^ dingdingding

the point is that these are words- symbols with agreed upon meanings that are arbitrary and meaningless outside of our self-construed mental monkey dictionaries...the menu isn't the meal, the terms aren't even a shadow of the thingness they feably denote- they're far more abstract and removed. So we could create new terms endlessly to denote 'it all' and get no closer to the mark each time

as for the ones that currently exist, i guess 'countless' is a bit of an exaggeration, Oly, but it would be a rather large list if you could somehow compile them all together

off the top of my head, imo universe/cosmos/all/everything/multiverse/hyperspace/the tao/brahman/maya/paramatma/prana/chi/qi/life force/life energy/etc, fit well... Then in addition you have all the other terms that signify some sort of slightly more specific aspect of it all- such as shatki, etc

probly dog backwards.

I was taught that he was anthropomorphic. But everything psychedelics has taught me says the exact opposite. I used to imagine a god who had my back, who wanted the best for me, but that was the egos illusion. God is the miracle, I don't think he is here to help certain people, that would be a complete paradox of spirituality. Why pray to a god who might be helping your enemy? God to me now is more of an idea, a theme. Some words like, awesome, omnipotent, infinite, powerful, and unknowable come to mind.

I like this too. I think the idea of God is just too vast for us to comprehend all at once. It's everywhere and nowhere. To define it is to it is to limit it. Like Lao Tsu said: "The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name." and I'm not even sure he was speaking specifically about God in all it's totality. The Buddhists and Taoists wisely refrain from speaking of God in any specific terms because the topic is just too confounding (in my view) and it serves little purpose. But yeah... there's definitely some kind of everyday miracle going on .

There's a link in my signature to the video "The God Delusion" which I recommend to anyone interested in the subject. Understanding the consequences of faith in an age where people feel justified to kill for that faith is critical to our progress as a species... Especially at a time when nuclear material and information how to use that material effectively is somewhat easily obtainable.

Scary, to say the least. If there is a G/d I think he'd wish us to start using reason instead of faith.

I think contemplating,is there a God, is un avoidable and good, I think feeling you and your group KNOW the answer is the cause of much suffering.

Are you referring to my post or someone else?

God exists somewhere and we live in their, its, his, hers programmed sandbox? You can try to breakthrough it and you feel like ya do but it has to be no where close to God. You just hit the spirit realm, or some other dimension. When you do it is massive but then you come back and realize if you can get there... it isnt anything in the full spectrum. God or the term for it all, the source, it is so far out of reach we will probably never ever see what it or they are, if it is indeed programmed with some crazy code/math billions times bigger than our impending singularity, they would have obviously made sure hackers could not get through. DMT is us experiencing our natures connection to the universe and it already seems huge. To me it seems like a hack but it is a hack for this realm, this universe. I would hate to smoke whatever it is in Gods realm that is their equivalent to DMT. Like TMK said, if you can get more loaded than that... I dont want to know about it!

I have often thought that any species able to conceive of a god has become like unto one.

No, Im not referring to anybody particular, Im speaking in general.

I assume there is something behind all of this existence stuff, but I also figure once you've put a name on it you've probably already missed the point.

I agree spin cycle. I am unsure about god, and that is really ok. If anyone feels guilty about questioning their original cultural beliefs, that is the point of these religions. So that you don't question this vast awesomeness and apply your own meaning to it.

Thanx Philosopher, for starting this intriguing thread. We've had a fair number of these God threads and I never ever tire of the creative and insightful responses they provoke. Each unique vista into this great mystery is a thrill to observe.

I guess I would have to initially state, that I feel anything we as individuals struggle to express about the nature and reality of God... is hopelessly doomed to miss the mark by a pretty wide margin. And still... we simply cannot help ourselves, when confronted with the effulgent bloom of awareness in which we perceive directly, The Unified Field of Being. And you know, when all is seen as One, what then is not God?

Yet, when we attempt to describe the absolute in relative terms, the infinite with finite reasoning or the limitlessness of the eternal expanse of the Sacred frequency of Being, in terms of our limited human cognition (ourselves being an organic byproduct of the time-space-continuum), the indefinable insubstantial, from a clearly formed sense of reality... I believe we all essentially fall into the trap of mortal mind, one prone to perceive of dichotomies and polarities.

