Simply God

Looking back over history, it seems that humans have huge fights about three major things: power, money and God.

When our civilization eventually moves to a universal morality represented by the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP — no one allowed to initiate force except in self-defense), no longer will anyone rule over others against their will. There will be no more nation states, and therefore no more taxes, and therefore no more large-scale wars.

When we move to honest money — true asset-backed currencies and authentic crypto, some will work harder or be cleverer than others and therefore accrue more wealth, but no one will any longer be able to inflate it through arbitrary printing or create it out of nothing as loans demanding real interest payments.

If power (jurisdiction), and money (resources) go away as justifications for war, then what do we do about God? The last several centuries have seen hundreds of millions of people die unnecessarily fighting over whose claim to God’s word is correct. This has been a convenient excuse for tyrants to use the cover of religion to expand their empire and tax base.

Obviously, in a voluntary world, people can believe whatever they want, but no one gets to impose their beliefs on anyone else. So, the Non-Aggression Principle even solves that one. But let’s go deeper, into the theology, the philosophy, the science of existence.

As the NAP solves the left-right polarity by transcending politics, and as the toroidal dynamic, determining sustainable systems at all scales, transcends the myth of a smallest thing or a largest thing, is there an equivalent in the realm of analysis of the divine?

I want to suggest, yes!

Anyone who knows me or my work, knows I am a dedicated question asker. I will ask the big ones, the tough ones, the awkward ones — not to put someone else on the spot, but because I really want to know how different people see, so that I can track the core natural principles in common to everyone’s experience. Over the last 15 years of traveling the world with the Thrive message and Movement, I have grilled countless priests, pastors, rabbis, swamis and gurus about their working definition of God.

The responses to such a huge inquiry seem to fall into two categories:

1. Fundamentalism, “I just literally believe whatever was written in the… Bible, Torah, Koran, the Talmud, etc.”
2. Honest reflection on one’s own personal and direct experience

People in the first category are virtually impossible to have an exploratory conversation with. They have replaced common sense and perception with blind faith and independent thinking with virtue-signaling obedience. That’s fine, as long as they don’t take it out aggressively on other people.

People in the second category have astounded and encouraged me with the essential commonality of their described experience of God.

Regardless of their religion, they almost always say something like, “God is everything, everywhere, for all time. God is all that is. God is the life force itself, that connects each of us with each other and all existence. God is boundless. God is creative. God is helpful, allows for free will and speaks to me through my inner voice, my soul guidance.”

Even the fundamentalists describe their God as all-knowing, all-powerful, everywhere, and forever. That is a lot of overlap with more independent spiritual experience. Most of the differences come in the unproven claims to miraculous powers of prophets and the adamant exclusion of other belief systems and believers.

So here, to my mind, is the crux of the matter. When you apply rigorous logic to describing the nature of the divine, you can’t simultaneously say with accuracy that God is everything, and that God created everything. That puts God separate from universe. If universe is everything, then God can’t be separate from it. A circle is not simultaneously a square. 2 + 2 doesn’t equal 5. If you simply say God rather than “my God,” “the God,” or “one God,” then the word can refer to all that is — to boundless, alive, and conscious existence. As Bucky Fuller said, “There isn’t ‘the universe’…separate from anything. There is just ‘universe’.”

I rarely use the word “God” because of all the misleading polarizations that come with it. I prefer “life force,” “universe” or “all that is.”

What if there is not “a” creator, but simply “creating?”

If God is everything, how could it be accurate to use “Him” or “Her” in reference?

If we are “created in God’s image,” perhaps it’s because we are part of God and we are toroidal, fractal, holographic, creative, capable of great caring. We are connected with cosmic consciousness, Indra’s Net, Akashic Records because all of that is in the Unified Field. We are a whirlpool in a sea of infinite energy and consciousness. As I quoted from Rumi in THRIVE II, “Remember you are not just a drop in the ocean. You are the ocean in a drop.”

What if Heaven and Hell are right here and now, depending on how we treat ourselves and each other and how we relate to the gift of life.

Aristotle said, “Truth leads to Virtue which leads to Happiness.” All of this is describing alignment with the dynamics of Unified Fieldness.

Universe is not just the material planets or the space that we see. That is all a tiny fraction of the electro-magnetic spectrum that spans vibrational realms of unimaginably grand and minute scales — theoretically extending infinitely in both directions.

We can combine scientific observation, direct, lived experience and the Non-Aggression Principle and find ourselves having transcended unnecessary polarization and without any excuses for war and the slaughter of innocents. I don’t think truly spiritual folks would be disappointed with this development, even though many politicians, central bankers, mercenaries and would-be global dominators may feel deeply threatened by the implications of such simple and responsible truth.