The concept of God
Perhaps, the most difficult part of this book that wants to communicate the incommunicable. The reason is simple: reality transcends our image of thereof and our image of reality transcends our ability to describe it.
As I promised in the foreword, I will try to point the level of truth the following information is from. When speaking about God, it will be obviously the highest level. There isn’t a good definition of God, nor can there be. I agree with Paul Brunton, that this term should be used carefully, and that we should always try to interpret it taking the context into account.
We can not know God, we can only be god.
Because there is only one god, which is everything, and everyone, even atheists, perceive one god. And since each of us perceives a different aspect god, we get the impression that many perceive a different god, or that they perceive the world without a god.
Only few people are able to acknowledge and admit how infinitely god transcends our ability to perceive him.
Even though we perceive only certain aspects of god, we perceive them as god, even if many will not call it so and will strongly resist such denomination.
In western civilisation, the idea of what God is has been significantly influenced by the intellectual level of individuals.
The lowest level corresponds to the most common idea of god as a supreme being that controls everything, whom people address with their prayers and religious rituals, mostly with the intention of getting some (not only material) benefit. And thus this god is ascribed human qualities.
A higher level corresponds with the idea of god as an impersonal intelligence (consciousness), apart from the created world (or superior to it), and therefore from human beings.
What is written in this book is an attempt to describe the image of God above those two levels.
In spite of some of the attempts made in this area, I believe it would be best to stick to what god said about himself through those who claim to have spoken to him.
The Bible: “I Am that I Am.”
Conversations with God: “I am everything that it is and that it is not.”
I am aware that these two sentences won’t fully satisfy the reader, so I will try the impossible: to present a certain idea or an indication of everything that this concept comprises.
But I must warn you that the more I try to define an idea of what God is, the more inaccurate and distorted His image will be. Any description of God limits and belittles Him, which is actually not the concept of God as referred to herein.
Unfortunately, there is nothing that can be done about it as the level of our consciousness and our available means of expression will not allow for anything else.
I use the word god deliberately, although it is very often used in completely other shades of meaning. It is, however, the concept most commonly used this sense, and its synonyms (with regards to this meaning) such as cosmic energy, Cosmic Intelligence, etc., are in certain cases misleading.
The easiest is perhaps to express what, in the context of this book, God is not; unlike many religious ideas (here I mean mainly Christianity, Islam and Judaism in their currently canonical forms).
God is not a personified being who decides what is good or bad, judging—and punishing or rewarding—other beings depending on whether they act in accordance with some divine law or not.
Any evidence of the non-existence of God can only refer to the image of a personified god created by religion.
Even materialists are, somewhere in the back of their minds, aware of an all-pervasive intelligence and energy (God), but they explain it in a restrictive manner.
The great majority of atheist become so precisely due to being unable to intellectually identify with the image of the personified god of the religion prevalent on their countries. Together with a higher education, this is one of the reasons why there are far more atheist in the west than in the east, as intellectually identifying with some of the eastern religions is inherently easier.
I believe that, though it is put in a very simple way, this image of the personified god is the idea many religions have of god, regardless of whether they are monotheistic or polytheistic.
Here I should note that many religions considered polytheistic due to ignorance (of our western civilisation), for instance, Hinduism, are actually monotheistic in their pure form, and the individual gods are only manifestation of the single pervasive power—the only one God.
The reader might be wondering why I am focusing so much on what God is not, and if I wanted to further define everything negatively, the book would grow out of proportion and become confusing, which, as stated in the foreword, is something I want to avoid.
The reason is that many people—even myself originally—have been mislead by a more or less materialistic orientation resulting from a lack of information. We have been, and are still being presented by theological doctrines with a personified god as the only possible alternative with which a thinking person may not necessarily reconcile. This is why I think it is very important to emphasise what God is certainly not in the context of this book.
As an example, I can mention the god of the Old Testament, as described in The Bible and the present orthodox Christian doctrine. He is depicted as a personified being, an angry old man, who in some cases imposes very severe punishments on people, nations and individuals for sins committed as a result of mistakes that He, omniscient and almighty, created.
This paragraph would have been partly pointless if this book had been written for the people living in a land where Buddhism or Hinduism prevails.
Certainly, many more pages could be written about what God is not (meaning that He is not only that), but I believe that I have sufficiently explained why I focused on just one negative definition.
So now let’s try to get closer to what God is. Once again, with great simplification, it could be said that God is everything that there is, and, since God can not have any limitations, because He would no longer be unlimited, nor would He be God as a universal force, He is also everything that is not. I understand that this is a scary concept, but there is nothing that can be done about it. Everything that you think about is God. And, obviously, also everything you don’t think about. The movement that, in my opinion, tries to explain this in the best and most logical way is Mentalism.
Mentalism
It is based on the principle that everything is “only” thought. It is a major leap from the image of the order of the universe, or rather, Universe. A leap from the idea of the Universe as massive “clockwork”, where all the wheels fit with precision, to the idea of an infinitely massive set of “thoughts”—a single, infinitely massive, homogeneous super-conscience, which itself is beyond time and space, because time and space are already a product thereof.
Mentalism is far a simpler and more logical theory to explain all the unexplained phenomena and miracles than the all the far-fetched theories of the orthodox, materialist scientists. In an effort to protect the foundations of the materialist sciences, these, the only true scientists, have come up with the most tortuous ideas and explanations for some phenomena in order to avoid the most natural and logical explanations, which are contrary to the materialist conception of the World.
