We don't know anything about God. The different religions all have their own fairy tales and ghost stories about God's shenanigans, some colorful and exciting, others ineffable and obtuse. The truth is we don't know anything about God, and the stories are just stories, made up to get some point across or for dramatic effect or whatever. There's nothing wrong with having some stories, but people take this made-up crap seriously and kill each other over the color of God's necktie. Grow up, admit it: you don't know shit about God, none of us do. Pretending to know the details of God's appearance, activities, preferences, loyalties and anything like that is pathetic. Admit it: you don't know. Have the dignity of honest ignorance.
Believing in made-up stories about God and all the misery that creates - persecution, torture, war - is the germ of truth contained in the idea of the old-fashioned sin of idolatry. Humans do not and cannot know anything about God. We experience God's presence, and our experience of God's presence can become profoundly deeper; that's what development, inhabiting being is all about. But our mental abilities are extremely superficial, and our minds are utterly incapable, and will always be utterly incapable, of grasping anything about God at all. The sin of idolatry is any attempt to make God mental, to reduce God to stories and scriptures, beliefs and verbal formulas - in other words, idolatry is what religions do. Anything humans can say, write, or think about God is in effect an idol, a graven image, something that's merely human and not divine; believing in those stories, ideas, and scriptures is idolatry, and it's terribly destructive.
We humans tend to be oh-so-enamored of our mental abilities, but any time mental activity goes off on its own and isn't just a tool we're using in the thick of life, contending with everything around us, it gets us in trouble. In the thick of life, the weaknesses and bad tendencies of our minds are constantly countered and corrected by necessity, matter, and our other faculties; if we're developing, mind is also countered by being. When we go off into mental flights of fancy, making up stories and ideas, none of this healthy counterbalancing is there. Off by themselves, our minds can only reduce everything they chew over to measly human categories, human scales.
The very worst and most destructive flights of fancy are our attempts to make God mental; idolatry is the worst example of the human tendency to think instead of live. That's why so much of the misery in human history revolves around religion, and why religion is a bad idea for most people: almost all the content of religion consists of attempts to make God mental. Religions are canned truth, and all canned truth is idolatrous; idolatry can be defined as any attempt to substitute canned truth for experiencing the truth of God in you. If you're interested in development, it's important to reject any and all accounts of God: all the stories and scriptures, all the teachings that God is like this, and you should relate to God like that.
As being develops in you, you'll slowly develop the ability to know, which is not mental at all, but direct being level grasp of truth. Knowing makes it possible to act resonantly, in harmony with the truth of whatever situation you're in. You could say that knowing makes it possible for you to act in harmony with God, because your actions are coming from being, the particular manifestation God that is you.
We don't know anything about God, but we can feel God's presence all around us, and we're sustained by that feeling. God's presence is a comfort anyone can feel. Feeling God's presence doesn't require faith, knowledge, education, or any degree of development; it's available to all, it's part of God's gift. We're good at drowning out God's presence, which is a quiet inner experience; the stories we make up about God are just one of thousands of ways we drown God out. But if you just shut up, you can feel God's presence.
God is always there; God is reliable. You can feel the comfort of God's presence no matter what you do, what you think, what you say or how your life has turned out. Pay attention to the comfort of God's presence and you'll begin to lose interest in the made-up crap, in preaching, religions, doctrine, and all the silly squabbling that goes on "in God's name." You'll come to see that that's all pointless and irrelevant. Let yourself feel the comfort of God's presence.
Feeling God's presence all around you isn't the same thing as experiencing the presence of God in you; that's a very advanced practice, the most advanced. But there's a connection, and presence is the word for both. The comfort of God's presence is the starting point, the absolute bedrock you stand on as you begin the journey to the presence of God, the absolute goal.
We are absolutely instantaneously dependent on God. If that's not obvious to you, you're not ready for this. Everything we are, have, feel, think, or can even imagine is absolutely a gift from God, moment to moment. Every breath is a gift from God, every second of our existence is given to us. We're not responsible for any of it, we didn't earn it, we don't deserve it and we never will, in any way, ever. It's all purely and absolutely a gift from God. The primal force of creation, of the universe, is giving. Giving is how everything works on the deepest level.
You're a manifestation of God in the exact center of a spectacular universe. Are you ready to begin living up to the promise of that?
The fact that God is beyond anything we can know or imagine doesn't keep us from wanting to become like God, and it shouldn't; wanting to become like God is a different matter entirely than imagining you know something about God. You're a particular manifestation of God, and wanting to develop is wanting to live up to the promise of that. Everything you ever wanted, big or little - money, sex, power, peace, happiness, love - that's all just misplaced yearning to become like God. God is indeed far beyond anything we can know or imagine, but we're not content to let it stay that way. Thank God for that discontent.
