I ran across a page over at CNN that inspired me. Apparently, Deepak Chopra has some issues with atheism or poll results or something. I couldn’t quite work it out because of the shrill video playing in the corner that told me how stupid believing in God is.
Here’s the thing, there are (at least) three different things that we call God. At least two of them are real, one of them is not real. Atheists are really hung up on the fact that the anthropomorphic, invisible Gods (Jehovah, Allah, Zeus, etc.) are not real. They are right, they aren’t, they can’t be, there’s no evidence of such super beings even though humans have been inventing, worshiping, discarding, and reinventing them forever. The energy humans have generated surrounding these archetypes is real, but the Gods themselves, no.
But there are two other meanings for God and they are profoundly, delightfully real. Ready?
God the Infinite
People often use the word God to refer to the supreme source and center of all that is. The great mystery, the energy of life itself. It sees all, it knows all, it is all. However, its alignment is a true neutral. It runs according to the patterns of life and death and doesn’t care about you, curing cancer or football scores. This God is beyond understanding, beyond experience. We can only ever know a tiny fraction of this God and, like the blind men touching the elephant in the old tale, our experience of God may be very different from that of another’s while both of them are correct, for us.
Those who recognize this experience of God realize that we are truly all connected and care about the environment, poverty, animal rights, indigenous people’s rights, and other issues of inequality.
At Temple All That Is we call the infinite definition of God “The All That Is” or TATI.
God the personal
There is another experience of God, the personal relationship. God comforts us, listens to us, speaks to us, guides us, teaches us, and loves us. This experience is just as real as TATI. It is a perfectly normal and healthy function of the human brain. The God personality in our minds can be connected directly to TATI where it may gather information of any sort it is inclined to access. Because this God is housed in the mind of an imperfect human being, it may not behave honorably, but once we reject the idea of an otherwordly God being, we are left accepting that whatever God tells us to do is actually us, nothing and nobody else.
It’s quite liberating to embrace your own personal God (or Avatar, as we call them). It can become your best nature, your higher self, your divine lover, and it is you but it is more than just you. It is you plus All That Is.
And that’s a beautiful, real, amazing thing!