February 22, 2006

God is Nothing

I'm going to use the word God. You might have noticed that God has a really bad name. I'm going to use that word because it gets us to the root quicker, and I can do it now since the inquisition apparently ended in 1834.

Let's assume that God is everything and that God is all there is. Some people believe that God does not frequent certain places. I know a Mormon who believes that God does not exist in strip joints. There is a thing that includes and permeates everything outside the strip joint as well the strip joint itself; I will call this God. So God is very inclusive; no one and no thing is turned away; all is accepted.

So now I'll freak you out: even the devil is a part of God. This thought makes me feel very uneasy, almost like I might go insane. But instead of not looking there, let's go deeper: into sanity.

Krishna, a pure channel and incarnation of the divine, said in the Bhagavad Gita something along the lines of: all offerings given in devotion ultimately are given to me, but those who worship the ghosts go to the ghosts, and those who worship the ancestors go to the ancestors.

So those who worship the devil, explicitly or in more subtle forms, go to the devil. But their offerings ultimately go to God since even the devil is a part, however small, of God.

And there is no eternal damnation; there is only choice. And in the moment the devil is worshipped, the devotee goes there. And there is no harm done; it is only a very restricted view of God; it's only a constricted awareness.

My friend also told me that God does not exist in money. In trying to understand this, I could only assume that even though God exists in the atoms of the tree, when the molecules are re-configured into paper, to be used for a bank note, God extracts herself.

This is really all about semantics. When some people talk about the presence of God, perhaps they are referring to the awareness of what I am calling God; in the strip joint there might be a more constricted awareness of reality than in the supermarket; in a bank note, as in a rock, the awareness of everything else is very limited; and perhaps when someone considers money, their awareness of reality may constrict, especially if they have a strong desire in that area.

So back to assuming that God is everything. Each thing needs no thing for it to exist as a thing. So every thing needs no thing in order for it to be. This means that an aspect of God is the no thing in which all things arise. And one way for God to be perceived is as nothing or no thing. And this is a very sweet perception for there is great beauty in a God who will be nothing in order that all else might be something.

It is the watcher and the benevolent witness; it is the womb that provides the safety in which things can arise; the peace from which arises thought; the eternal from which arises time; the stillness from which arises joy; the infinite from which arises space.

I suspect that the nothingness aspect of God is the root of the divine quality of humility.