IMO, the journey of awakening involves much practice, concentration and much attention focused upon this living moment, right here and now. Only here are we able to move towards the grand eclipsing of Iso-self and Omniself, Jivatman and Paramatman, Soul and God, fused as one fulcrum of interconnected, universal awareness.

In this very moment, we are free to shift our perceptual parameters, to utilize other more effective senses and other, far more effective regions of our brains, to link to the Sacred. I have come to believe that many of us are destined to experience a transcendental blooming of sorts, an expansion of routine, commonplace perceptual cognition. So much so, that we cease to be who we think we are... and suddenly become what we somehow recall, we always have been (and will always be).

Entheogens, deep meditation, NDE and OBE... all shift our mental and emotional fixations and open new views into alternate levels of conscious being and new realities to voyage into. Ours is an ineffable calling and an endless opening of heart & mind.


I do agree on many levels, "God" is a just word and a conceptual ideal. God is also The Word and something so vast, no concept can begin to pin it down. We agree, whether we speak it's name out loud or choose not to give it any name at all...
it is as it is. Our human quantification is quite superfluous in the Big Picture.

Love is also just a word... but to merge within what we name as "love", is to dissolve our separation and expand in a complete fusion and deep unity with another. Love is the buzz, the joyous vibration we hold highest, yes? We can talk about love all day long and all night, but it's something we must feel directly and enthusiastically loose ourselves deeply within. Falling head over heels, as it were.

So, in the strictest sense of naming names, any labels we project, are as you clearly suggest, quite irrelevant if not born of one's direct, firsthand knowledge and immediate experiences. Divinity is a conceptual paradigm we often cling to, as a conceptual framework by which we might objectify our experience of the ineffable Tao. The trouble begins when we as mortal souls, believe we know what God/Tao is and why we exist.

Gnosis needn't be a case of a subject-object relationship, rather, one of direct reflection and integration. A type of knowledge that cannot be properly defined with any human words or concrete ideas. As it is surely both, the transcendental void and the very same self-awareness, hidden most centrally within the core vortex of the all in all.

We perpetuate our desire to know... and in so doing, we try to bring the Omniscient into assimilable, ideological terms. For at the moment of death, in the sheer face of sentient oblivion, an empty mind with no idea or reference point, we risk immersion into that which is wholly Void. No words or ideas will be of any avail to us, as we will be naught but our own conscious-awareness, same as always (but without human form). Once more returned to awareness within immeasurable emptiness?


Agreed. What our species has touched, throughout the ages, is the deeply profound awareness of this great expanse of intelligence, love and unbound power. As you elude to, it is a matrix of sorts. A field of ideas, interwoven into a fabric of dimensionality and laws of universal attraction.

I believe we are, as individuated dream-sequences within a fluid current of potential realities, flowing within it's immense energy surge and hold to our existence, overlaid upon it's limitless field of being. The Godhead awakening into being, even as we are awakening into the Godhead.

Likewise, we are in essence, composed of variations in energy patterning and frequencies of thought, within the immense field of said "Godhead". It is void of features but seems to express aspects of itself, which we are able to access through our intuition and instincts.


Nice, very well said and poetic.

I feel that there exists a symmetry within us which reflects this measureless desire to be. We are it. It is what we are and we are all one grand organism. Our cognition of being existent is our link to our Divine identity, which naturally attunes itself to the greater totality, towards the Omniversal Oneness.

Paradoxically, this same zero state gives rise to all that exists, for reasons we cannot ever know. Even as it's no-thingness initiates thingness, it remains interlocked indivisibly, within the manifestation of the universe at large.



It sure seems that the totality of the Sacred, whose interrelationship with itself, sparks the vortex of self and other, existence and non-existence... is alive in everything and everyone. It exists when we do and it ceases to exist when we do (for ourselves). Omniscience without a witness is quite a mysterious void.

