How Do You Define God?
I won’t but I attempt to convey my understanding of God in response to that question from a KTHT reader and writer
I think I shall start this post with a poem that as I type I have barely begun to create beyond the notion that Cendrine Marrouat’s vardhaku form, which I discovered as an editor in Ravyne Hawke’s pub Promptly Written, lends itself nicely to what we have in mind, but I suspect I will have to transform my intention into a vardhaku series rather than one poem.
God So many ask Why do you allow suffering? Why should we believe that you exist? Child, why must I prove existence to you?
Please God Everyone teases me so Say I must be mentally ill Believing in imaginary source of strength in sky Oh child, why must you fear others’ opinions?
Child, I love you Without conditions But your life is yours to live Creator, please tell me what is its purpose and meaning?
Oh love Enigmas last Humans want proof of All If I should reveal your purpose Would you stand atop Solsbury Hill and with courage eagle fly?
So, my friend, Shawn Jr, I do not define God as the definition of God requires the achievement of enlightenment, or to state it another way, Nirvana, which no human I or you have encountered has achieved. Jesus, aka Yeshua, aka Zoroastra achieved this state through pain that no human would willingly endure. My tangent here is that anyone who sells enlightenment to the spiritually seeking masses is either a fucking manipulative capitalist and/or narcissistic asshole and or has no idea what they are purporting to sell.
Ok, before I piss off too many editors or readers with my in-your-face style, I’ll land this plane.
God does love us unconditionally but did not create humans to experience health, happiness, and prosperity.
Meredith’s conception of God, or the Great All, and how we and our souls fit in, is that when our souls leave the Great All to take human form we contract with the universe to experience certain painful things on Earth that are not spiritual so we can learn what is spiritual (love, kindness, compassion, charity, etc.)
I have written many times that the meaning of life is to learn. What has had my soul cackling with delight, which as I recently reread in one of my first KTHT posts from January 2021,
is that the purpose of all of this learning through suffering is so God can learn too. I have discerned that our creators are not omniscient,
however, they know more than imaginable, yet I believe they require us so they can continue to learn.
Too many humans do not understand or are unwilling to accept our role in the universe.
Religions have been designed to be believed and thus construct God as a deliverer of human wants if we do as we are told, which God is not. So people either blindly believe in God because the lie of what God is is believable, or reject God because the God defined by religions cannot co-exist with the reality that most people do not get what they want, or are not actually happy, and a world full of seemingly senseless tragedy and really bad things happening to good people.
This conversation began many posts ago with my assertion that the law of attraction is absolute horseshit. Sure, sometimes it seems that someone has manifested their wishes or their destiny but the corollary that failure to achieve those through positive thought means that the sufferers brought such upon themselves by not vibrating enough positive energy or too much negative energy reeks of so much victim-blaming and shaming that anyone who still clings to this new age crap should look in the mirror with the shame that they cast.
For additional context to the reader, Shawn’s question arose in this essay of mine on the relationship between humans and our souls, in which in response to my dear friend Ilis Trudie Palmer’s question that if I don’t believe in the law of attraction, what do I believe and how would I explain it to my hypothetical 6-year-old grandson, I answered:
You know those participation trophies that every kid gets for playing T-ball instead of awards for best hitter and best fielder and how that annoys grandpa, well that’s actually how life and heaven work. Everyone gets to go to heaven as a reward for participating in the game of life. Some will play it really well, some ok, and some terribly but they all get to go to heaven. God loves everyone equally and is like your coach. When the game is over and you are in heaven you and God will discuss the game and come up with a plan for you to learn to play better next time. Anyway, things don’t always go well in the game and that’s ok. And sometimes other players cheat and that can hurt you physically and your feelings. Learning how to react to that without cheating yourself is part of playing the game. If things don’t go your way that doesn’t mean God doesn’t love you and it doesn’t mean God is punishing you.
In the one or two minutes that remain in the arbitrary 6-minute limit (opinion, not right or wrong, yes?), I can add this haiku and explanation therefor that I published a couple or so days ago:
Goosebump raising surge kinetic energy says God present for all
Note: “present” is a double entendre
In 1996, during my first and mostly forgotten foray into the 12-Stepverse, the rehab took us to a “meeting.” The speaker told the story of his suicidal ideation. He had terrible insomnia along with alcoholism. He would stay up nights, drinking in his basement, planning his family-annihilation suicide. He spent many a night meticulously planning for and rigging the boiler to explode to take out himself, his wife, and his children as his family slept. Then, the night he was ready to pull the switch, he fell asleep. At that moment of listening to him tell that story, I felt a follicle exciting, hair-raising surge of energy. For the first time, I felt the presence of God in my life. A presence I later forgot about for too long, but God never forgot about me.
For those that may wonder in which universal laws I may believe, I say, especially to the those that believe some or all of what they have read about the alleged existence of 12 metaphysical laws, I only believe in one such truth — we and everything are connected, sometimes stated as the law of oneness, and that my friends, also describes God, as the should be esteemed Gavin Sher wrote in this brilliant essay.
I would argue that the biggest reason that people lose faith in there being ‘God’, is because ‘God’ is the most misused and misunderstood word that there is. The pervasive and pernicious caricature that ‘God’ is some dude on a cloud with a beard, makes a mockery of religion and of the very idea of Divinity and turns away anyone who has a capacity for critical thinking, but lacks access to truthful religious teaching…Too often, people base their opinion on what ‘God’ is by this ‘God’, the all-powerful father metaphor, that they may have encountered in their childhood, rather than by developing a more profound understanding of the concept through deep personal study, let alone from personal experience….The holiest prayer in Judaism is the Shema, in which the holiest line, affirmed by Jews repeatedly every day, is often translated as ‘Hear O Israel, the Lord is your God, the Lord is One’. Obviously Hebrew is not English and translation can be a subtle thing. A more truthful translation of that holy line would be ‘Hear O Israel, The Lord is your God, the Lord is a Oneness,’ i.e. that ‘God’ is a Unity…This idea that ‘God’ is a oneness is simply an expression of the idea that: nothing exists but ‘God’. Everything that is in existence is one inter-dependent, inter-twined Whole and that Whole has intelligence, that Whole is conscious, that Whole is consciousness.
In Rama I create, with soul-energy surging through my body, inspiring me and breathing wind into my sails,
