To Live "In God"
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Ummm, let's try this ... there is a mushroom growing on a rotting log in a damp and shady part of the forest. Every aspect of the mushroom's physical being is a direct consequence of the log, the light, the dampness and the forest in general in which it exists, yet because of the limitations of it's own physical structure it is not capable of recognizing this. It is what it is, where it is, and how it is because everything else around it is as it is, too. But it can't know this. It doesn't have the physical capacity to comprehend such things.

This is how it is with us, as well. Everything about us is the direct result of everything else around us. We are parts in a whole. Aspects of the whole, really. And though we do have a greater intellectual capacity than the mushroom, it still isn't great enough for us to truly understand the circumstances of our own existence. We can't ascertain and comprehend the whole. Yet we do exist, as does the mushroom and the whole rest of the universe, and maybe many other universes as well. Unlike the mushroom, we do at least know this, whatever it means to say that we "know" something.

In most instances, we use the word "God" to imply or to refer to the creative and sustaining force that lies behind/beneath/within the phenomenon of existence, yet we don't have a physical structure that enables us to really comprehend what this "God" is, what it means, or how it works. We're able to comprehend bits and pieces, and to formulate pertinent questions, but we just aren't able, yet, to grasp the answers to these questions. "God" is what we call this wholeness that we are not able to grasp, yet able to understand our lack of grasping. This is how God can be fully present and available to each of us, hiding nothing, but yet remain a profound mystery to us at the same time. God is a mystery to man just as the forest is a mystery to the mushrooms even as they live within it. The forest is not hiding; the mushroom is simply incapable of comprehending it.

We fill in this empty area in our comprehension with all sorts of myths, and theories, and fantasies and speculations both fear driven and hopeful. And because God (the whole) remains a mystery to us, we allow our stand-ins to become our gods. We allow our myths and theories and fantasies and speculations about what the whole might be to become the whole, for us. Our theories about God become our God because the truth of God remains beyond our reach. And this is how our imagination becomes our reality and our reality becomes our enemy. This is how we become sick, and lose any sense of who we are and what's real. This is how religion becomes our master, blinding us and enslaving us while we imbue it with divinity. We make of it a false idol, because we forget that we are human beings and that as human beings we don't have the ability to understand the Whole.

Humility. The awareness of our own profound ignorance is our only way back to the reality of who and what we are. Our choices as human beings are humility or illusion. We don't get to possess the Big Truth. So humility is the only way we have of finding the same place in our minds and hearts that we occupy in God's reality. We can have our myths and fantasies and theories and speculations and hopes about the nature of God, but we will become sick and crazy if we don't always keep in mind that this is what they are. And we will inflict our sickness upon others if we attempt to deny that this is all they are.

I am basically an ape with a very powerful imagination. So powerful is my imagination that it can imagine that I'm almost a god, and then cause me to see "evidence" to convince me that this is the truth. I could easily come to prefer this imagined idea of myself as a demi-god over the reality that I'm simply an ape, and wish to erase any evidence to the contrary. And if you should happen to represent the idea that I'm not a demi-god, but am just an imaginative ape, I might wish to erase you.

This is what elitist religions are all about. They promote the fantasy that their participants are "special"; are the "chosen ones", "God's children", and as such they have special attributes, they're "righteous", they're "saved", they're on a railway to heaven. While anyone who might suggest that this is not so must be erased: erased from the "book of life", banished from the community of "believers", they're "lost", condemned by God. This is what religious Christianity has become, almost from the beginning. It's the promotion of illness and insanity disguising itself as "God's will". It's the religion of self inflation become a God in the minds of it's participants. The sickness is even written into the bible, old testament and new, and it obscures the real message buried beneath. Religious myths and interpretations have become definitions of God, have become God to the "believers", and should we suggest that these are myths and stories and metaphors and fantasies and human interpretations we will be condemned. We will be erased.

I stumble around in confusion, trying to hold on to the message of love that comes with Jesus, without being buried by religious rules and dogma and the sickness of Christian elitism. Without being erased. They so want to erase me. They so want to eliminate the reality of my freedom to seek God as love rather than drown in the drug of moral superiority and the fantasies of eternal security (a conception that exists only at the cost of all those "condemned"). They so want to force that God of power down my throat. And down everyone else's.

I cling to my own reality. My reality is the reality of mystery and of ignorance, because I am a human being. My God is the Whole that I can't understand, or name, or explain, or prove. My God is a wholeness that just is. And is is good. To be is a great thing. My being is part of all being, it's a gift from the wholeness of being. The Supreme Being. I don't have a religion. I don't want a religion. I want to just let God be God, and to be myself within God. I don't have to understand God's reality to be a part of the Whole that God is. I'm already a part of it. No religion is needed. The gift has already happened. I don't have to "perform". God expressed Itself and everything came into being. And it continues. It's an act of love, I think. I can share this expression by letting this love flow through me, maybe. To love is to promote being. To love is to promote wholeness.

My faith is in the idea that the Tao (the way of all that is) is an expression of love. "God" is just a word for the mystery at the source. God flows through me like the forest flows through the mushroom growing on a rotten log. God flows through all things and this is how they come to exist. All that's left to me is to be happy.

Peace,
Dave