Perhaps it is a symbiosis of mutual reliance, and a mirage we perceive, as well? It is likely to be partly both and partly neither... for words and ideas are our own creations. "God" would logically have it's own multifaceted, myriad potentialities and infinite levels of reality, wholly free of our subjective perceptions. We are it but it is not limited to us, after all, it is Sacredness aware of naught but the Sacred. it is everything surely, but not apart from the me, which writes these very words to you all.


Yes, there is an immanence and presence within all which manifests as perceivable form. It remains empty and without limit to form, even as it plays within the structure of form/formlessness and the circle of duality. God is beyond all of our contemplative insights, internal discoveries, enlightened epiphanies... and yet it remains nearer than our next breath, our very next heartbeat. Quite the miracle, eh?

I also share a Pantheistic view of the Sacred nature of existence. You have expressed this idea before and I can relate to your perspective. For a God which is in some far off Heavenly plane, cannot be the true God, as all is indivisibly one... and The One is within all, therefore it is wholly immanent and inextricably present.

God twinkles in the stars, dances in the breeze, whispers it's own name in the bowing blades of grass, giggles in the babbling brook, shimmers in the blinding light, echoes within the sound of planets coursing through empty space.

As you wisely have noted, we cannot capture the limitlessness of it all, nor feasibly hold eternity in a nutshell. So why not enjoy this timeless moment? We are only as bound as our beliefs make us, as fixed as our mindset. We are truly free if we choose to accept our birthright. Why not sing, dance, play and make love? We are free to rejoice that we have become consciously aware of and fused within the higher sphere of our potential being. We are an endless unfolding, a bloom of unprecedented beauty, awakening to a greater understanding and a deeper level of harmony.


Wise council, universecannon, and you are spot-on. The Divine needs no name nor lofty treatises written of it's ineffable, glorious nature. We are hard-pressed to find the proper words, even if we are hell-bent on nailing down the Divine Being to a feasible cognitive format. And as you say, those words we speak are but echoes and reflections of the immeasurable force which inspires them, through our ego-shattering experiences. Yet we cannot resist to try not to try... and to write down our impressions, even as the fade before our sight, forever evading our mortal grasp.


Sweet!!! You bring to mind many of the deepest truths humankind have raised. While we are sentient travelers, we cannot contain the Supreme Being with our systems of finite reasoning, nor effectively prove it's existence to another living soul.

Yet, for many of us, we can feel it's presence within us and alive and quite immanent, all around us. And I like your way of putting things, we are all caught within this miraculous process. The immensity, intricate complexity and cosmic balance of it all... blows my mind on a daily basis.


Yeah, I also think along these lines. We exist inside of the whole expression of manifest being and we are component parts of the whole. Spokes in the spinning wheel of existence, so to speak. Our greatest illusion, amongst many others, is our sense of separation and our isolated state of independence. We are only as real as we make ourselves.

We are in fact, the architects of our own self-generated mirages. But behind all of our dreaming, we are not anything else than God. And as you insightfully stated, The Divine is so far, far beyond what we are hard-wired to perceive of... that it is fruitless to speculate or project our preconceived notions.

Still, by direct immersion and a temporary dissolution of our fixed reference point, we can merge into a Grid of Sacred Gnosis. We can reflect something of this great force, through our awareness of our own existence. We can melt into it's Divinity and become unified within it's insubstantial frequency of wholly unbound being.


So true... but what's a humanoid to do, given our conceptual nature? We are prone to perceiving all we experience with our 5 senses, in terms of subject and object. When we shift into non-dual mode, we are everything... and likewise, we are no-thing at all. Something Omnisciently powerful shatters our catalog of self-definitions and we are naked and speechless before it's rushing force.

As when we imbibe potent psychedelics, we are swept away and then, we are reborn again. We expand and awaken, for we are aware of being awareness itself, without being aware of any thing pragmatically quantifiable. No thing, that is, as we know of as things. We are conscious of being existent, so what then are we? Awareness personified for a brief flicker, in the eternal flow and cosmic scheme of things?