God gives us many gifts. One gift is what is, including being, body, life and everything else that actually or potentially exists. God's grace is given to us in addition to that; God's grace is an expression of God's love for being. At its most basic, God's grace manifests in the comfort of God's presence all around you. God's grace also manifests as guidance - the help you receive from being, from your life, and from everything around you - once you turn toward becoming, once you turn toward God.
The key is that you must turn toward God; you must choose to participate in creation before God's grace can come to you. Once you choose to participate, you enter the protection and encouragement of God's grace and you begin to see this as your world, your creation, no longer a place of exile. The pit becomes a palace. Only by God's grace can the exile discover the truth, that it never was exile in the first place. Choosing to participate in creation is salvation; it's the first choice any being can make. Salvation is waking up and saying Yes, I'm here, I'm part of this, and I'm ready to work, to prepare myself to do my part, to tell my truth. Until you make that choice, you're simply pulled along by the current of all being, which is slowly finding its way back to God. When you choose to participate in creation, you become part of becoming, and you set out on the journey that will end only when God shines through you and you become a true participant in creation. Once you set out on that journey, you slowly begin to understand that this is your world, your creation; it never was a place of exile.
God's grace also manifests in the practices of prayer and presence. These are great treasures on the path forward, and also great challenges; they're crucibles you'll try yourself in, and they open the way to the fullest becoming. To encourage us and strengthen us for these challenges, God gives us help in the form of guidance, which leads and encourages us forward, and silence, which soothes and sustains us on the way.
Silence is an experience of God's grace that's always available if you simply turn your attention away from content and noise. Like love, silence is an experience of profound simplicity; it requires openness and turning away from everything that fills your life and prevents openness. You can feel the comfort of God's presence all around you even without turning away from noise; silence is a step deeper and a much more profound comfort. Silence is a kind of intermediary, a manifestation of God that's much easier to reach and to bear than the experience of the presence of God. Silence is supremely comforting and sheltering; it's a gift that sustains us in the work of becoming.
God gives you absolutely everything, moment to moment without interruption, no matter what you do or don't do with the gift; that's God's mercy. There's no crime you can commit, no failure to live up to the promise, no possible action or inaction on your part that can affect God's love expressed as the creation of existence. God's grace extends to all beings that turn to God; God's mercy extends to all beings regardless; you don't have to turn to God to receive God's mercy. God is indeed the all-merciful.
There are certain human qualities that reflect God's qualities; God's qualities stepped down to a human scale. The human reflection of God's grace is compassion; the human reflection of God's mercy is patience. God is infinitely patient with us in all our sad failure to use and live up to everything we're given, but far exceeding any human conception of patience is the fact that through it all, God unwaveringly gives us life, breath, being, the world and everything in it. That's God's mercy.
To you the world is a gift; it's your world. In itself, the world is God becoming, and in this sense the world includes you. God flows out creatively from universal being and presence into particular being and presence, becoming the world. Becoming is not the same thing as growth or development in this context, although for humans these words can be used interchangeably until the later stages. God becomes through particularization; being is God in you, a particular manifestation of God. The world, the universe is also a particular manifestation of God; it's God becoming.
Why are we here? What's the meaning of life? We're here as an expression of God becoming; we're instruments of God's becoming. As humans in this world, we have a particular part to play: our purpose is to serve as lenses for God to shine through. Whatever you think you want to be, whoever you think you are is just a story that helps you stay on track on your way to doing what you're really here to do, which is to become perfectly transparent so God can shine through you.
You can't understand your relationship to God because you can't yet experience directly that God is in you, waiting for you to get clear enough to shine. You may be able to experience the comfort of God's presence all around you, and the comforting aspects of God's grace, but the direct experience of God in you - the searing crucible of prayer and the exquisitely annihilating surrender of presence, the practices that lead to the possibility of God shining through - those are very different than the comforting manifestations of God's grace. Those practices bring you to the fullest degree of becoming, and to the goal all this is aiming at.
God doesn't want worship, praise, or thanks; that stuff means nothing to God. The only thing we can do for God is to tell the truth. What does God want from us? God just wants us to shine.
Everything that is is a gift from God. The universe is God becoming; it's a manifestation of giving. Giving is the principle everything springs from and how everything works at the deepest level. It's important to focus on that, to work from that, and see your life and everything that happens to you as a gift of God. Everything about how we make progress, everything about the practice of being pleasure and all other paths toward being springs from that vision. However, it's only part of the truth. The other part, the terrible unknowable part, is that everything is God. That's the infinite view and the ultimate annihilating mystery: the categories, our understanding, even our becoming are nothing and God is everything.
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