So what exactly is God?

[Mellowmarsh]

Is that the one question to all our answers?

 

Your turn…

[Hyperion]

 

[Someone here]

Imagine taking a cup and going to the beach and you try to contain the whole ocean inside a cup. That’s like the finite mind trying to contain the infinite . It’s unknowable . Infinite mystery .  We can approach higher and higher detailed understanding but I gave you the big picture . 

[Someone here]

Also give this an open mind and try to understand what he is saying . I know he is boring with his slow motion talking but it’s short clip.

[Mellowmarsh]

My two pence for all it’s worth….

 

God is the oxygen being inhaled and exhaled until the last exhale. 

[LastThursday]

I could be provocative and say that god is just a construction of the mind or just a word. But I'm not going to say that.

In the spirit of the question, god is the thing you fall back on when you run out of explanation. For example I look around me and there's all this stuff happening, I can come up with an explanation as to why all this stuff is happening, but I can't come up with an explanation of why this in particular. There seems to be complete arbitrariness about what I'm experiencing, I could have been any one of 8 billion people at any moment in history, indeed even an animal.  So I invoke god.

Once you invoke god, then you have to ask what is god's nature? And the only satisfactory answer (to me) is that it is exactly what I'm experiencing - the two are the same. So it's the other way round, me and my mind are a construction of god. 

[Breakingthewall]

God is the unlimited. It's one and multiple, and it's you. It's not omnipotent or omniscient in the sense of choosing, it's in the sense of being.

God is, and you are that, not other. In this exactly moment the absolute is, it's your now, but it's veiled by the human density. You can open your mind and your heart to it but first you have to make all your emotional structure transparent. That's the spiritual work, not anything else. It's very simple and very difficult. 

[Breakingthewall]

2 hours ago, LastThursday said:

I can come up with an explanation as to why all this stuff is happening, but I can't come up with an explanation of why this in particular.

Why not? It's just a potential possibility happening. One possibility has to happen, so this one. nothing special in it. 

Edited 17 hours ago by Breakingthewall

[LastThursday]

1 hour ago, Breakingthewall said:

One possibility has to happen

It does. But saying it's one possibility out many doesn't explain it. Furthermore it doesn't explain the quality of this particular experience. It's not as if it's just a blank field of X, it's a chaotic, structured, "full" experience.

[Breakingthewall]

24 minutes ago, LastThursday said:

It does. But saying it's one possibility out many doesn't explain it. Furthermore it doesn't explain the quality of this particular experience. It's not as if it's just a blank field of X, it's a chaotic, structured, "full" experience.

Simply discard what's not possible and what's inevitable remains. Look:

First, you see that any manifestation is movement; without movement, there is no "happening."

Second, you see that any movement is a relative change of state, a fluctuation. What changes state? Reality. It is something insofar as it changes state.

Third, you see that for a relative change of state to be stable, it must be sufficient coherent and synchronous. Anything that is not sufficient symmetrical, synchronized without deviation, is not possible. It disappears before it appears. Then, these synchronous changes of state overlap without limit, creating realities, like a kaleidoscope.

4. why stable relative changes happens? Because those that are not stable doesn't happen. Yes but no change could be? No because it would be an absolute limit. 

Edited 15 hours ago by Breakingthewall

[Cornelia Watford]

I don’t think the word god has any place in describing reality. We do not come from a singular source. So god is not that source. We come to the universe. The universe is a big shared construct between us. It is emergent. So that is the only thing I think anyone would reasonably call “god”. It is not conscious. It is us as a team. So I don’t think the word god is appropriate at this point. Especially because it is associated with a higher being or ultimate reality, which are both false. There’s no concept of a higher being. We are all equal. You are just as powerful as your idea of god is. But everyone else is too. They’re just as infinite as you. 

Edited 11 hours ago by Cornelia Watford

[Willy Phallicus]

A miracle without explanation.

[No1Here2c]

Mystery irreducible.

Beauty without scale.

Love unexstinguishable.

Unshakable reverence.

[No1Here2c]

God is not grasped by thought.

No thought may touch God, the beholder of them all.

[No1Here2c]

Sometimes it helps to contemplate:

What isn't God?

[Willy Phallicus]

Being everything and nothing is a mindfuck for sure.

[No1Here2c]

Is God a grain of sand?

No.

But also Yes!

Utterly mysterious.

Paradoxical by nature.

[Willy Phallicus]

Just now, No1Here2c said:

Sometimes it helps to contemplate:

What isn't God?

I think that's been done and I believe its called 'negative theology'.

[No1Here2c]

1 minute ago, Willy Phallicus said:

I think that's been done and I believe its called 'negative theology'.

I call it testing the Truth.

[Willy Phallicus]

Quote

Apophatic theology (from greek apophemi, "to deny")—also known as Negative theology or Via Negativa (Latin for "Negative Way")—is a theology that attempts to describe God, the Divine Good, by negation, to speak only in terms of what may not be said about the perfect goodness that is God

In brief, negative theology is an attempt to achieve unity with the Divine Good through discernment, gaining knowledge of what God is not (apophasis), rather than by describing what God is. The apophatic tradition is often, though not always, allied with the approach of mysticism, which focuses on a spontaneous or cultivated individual experience of the divine reality beyond the realm of ordinary perception, an experience often unmediated by the structures of traditional organized religion or the conditioned role playing and learned defensive behavior of the outer man.

* Neither existence nor nonexistence as we understand it in the physical realm, applies to God; i.e., the Divine is abstract to the individual, beyond existing or not existing, and beyond conceptualization regarding the whole (one cannot say that God exists in the usual sense of the term; nor can we say that God is nonexistent).
* God is divinely simple (one should not claim that God is one, or three, or any type of being.)
* God is not ignorant (one should not say that God is wise since that word arrogantly implies we know what "wisdom" means on a divine scale, whereas we only know what wisdom is believed to mean in a confined cultural context).
* Likewise, God is not evil (to say that God can be described by the word 'good' limits God to what good behavior means to human beings individually and en masse).
* God is not a creation (but beyond that we cannot define how God exists or operates in relation to the whole of humanity).
* God is not conceptually defined in terms of space and location.
* God is not conceptually confined to assumptions based on time.

Even though the via negativa essentially rejects theological understanding as a path to God, some have sought to make it into an intellectual exercise, by describing God only in terms of what God is not. One problem noted with this approach, is that there seems to be no fixed basis on deciding what God is not, unless the Divine is understood as an abstract experience of full aliveness unique to each individual consciousness, and universally, the perfect goodness applicable to the whole field of reality.