"You're
god
in your universe. You
caused
it. You pretended not to
cause
it so that you could
play
in it, and you can remember you
caused
it any time you want to."
...
This essay,
God
In Your Universe,
is the eleventh in a group of nineteen
reflections
of
God:
The power of
transformation
comes from making distinctions. Distinguishing A from
B is powerful. Drawing similarities between A
and B doesn't require the same
commitment.
Drawing similarities between things and other things, consciously or
unconsciously (mostly unconsciously), knowingly or unknowingly (mostly
unknowingly), is one of our most natural tendencies. It's one of our
most taken for granted natural tendencies. It's one of our
most unexamined natural tendencies. We do it constantly,
automatically, without
rigor.
We do it without thinking. That's because doing so is built
into the
machinery.
My mind is a machine
hell-bent on survival whose logic system is "everything is the same as
everything else ... except not always" as
Werner Erhard
points out.
So in this conversation, I'll be wary of falling into the trap of
making knowing
God
similar to getting
enlightened.
That's a surefire way of evoking enough overlap, enough conceptual
boilerplate, enough
free
association, enough
already always
listening
to completely obfuscate the question "Who is
god
in your universe?".
But I'll do so anyway (carefully) as it'll allow me to draw on
something
Werner
said in a conversation about getting
enlightened,
which is this:
Say you do give up the idea that you don't know
God
ie say you're willing to try on for size giving up the
idea that you don't know
God.
What appears in the
clearing
once filled by the given up idea, isn't new beliefs, isn't new
concepts, and nor is it more persuasive arguments voting in favor of
God
(all of which, by the way, will most likely get in the way of any
direct experience
of
God).
Rather, what appears is the possibility of knowing
God
(perhaps for the first time really), a
beginner's
mind
inquiry into who
God
really is in your universe, and how she got here to begin with. There's
all that ... and then there's also the perplexing enigma that (at first
glance, at any rate) she now seems to have totally disappeared.
One possible direction such an inquiry could take is this:
How in
the world
did she ever disappear, and is now nowhere to be found? Well ... maybe
she didn't disappear. Maybe it's just that we're looking for her (like
that hapless
cowboy
Johnny Lee) in all the wrong places. We look, for example, for
God
in front of us. But what if
God
is actually behind us? What if
God
is where we're looking from? What if
God's
been here all along, and we haven't seen her because we've been looking
for her rather than looking from her? The
question isn't "What if
God
was one of us?" (with apologies to Joan Osbourne). The question is
"What if
Godwas us?".
Another possible direction such an inquiry could take actually isn't
looking at who
God
is in your universe at all. It's prior to that. It's
looking at
who you really are
as the
context
in which
God
can
show up
in the first place. Consider
God
disappeared simply because we haven't been willing to be responsible
for being the
context
in which
God
can
show up.
What if
God
disappeared simply because we've been unaware of the
possibility of being responsible for being the
context
in which
God
can
show up?
If you and I were willing to be responsible for being the
context
in which
God
can
show up,
it would alter our experience of
God
and of Life as we know it, yes?
So ... who isgod
in your universe? I suggest you don't use the question to lay claim to
knowing all the facts, nor to simply invoke echoes of tired old beliefs.
The question doesn't call for restating rote concepts, and it's not
intended to start a persuasive (and maybe a
passionate)
argument in favor of a particular
point of view
of
God
that's already been touted endlessly before, with questionable effect
and minimal impact. Rather, use it as a fresh start to an inquiry into
what's possible for
God.
Oh, and there's one other thing: don't start this inquiry until you've
given up the idea that you don't know
God.
