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I believe that there are eight definitions of God. Each of them represents a different way that we hold God in our hearts and minds.
God shines through our human perspectives as light shines through different lenses. We see that light of God in different ways and we have different words to describe these various manifestations of God. LOVE – God’s love is all pervasive and probably the brightest light of all. It is through love that all the next definitions of God manifest themselves as if through a prism. The ideas of peace, truth, beauty, meaning, compassion and joy are mere refractions of the light of love. PEACE – Equanimity, equality, equity, justice, balance, stability are all outcomes of peace. It is God’s action in the world. TRUTH – God is the one absolute truth of the world. In all other things human, there is only context in which truth can be understood. It becomes a sliding spectrum/continuum. BEAUTY – Beauty is the sensory manifestation of God. Through our eyes, ears, nose, tongue and touch we get to experience God in a physical dimension. MEANING – God is the reason for all of existence and thus imbues meaning into all things and the unitive state that connects them all. God’s meaning is the accumulation of all meanings. COMPASSION – Compassion stems from our physical heart/mind connection. It allows us to engage in the ways of God. It is extremely difficult for the human condition to fully manifest compassion because compassion plays no favorites. JOY! – Joy is God connecting with us and expressing love through our emotions. In the throes of an ecstatic moment we are in a state of ineffable joy. Words are but a grain of sand compared to the complexity of the entire earth and all of its creatures. They cannot contain even the idea of joy. |
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God is non-dual. People and other creatures are dualistic by their very nature. God’s modality is infinite. Human modality is finite. God is timeless. People are the creators of and ironically the slaves of time. The human condition is fraught with definitions that are the literal antithesis of God. We tend to cluster on the lower end of the spectrum as it relates to the eight definitions of God. Corporeal, hateful, conflicted, deceitful, ugly, meaningless, and depressed are too often words that are suitable to describe and define how we can, when we are at our most base, express or live our lives. On the other hand, as we come closer to God, we become attuned to the higher end of the spectrum. To use a metaphor for understanding the non-dual definitions of God, one could use light. From a dualistic perspective you have light, or you have no light with a range of brightness between those two extremes. Light, however, is an infinite range of wavelengths that are a part of an even bigger spectrum of electromagnetic waves including microwaves, radio waves, infra-red waves, ultra-violet waves, x-rays and so on ad infinitum. Our brains and eyes and ears are ill-equipped to receive and process this information. God is akin to this entire electromagnetic (EM) spectrum. Regardless of how bright or how dark a light is, we are only focused on its existence through dualistic eyes creating a polarity. This gives us a linear understanding of light but not the experience of the EM spectrum. From a non-dual perspective there is simply a field of energy that is all enveloping. When we are fully immersed in that field, we are one with love, peace, truth, beauty, meaning, compassion and joy. |