The Big Picture

Every image of God that ever was presented itself out of human temporal experience in relation with our intuitive sense that God(s) exist(s). Our intuitive sense of God is not contingent upon our experience. Our image of God is. The particular image of God that is formed by such and such a people at such and such a time is as true a representation of God as any other. It provides as good a connection with God as there can be as long as the image of God is relevant to the perspectives of contemporary experience. To change our image of God in reference to a changing world has no effect on God whatsoever. We confuse our intuitive sense of God with our image of God. Or connect the two in a way that causes confusion. Our intuitive sense is not contingent upon experience and we believe our image of God which is partly a product of our intuitive sense should also be unaffected by experience. We feel that any challenge to our image of God is a challenge to our intuitive sense of God’s existence. Our intuitive sense does not produce our image of God it just informs us that there must be some universal God-like presence. Any challenge to an image of God is not a challenge to God or to our belief in the existence of God. It is merely what it purports to be, a challenge to an image of God. Our image of God is not GOD. It is only an adequate means of relating ourselves to God through our knowledge and experience of our world and it is subject to change as our knowledge and experience change.

All the various Gods of the macrocosm have been created from the social interaction of people within various communities in response to their particular environments. It is out of this mingling of elements that all our cultural effects have been produced. The microcosm of individual intuitive knowledge of God’s existence, merging with the intuition of others, develops an image of macrocosmic Gods which gives resonate fullness to the individual’s intuitive sense. Macrocosmic images of God are created from a microcosm of individuals as God creates the macrocosm from the microcosm.

The whole universe is the unfolding of energy/matter in the form of infinitesimal particles. God is that unfolding. God is the catalyst for the existence of all things. God is the microcosm as well as the macrocosm. God is everything there is. Everything.

God is not our father. God is not a personage, man or woman. What God actually is we cannot know. All we can say is that God must be the essence of existence. And the closest concept we have of that essence is energy, which makes everything possible and yet remains an absolute mystery. What energy actually is we do not know.

About the creation of the universe all we can now imagine with our poor faculties and limited knowledge is that God is the energy that set in motion certain properties, which work upon one another in certain ways, to create a myriad of phenomena, in relation to the particular conditions afforded by particular locations formed by the motion of those properties. And although things must happen in specific ways in relation with other things under certain conditions nothing is really planned out in advance. That life occurred on the planet we call earth was merely a matter of how our solar system just happened to be formed. Life is a possibility nothing more, nothing less. The really significant thing is that life did indeed occur. However improbable life may or may not be is beside the point. The important thing is that it is happening here and now. And it will, in one form or another, continue well into the unforeseeable future. How long our species will be around is another question. Our continuance, to some extent, is in our hands. Excluding the possibility that the earth’s environment will so drastically change that our species will be unable to adapt, our continued existence is solely in our hands.

The universe is a manifestation of the God force, which might be equated with energy. Think of the whole universe and everything in it as one energy. This one energy is a total mystery to us, yet it is all there is, all around and within us. One energy transforms itself into all phenomena while the energy itself never changes. All things are at once in constant flux and absolute permanence. Energy transformed is the very essence of spacetime. The very essence of all there is. One is all and all is one.

All things are infused with this manifestation of God. We as individuals contain that God force. We are not God. We are not a God. But God is us. God lives within us and through us. One is a part of the total God force. One is comprised of subjective Gods. Gods of the microcosm. Personal Gods which serve one’s purposes well enough but must combine or bond with the personal subjective Gods of others to create a whole objective God in which everyone’s personal Gods can be subsumed and elevated. There are also minor objective Gods created. The bonds that are formed between people are a creation of objective Gods wherein subjective Gods can play, fight, love, etc. It is our objective Gods that bind us together and represent to us that which must be done, that which we must hold above ourselves in order to perpetuate ourselves.

Objective Gods fail when they cannot adapt to changing conditions or when subjective gods become confused with objective ones or when both conditions coincide. We now like to think of a God of the macrocosm who is independent of us, who has a plan for us and is judging our every thought and action. A supernatural God who created the human species to be put through the gauntlet of life to see how well we perform in order to get the reward of life eternal. We are, then, kind of like rats in a maze. This might be an interesting spectacle for a Creator but God supposedly knows exactly how everything and everyone will behave. So that wouldn’t be very entertaining. And if God is all knowing, why would He, at the time of Noah, decide to do away with all humanity because He was not pleased with how it turned out. And then, why would He change His mind about destroying everyone because He thinks Noah’s a pretty good guy? Anyway, God decides to spare Noah and his family, along with every other creature on earth. I don’t know why God initially wanted to destroy all the animals too. But, of course, sea creatures would have been unaffected. Anyway, Noah builds an ark at God’s bidding and he, his family and all the animals are saved from the flood.

It’s first of all curious that God, out of all the people He made, would make only one man who He could be pleased with. It’s also curious that God would destroy everyone else because of their wickedness in what was, as it turned out, a futile attempt to improve His handiwork. The world was no less wicked after the flood than before. And God knew that it would turn out that way to begin with?

This vacillating God who makes futile attempts to get things right is one that was obviously made in our image rather than the other way around. That image of God was fine and necessary for a certain people at a certain time. Again that image of God is not God but merely a people’s conception of God based upon their particular circumstance. And, though God in essence does not change, our image of God does change. We may not like the change, we may prefer the old image, we may wish the world didn’t have to change. We may attempt to ignore the changes in the world, deny changing perspectives, and, instead of dealing with those changes, stubbornly insist that the world must remain as it is, or once was, because we feel uncomfortable with the changes it demands.

Change, however, is inevitable and we now see Gods looking through us from the microcosm instead of down on us from the macrocosm. The only plan for us is that which we ourselves arrive at through the interaction of those Gods emanating from ourselves on an ongoing basis. God gives us law through innate moral perceptions that we are endowed with as a result of that part of us which is programmed by Gods of, or universal concepts of, law and order that have been created within us. These Gods of law and order, which radiate out of THE God, the universal essence, as all things do, are more prevalent in some than in others but all must be developed in concert with everyone else’s in order to form and reform a just and lawful social organism.

As an eternal entity, God, in essence has no past or future but always exists in the present. What need of past and future to an eternal presence? How could something that always was, always will be and never changes have a past or a future? We have concepts of past and future because they go along with the temporal realm in which we exist.

So, God has no idea of our future nor of any future. God doesn’t know what’s going to happen but God is what’s going to happen, whatever happens. It doesn’t matter to God whether we exist or not. Whether there is a planet earth or not. It matters to us. It matters to that of God which is looking through us. That part of God that is us. The Gods emanating through us and throughout creation have an interest in the perpetuation of a thriving planet earth. Otherwise, God, the essence of God has no such interest. That God exists in everything there is, unchanged, no matter what happens.

Our experience of God is a localized conceptualization of the essence of God. All we can say about what happens after we die is that we remain as part of the existence of God as all things are. But what that means exactly we just don’t know. Our purpose here on earth is to live according to those principles that speak to preserving life, preserving the ecosystem in which life can perpetually prosper. Assuring that virtual eternity, which must be measured and visualized through present actions, is the closest we get to the essence of God on this earth and to aligning ourselves to God’s eternity.