It's always bothered me, even from a young age, people's perspective on what or who God is. This cognition, this concept or idea seems to follow a particular consensus, a sort of memetic that has spread and shared amongst the strong majority of Judaic-christian religions. It seems like a solid, strong, fortified idea because of all those congregating religious people who conform to it, re-affirm it to each other and hardly progress past the simple idea of a man in heaven, a father figure, male, old. Depictions of him would portray him as an old king, perhaps with white hair, and gigantic, that's a quite a human vision. Of course there are other perceptions and concepts such as infinite, omi-present, love, spiritual, made of light and things like that. As a child I could not comprehend what God was because I imagined him visually, my mum would refer to him as being up in heaven, looking down on us, and that he loves us like a father, these are nice and simple ideas to grasp but I knew God was made of more than that, I was also told he was spiritual,, we can't comprehend him, he can hear our prayers and see through walls and into our hearts, and yet he sat in heaven, which was in the sky. I knew he had the power of creation, and I thought that must be similar to controlling a dream, it is control, free will, and I know we have free will, over time I thought maybe my mum wasn't able to know or understand herself, it wasn't such a deep contemplated thought, it was just a sort of passing thought, but as I grew older my understanding of the world changed, I wanted to understand everything, I wanted to become enlightened, all-knowing, wise. I read books, I absorbed documentaries, I understood what I was being taught in school, and I was just trying to decipher the world, descover things, as we always should be, but especially as teenagers expanding our horizons, mentally. Eventually I came across and became interested in other religions, ones that believed in chi, re-incarnation and attaining enlightenment and I soon developed two opposing ideas in my head of what God in a christian sense and the consciousness that created the universe as a less tangible idea of god are all about.
God's name in Judaic religeons, in modern (christian) times is Jehovah, or often spelled yaweh, but the thing is even acknowledging his name is not God but instead Jehovah doesn't quite cover the point, because it's not what his name is that is important, but what it means. because he never had a name before the beginning of universe, before he begun to create, begun using his consciousness to define reality. He needed a way to describe who he was, what he was: In
Ex. 3:13-14, Moses
asks God, “Whom should I say has sent me?” and God responds by saying,
“I AM that I AM… You must say this to the Israelites, ‘I AM has sent me
to you.’” He later changes it to the third person "he is" because that is a bit of a difficult for Moses to explain "I am" as a different entity in a sentence to people, and also it can be translated to "I am with you". (it continues on like this;
And this is what you should say to the Israelites, ‘He is the ever
present helper’ – the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God
of Isaac, and the God of Jacob – has sent me to you.”) Now the point is, his name wasn't simply a title to refer to him the way we use our names today, it was actually a definition of what he is, and that definition was "I am".
The Tao Te Ching refers to a force called the Tao, "the way", and many vedic religions understand the universe as having a consciousness, or that there is a force, an energy that is both the creator of the universe and an energy that exists within it and thus is a part of the universe. Hindu texts describe the universe being created by means of consciousness, a field of consciousness to give perspective, to give a sense of position.
Imagine there was nothing, no light, no matter, no up or down, there would be no movement because nothing exists to compare your position with to create and define position, now if you were to create a bubble around you, a field of thought, you would be able to position yourself within that field, moving to it's edge or it's center and you'd suddenly have a sense of position, then if you were to move to it's outer edge and create another field of consciousness you have started to create a form, this is how the idea of the egg of life and flower of life works, expanding and growing circles of consciousness which eventual grow and take form and eventual become the universe as it is today.
That consciousness that first begun creation is supposedly what god is, but then it gets deeper; we are all apart of that, we are the end products of this process of an expanding and creating consciousness and we yet have gained consciousness, we are aware, and god is within us, as the Rastafarian describe, "I and I", they refer to god and themselves in the same phrase. In this sense god is not separated from us, in heaven, he is in fact a part of us and our consciousness exists within his, so we are a part of him to.
If were to merge these two ideas, the Christian idea of God, being omni-present, infinite, made of love and light, the creator of all things with a consciousness that created the universe through thought and permeates within everything that exists (because everything is made from its consciousness), we can see that god is not a man in heaven, he is only referred to as a man because of our physical human perception and culture, he has no gender there was no gender at the beginning of the universe, even if it is only through respect that reference to him is in the masculine, personifying him on a human level is only for our benefit and is not the reality of the matter, God is simply a force with which we exist within, his consciousness is the matrix of our existence and consciousness is the power of creation.
I believe when God gifted us free-will, and claimed us to be made in his image, he was saying we have the power of creation within us too, we can create for ourselves and choose destinies. We all have some power, the stronger your will, the larger your consciousness, the more connected you are with the universe the better you can create your own reality. Yes our consciousness only exists within a small plain of the universe, our eyes can only see light within certain frequencies, our ear certain frequencies and volumes, we are only tuned in to the environment we were born in on this earth, we don't have the consciousness of spiritual creatures or fourth dimensional beings, but we do have free will on this earth, in our physical forms. Even mentally, emotionally, we can choose our own values, opinions, perceptions and ideas that define our realities .
God is the consciousness of the universe. He is not a man in the sky, he's an energy we are made from, connected to, contribute towards He is the consciousness of the universe, and all things are made from consciousness.
