WHO OR WHAT IS GOD?

Extract from Your Holographic Soul

© Ian Lawton 2010

Even if you’ve been comfortable with what’s been said so far, it’s a fair bet this question has produced some sort of reaction in you. After all, God is such an emotive word, isn’t it? So full of connotations of all different sorts.

Thankfully most people have moved past the clichéd view of a kind old man with a long white beard and flowing robes sitting atop a fluffy cloud. But the idea of God that’s inherent in most mainstream forms of Christianity, Judaism and Islam is of some sort of spiritual being essentially outside of us, who has power over us and to whom we should be utterly dedicated. Even in the twenty-first century we still find the media debating ‘why does God allow bad things to happen?’

Do you feel uncomfortable with this idea of a controlling, judgmental and all-powerful God?

Maybe you’ve rejected it because you feel it detracts from your personal responsibility for your own life, or because traditional scriptures don’t seem relevant to the modern world? Perhaps you’ve rejected orthodox religion, for this and other reasons, but you retain a broadly spiritual outlook? As a minimum maybe you’d still say you believe in a God of some sort, you’re just not sure what sort?

What if God isn’t a person or being of some sort, but more of a concept?

Even in the aforementioned religions, words like ineffable and unknowable may be applied to God. These hint at the very inability of mere words to describe, and of human minds to fathom, the depths of something that’s far better thought of as a concept than a being.

Can modern science help us here?

Yes. Many of us are already familiar with the story of how, when the scientists of the twentieth century started to delve more deeply into the insides of atoms, they found that electrons and protons and so on aren’t really particles at all. They behave more like energy waves, also referred to as ‘quanta’. So at the most fundamental level everything is made of pure energy.

A note of caution should be sounded at this point, in that any attempt to apply these discoveries to the spiritual arena is fraught with problems. This is because there are many more areas of fundamental disagreement over the correct interpretation of the theory than some ‘quantum mystics’ would have you believe.

One of these involves the extent to which behavior at the quantum level still applies as systems become more complex or ‘entangled’. Or, to put it more simply, as we move up the scale from atom to molecule to complete organism or object, and so on. And the answer is almost certainly ‘not very much’, whichever interpretation of quantum theory you favor.

So is the chair you’re sitting on, or the bed you’re lying on, or the floor you’re standing on, physical and real? Perhaps an ascended master might be able to defy the apparent laws of physics by passing their hand clean through it, but most of us aren’t quite there yet. We shouldn’t, therefore, get too carried away with all this.

Yet it’s still true that no matter how physically the molecules that come together to make you or your chair and so on might currently be expressing themselves, they’re still basically made up of packets of energy. Everything is.

Can the Eastern religions, such as Hinduism and Buddhism, help us here too?

Indeed they can, despite some of them having pantheons of apparently human or animal gods. Because what they’ve long understood is that the ultimate deity isn’t something external to us at all. It’s internal, in everything. This idea is also found in the more esoteric forms of the Western religions such as Christian Mysticism, Kabbalism and Sufism, and in most native tribal worldviews.

These various approaches use a range of words to describe this more internal concept, such as the Absolute, Universal or Ultimate. They also tend to regard it as the ultimate creative power, so terms like Origin or Source are used as well.

Hopefully you’ll now have little trouble in associating this concept with that of the metaverse discussed earlier. By contrast some people find the next step a bit of a challenge, at least in the first instance. Yet if the best way to think of God is as the energy that underpins the entire universe and everything in it, there’s only one conclusion that can sensibly be drawn… it’s that we are all God.

Does this idea make you uncomfortable?

If it does, is it because you feel such a statement makes too great a claim for the human species, with all its wars, greed, materialism and so on? That’s perfectly understandable.

But think of it this way. We’re not only saying that we humans are all God. We’re saying that everything in the universe is God, no matter how large or small, animate or inanimate, seen or unseen. Because it’s all made up of the same energy of the one Source. How much better does that feel?