to give human beings at least a taste of that ineffable experience.  I am pretty sure that is why there is such a huge number of religious expressions throughout the cultures of the world.  Everyone is trying to grasp that which can not be grasped.