How Do You Conceive of God?

Yes, and Terrence Malick is my favorite director.

 

I am an Orthodox Christian. I think God is unknowable until after death. I expect that God is good because, if I am this loving, God is better. Jesus was given to me during my life as a means to join my imperfect self to God through forgiveness. Without that, I would be afraid of death, that I would not survive due to my unworthiness. No way can a person live in this world and stay perfect. I see God as being huge and all around us and simultaneously small and everywhere inside us. I see God as unbound by time and space. Life is a miracle. God is life.

 

Pantheistic Godness that fills the panpsychistic display of life like the oil fills all the layers of a seed from the innermost core the outermost shell.
Godness itself is not static but a living experience, that which ables every sentient being to feel the sense of beingness.
This nature is seeingness itself, penetrating all with awareness, hidden beneath as the oil of a seed or the fat of milk.
That awareness is the true sense of I, behind your thinking and imagining mind.

 

To conveive of God is futile - to try and fit all the seas of the world into a pint jar is less absurd.

The first chapter of the Tao Te Ching says this:

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.
The named is the mother of ten thousand things.
Ever desireless, one can see the mystery.
Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations.
These two spring from the same source but differ in name;
this appears as darkness.
Darkness within darkness.
The gate to all mystery.
​

Intuition is a divine faculty because with it I can 'see' God even though I can't conceive of ..... what ..... Her, Him, the sand runs out of the pronouns and language fails.

I don't believe in God - I am aware. It is a relationship. God is the only thing other than myself that I am sure exists - all the rest is faith. It's not a useful word 'God' - there is me and there is You and there is the most incredible love imaginable between us, but I'm not always true to it because it isn't an equal relationship and I'm not all that good at it It's only through this that I know that I'm not utterly alone, and so I can have genuine faith that there is an external reality.

There are no words to truly express this relationship - I can read the way others have described it and they shine in my intuition as the same experience so I know this isn't just something that I have imagined, though the sheer intensity of the experience takes me there anyway quite honestly. But these same words mean little to those that haven't already been there, or are at least drawn in that direction. What can I say - that the way to God is not through words and analysis but to seek an encounter with a person. All I can do is point and suggest trying to walk that way, but in the end it has to be walked by each of us, alone - I don't know why.

 

I basically believe that 'God' is a concept of man, not something that really exists.

A pantheistic one.

 

Once the conceptual part of mind, which most of us identify ourselves with as our ego has dissolved, the pure Void is displayed, the Knowing Nothingness reveals itself.

You have to turn within and enter the Void to understand this.

 

Great thread Ren

 

Yeah, totally, I'd expect we should have such access to it, should it at all be possible -- I think I might subsume this in the 'evil is impossible' being counterintuitive view, just because I think creating beings with free will without access to the moral truths in the unrestricted sense you mention might as well be included as an evil. It certainly seems like, were you and I to design the world for the future, we'd try to give everyone as clear access to moral goodness, truths, etc as we could.

I have toyed with the idea that, if there were a necessary being which exists and is the source of goodness and with all powers compatible with doing good, were that to make sense, probably there should be the *possibility* (not necessity) at least of a being who is the evil counterpart -- who can do any evil thing.
To preserve the intuition that evil is possible, at least.

Note that this would mean *everything* does not happen by God's will (which is against some concepts but incidentally not against the traditional Christian concept -- the idea of giving us free will is that it seems some things can happen which God does not intend). He has all good abilities, but it doesn't mean he can make the logically possible into the logically impossible -- if evil is logically possible, he can't change that, presumably. (this is the same reply most theologians give to paradoxes about can-God-make-a-stone-he-can't-lift suggesting it's not a power God has to have, as he can do the logically possible only.)

I'm not even sure if this is incompatible with the truth of the ontological argument, were that to even work... it would just mean this perfect being sadly does not have the ability to rule out evil, only to do any good thing that is logically possible.

 

Fall asleep and pay attention where the dreams emerge, who or what is witnessing them and with what and where.

Once you recognize your true faceless face, that inner eye which sees but cannot be seen, that which is and yet is not, your journey inwards will finally begin.

Godspeed and Good Night!

 

god sux

im better