When we release all association with our learned assumptions of ourselves... and we are still quite consciously observant and keenly aware of our very core and innate being, we hear an unspoken word giving voice to fill the silence. Whose voice calls us beyond ourselves, but our own voice? For who creates whom, in this game of mirrored reflections and immeasurable echoes? All is One.

I like this viewpoint and even more so the viewpoint of panentheism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panentheism

It seems the times that I felt I got a glimmer or gnosis of something of an immense and all pervading intelligence that drives the universe, is from nature.

If that is G/d or not, I don't dare label it but man, is it not an amazing feeling when you get hit to your core with the immenseness of of our world and the seemingly all knowing universe that wraps around us?

For sure.

Panentheism is a suspicion I have (cf. A.N. Whitehead).

Dichotomizing "reason" versus "faith" typically involves an oversimplification of both.

Reason, accompanied by godlessness, can lead to undesirable outcomes. Richard Joyce's philosophical outcome is moral nihilism, for instance, which seems a dangerous stance in a world brimming with nukes. That is, godless worldviews pose threats, as well.

I'm with you, a1pha, insofar as New Age dittoheads wed their sentimentalism to specious ideas; you rightfully question their shallow epistemologies. I tend to view Richard Dawkins, though, as an immature thinker compared to someone like Mary Midgley. In other words, The God Delusion helps encourage caution about religious doctrines; however, scientism (cf. Alexander Rosenberg) must be likewise confronted.

Today a couple of people and I in different conversations kicked around the idea of God being a spirit, kind of like a loa. The spirit of god literally dwelling in people at times, possession essentially, one is possessed by the spirit of god, and there is a central guru figure who teaches how to obtain and use this possession when it is needed for and asked for.

A lot like invoking other spirits but more powerful.

Like many loa, one that demands sacrifice, but a pervasive rite was employed for this purpose by the guru, so you do not need to offer it, but instead connect to it and or invoke it.

A ubiquitous spirit, God, formless and investing all things with their properties.

But accessible, invokable and useful... an actual spirit
one works with it with love and faith, but it is not faith in self or faith itself that does the trick, it is god...

interesting idea...
I cannot deny that it strikes me as true, but I would rather pretend to be a lot more agnostic than I am. I am convinced it is a spirit that has saved and helped me many many times, but I know I could be deluded to think that, but if you invoke something and it works then does it matter if it is delusion? Hence I pray, knowing it works but not entirely accepting why it does, for how can i actually know, ergo faith.

I have no idea what god is.
I am agnostic.

There once was a man who said "God
I find it exceedingly hard
That a tree as a tree
ceases to be
when theres no one around in the quad"

"Young man your astonishments odd
Im always around in the quad.
So the tree as a tree
never ceases to be
since observed by yours faithfully." - God

God is divine order.
There is no such thing as a definable "God" only the conceptual "God".
Therefore, the view that "God is a concept Humans created." is equally as true as the view "Humans are a concept God created."
Black implies white.
Death implies life.

The question here is especially apropos. It isn't a question of the divine's existence, and so it approaches what many theists (myself included) wager as the divine's ownmost property, viz. not even non-existence.

Assuming we knew what the word "Being" meant, many theists (again, myself included) would not attribute this quality to the divine. These theists understand the divine as that which escapes all predication, including existential predication, because, for them, the divine is the givenness of the possibility of any predication whatever. The divine, as these theists understand it, is without being or non-being, because, for them, it is what calls non-being to being. Put simply, the divine marks the possibility of a relationship—collective or individual—with that for which there can be no idol.

And so, to even answer the question “Why is such a relationship desirable?" would be to make the divine answer to something else than itself. It would be to make what is, for those who have faith in it, the absence of any absolute, what exceeds any and every absolute, answer to some absolute. It is not a matter of use, nor is it a matter of certainty in the sense of causality or a positive fact; it is a matter of being faithful. It is certainly not a matter of cowardice or ignorance. This faith is what Nietzsche was about in his famous declaration on the death of god: creative fidelity to the absence of any absolute. In his famous parable of the madman, it was the so-called atheists who did not understand what was meant by the death of god, merely laughing instead, like so many today, “Where then has he gone? Did he lose his way like a child?”