Tuesday, February 4, 2014

God is God.


I originally wrote the following to a friend, but I think it is valuable enough to share here because it captures an organic and focused attempt at a logical description of the logically indescribable. I cannot focus my thoughts this clearly on my own for myself; I need an audience that does not understand for my words to become didactic.

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"Be with those who mix with God
as honey blends with milk, and say,
'Anything that comes and goes,
rises and sets,
is not what I love.'"
-Rumi

For me, this "'mixing with God" represents carrying your love of the eternal with you at all times, and directing your love towards God rather than temporal things (things that come and go, rise and set). Of course, by "God" the poet and I mean something a bit different than the personal deity of Christianity. We mean just the eternal itself, the I-am-who-I-am representation of God. It's what the Christian anthropomorphic God points towards, I think. All these religious symbols point toward the same thing, and that is what I think is the true God. The true God is not Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, or anything else. The true God is what underlies everything.

I do not have faith in God; I love God. There is nothing to have faith in. Look around you: God is everywhere. If you can see God like I can, there is no possibility of denying God's existence. One last thing, God is not a He or a She or an It. God is God, and God can never be reduced to a simple pronoun or gender.

My vision of God is mystical, and comes from the heart rather than the mind. I cannot give logical arguments for the existence of God, or describe what God is, because it would require a pure language of the heart, which does not exist in verbal language. I suppose some poetry or scriptures can point towards this language of the heart, but they only do so by virtue of the author's own relationship with God, which we can share in if our hearts are open and we suspend reason.

BUT, if I were to try to describe God, I would use words like "eternal" and "infinite." These concepts in themselves are beyond human understanding, save for an intuitive understanding of the heart, and that is what God is. God is the eternal, is the infinite. God is what preserves all temporary things eternally, and gives all meaningless things infinite value. God is what gives Form to the universe.

An understanding of God is not empirical in any sense, and trying to grasp God through reason will always fail. Thinking God is reasonable is in itself a step away from understanding. It requires a leap of faith, an abandonment of fear that stems from past experience, and a deep openness to yourself and the fundamental. It requires stripping your soul from everything you know and love, including your mind, and spelunking into the deep abyss of nothing-and-everything that is the mystical experience.

It is like the feeling you get at church when you feel at peace and "in God's love" or however you describe it. Except it's more than the feeling; it's also understanding of that feeling without words. The feeling is fleeting, but the understanding of the feeling lasts forever. You live with certainty, and all your fears and questions disappear. It's beautiful.

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Endnote:

Ponder the question "Who is God?" until the question falls away and all that remains is "GOD." Until you are happy with the seemingly nonsensical, meaningless statement "GOD IS GOD," you do not know God. You will believe in this god or that god, but you can never believe in the true God. You can only know God. You can only love God.

Until you love God, you do not know God. Until you know God, God does not exist. Until God exists, you do not know God. Until you know God, you do not love God.

Do not cast your pearls amongst swine. Do not believe in shadows.

Know thyself. Know God.

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