At their absolute worst, they simply ignore certain facts, the supporters of other theories, or ridicule or socially exclude witnesses of events (which, according to their model of the world, cannot theoretically happen).
Occam’s razor is one of the basic principles successfully followed even by modern science. It solves the problem of an infinite variety of theories leading to a same result. For instance, an alternative theory to Newton’s law of gravitation could be formulated, stating that the gravitational force is in fact half of what Newton’s law postulates, and the rest is caused by invisible and immeasurable dwarves that push bodies so they would behave according to Newton’s law. Occam’s razor, from among the innumerable alternative theories, chooses Newton’s law, which does not need any dwarves.
What is interesting, though, is that it’s not used where it’s not convenient, and scientists will invent very complex theories to find a reason for something that is otherwise perfectly clear and evident.
An example is the way they explain the origin of religion in all civilisations and cultures with the intricately fabricated evolutionary advantages that the creation of religion has for some groups of people, in comparison with the simple thought that there is some force or intelligence that transcends us, which some people call god.
In terms of modern technology, God could also be described as a supercomputer beyond human understanding, which has created the World—including space-time and ourselves—as a virtual reality. This supercomputer, called the “World Mind”, simultaneously creates everything that there is, was and will be, because it creates space and time. For our full understanding, this idea has many shortcomings. One of them is that this supercomputer has no hardware. Everything is only virtual reality. And what is even more complicated is that the supercomputer itself is virtual reality.
A virtual reality generated by a virtual reality. It may sound absurd, but there is something to it. To the objection that I am proving god with god, I answer beforehand that it is not my intention at all to prove god’s existence, but to present one of the ideas about the existence of god, if possible, in a comprehensive way.
To make sure things are not so simple, in esoteric doctrines God comes in two forms (I point here again to the inadequacy of the means of expression and the possible inaccuracies as a result, which may mislead the reader).
One form is a clear and empty Absolute, without any movement, without time and space, charged with infinite potential. This Absolute is also called the Transcendent God or the Absolute Mind. The other form is the Creator, including the Created World, who is also referred to as the Immanent God or the World Mind.
The Absolute Mind
In its Absolute form, God could be likened to a gigantic supercomputer with infinite potential, which at the moment is not performing any task. Intellectually, we know absolutely nothing about the Absolute, because it is a formless and timeless Emptiness without limits. This, however, does not mean it doesn’t exist. The Mind is eternally and universally present, the “Nothing” is illusory. Doesn’t it sound a bit like that theory of modern physics about the enormous energy potential of the vacuum? God created the Universe to His image.
In the same way man was created in god’s image, the world is created in the image of the World Mind. This also allows us to get closer to understanding the World Mind, in the same way that a water molecule can give us an image of the ocean. But the Absolute Mind is unlike anything else. It is an absolute emptiness beyond the limits of human understanding, and therefore absolutely unknowable.
What is indescribable and beyond human understanding is also indefinable.
And that is why “it” can be given any name, provided it is clearly indicated how it is being used, including its limitations.
And this is also how the names Absolute Mind and Transcendent God are used here.
The Absolute Mind is beyond time and space; it is everywhere and nowhere, always and never. Therefore, it is not possible to affirm, without being inaccurate, whether it is infinite in time and space, as even “infinite” is an expression that has meaning only within those two categories.
In case someone believes that the description of the Absolute Mind is totally unscientific mystical drivel, let me point to the attempts to precisely describe phenomena predicted by accepted scientific theories like black holes and the singularity that preceded the big bang.
The Absolute Mind can be likened to a black hole. When picturing the World Mind, the centre of which is the Absolute Mind, we can create an intellectual model similar to a black hole, where instead of mass there is information.
The closer we are to the centre, the denser the information is, until, in the very centre, the density is infinite, resulting in the complete cessation of the movement of the information (see Fig. 2).
An absolute emptiness charged with infinite energy (intelligence, love).
Fig. 2
This is a big simplification of the three-dimensional space model. If we were able to create and perceive this model in six or eight dimensions, we may longer see it as a mere abstraction. The analogy with a black hole would then be clearer if we saw it as the intersection of a six-dimensional object with our three-dimensional space.
The World Mind is the essence of all things, phenomena and beings. The Absolute Mind is the essence of the World Mind. However, we cannot say that the World Mind is created by the Absolute Mind. The World Mind is a property of the Absolute Mind. Since everything else is created by the Mind, it depends on it and therefore has only a limited relative existence; the Mind is absolutely unchangeable, only its manifestations are subject to change.
The Created World, the Universe, is a lucid (conscious) dream of God, the World Mind.
Since the Absolute Mind is absolutely unknowable, the rest of the book will mostly focus only on the World Mind.
Knowing God
We can never know God in His entirety and essence, we can only get close to knowing the different aspects of the Created World, but this should not prevent us from trying. Not understanding God isn’t a sin, not trying to is.
In one of His forms, God, as the World Mind, including the Created World, can be pictured as a Matryoshka Doll (a hollow figurine containing many identical, but gradually smaller figurines).
You believe you understand God only to realise that your understanding is merely a part of a higher god. Then you understand the higher god, and again realise that this understanding is only a part of an even higher god. In the end you find that God is dimensionless, but, at the same time, infinite, which does not only mean in the space-time sense. Knowing Him is an endless process.
Knowing God is one of the basic conditions for the development of a Being as a human, one of the basic conditions to the state known as enlightenment.
Even though we perceive only certain aspects of god, we perceive them as god, even if many will not call it so and will strongly resist such denomination.
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