| How Do You Define God? |
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| Wednesday, 27 September 2006 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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HOW DO YOU DEFINE GOD?
Ozodi Thomas Osuji
Everywhere people define God. In this essay, I point out that the manner in which the individual conceptualizes God tells us a lot about his mental status. In as much as we are in the business of defining God, let me give you my own definition. However, I believe that God cannot be defined. To define something is to limit it. To me, God is limitless and, therefore, cannot be conceptualized. (This is a definition, is it not; so, we cannot completely get out of the business of defining God, hence limiting God, can we?) We live in a world of opposites: good and bad, black and white, light and darkness etc. God must transcend this world of opposites; he must be something that is not of our world. Our world is a world of space, time and matter. We live in bodies, bodies that are affected by the laws (physics) of space and time. God must transcend space, time and matter. God is transcendent; God cannot live in bodies; God cannot be in form; God is formless spirit (if spirit is that which the opposite of matter is). God is everything and is everywhere; everywhere is in God. God is a unified self with a unified mind; in him there is no subject and object, no seer and seen, no you and I, no here and there. In God all is one, unified. Clearly no human mind can appreciate the type of God I have defined (hence limited). What I offered is really not my definition; it is the mystic’s definition of God. (See William James, Varieties of Religious Experience; also see
NORMAL PERSONS’S APPROACH TO GOD
The mystic’s definition of God is different from the manner normal, neurotic and psychotic persons define God. Normal persons are the well adjusted persons of this world. They are the people who accepted their group’s definition of reality as reality and operate within its cultural parameters. Normal persons are at home in this world and see nothing wrong with this world. They constitute, at least, 90% of the human population. If you asked a normal person what is God, he would probably give you his group’s definition of it. A normal Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist etc would regurgitate his religious group’s definition of God, without having given it any kind of serious thought. This person is happy with the world of meaninglessness and purposeless he lives in; he is adapted to nothingness (as existentialist writers like Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus, Jasper, Heidegger etc construe the world). He cannot conceive God that does not seem like a human being. His God is sort of like a human king, with human body to boot. Indeed, this person’s idea of resurrection from death is that he would wake up from his physical death in his present body. It never occurs to him that his body is composed of elements, atoms and particles and that what is composed, what is held together by chemical bonds must decompose and the various particles and sub-particles that compose the atoms in his body (neutrons, protons, electrons, and sub-particles like quarks) return to their pool in nature. It is impossible for the dead human body to reconstitute itself in its former form. Let us then say that the normal person is, generally, philosophically challenged. Hinduism correctly pointed out that the majority of mankind do not think and therefore need a type of God that appeals to them, what it calls Bhakti God. The Bhakti approaches God as a person to be worshipped. He prays to God and sings hymns of praises to him, hoping that in doing so he pleases God, as he pleases his earthly father, and that you would take pity on him and give him what he wants. Obviously, this is a childish approach to God, yet it is where the majority of mankind is. As Hinduism sees it, you must take people where they are at, and since over 90% of humanity is Bhakti you must construct religions to suit them. Build churches and have these people sing praises to their projected out father figure in heaven, but do not try to reason with them on how God could be everywhere and yet be anthropomorphic. You might actually confuse these folks if you tried to reason with them, so let them be. As Hinduism sees it, Christianity, Islam and aspects of Hinduism are Bhakti religions, and are not for thinking persons; for cows, may be. According to Hinduism, only a handful of humanity is capable of thinking. Such persons approach God through philosophical reasoning. Their approach to God is called Jnana. In Western categories, Jnana is equivalent to Gnosticism. The philosopher thinks about God until he reaches the end of thinking and recognizes that God cannot be understood through human reasoning. Like Emmanuel Kant, he “critiques pure reason”. The other two approaches to God, according to Hinduism, are Karma and Raja (yoga). The karma approach to God does not think about God but serves humanity. In serving society, since God is all people, the karma yoga is really serving God. These are the doers of this world, the business men and politicians. So Bill Gates makes his billions and gives them to the needy. Since those needy are no other than God, he is serving God. Each of us serves God in his own way, according to his temperament. Raja yoga is considered the royal approach to God. It is considered the most effective way to reaching God. Raja yoga means meditation. Here, the individual closes his eyes and shuts out the “distracting external world”. He tries to shut down his conceptual thinking. Of course, it is very difficult to stop thinking, so he negates his thinking by saying: neti, neti, not this, not this. Whatever idea enters his mind he sees it as not true. In meditation, the individual, in effect, says: no concept is true, for concepts adapt to the world of concepts, which is the false world of separation, space, time and causation. The apparent, empirical world, according to Hinduism, is a dream world, an illusion, Maya, and is to be transcended before one can enter the real world of Brahman, God. Thus, in meditation, the individual attempts to shut out the conceptual world. If he is a loving person and has forgiven all those who wronged him, as the Jewish mystic, Jesus Christ, insisted, and meditates, he is likely to enter into Samadhi, transcend the world of multiplicity, differences and inequality and enter the world of oneness, sameness and equality, Brahmaloka, God’s abode. Put differently, in meditation, Hinduism believes that it is possible to break out of our present world (Moksha), if ones accumulated samsara, past evil deeds, has been expiated, and return to the world of oneness, God. Hence meditation (which Buddhism emphasizes almost to the exclusion of other aspects of Hindu religion) is the best way to attain self realization, enlightenment, illumination to the fact that one is one with the one light of this world, Brahman. Ones true self is the atman which is a part of Brahman But before you run to meditation and think that God is in a cup of tea, do remember that Hinduism also believes in karma and reincarnation. Each person is said to have accumulated past misdeeds, samsara, from past life times and, therefore, come back to this world (reincarnation) to take the consequences of his past evil behaviors. Those who have gradually rectified their past evil, cleared their samsara through love and social service, are likely to be those who are going to become mystics and illuminated in this life time. If you are evil you are not going to come to God, soon, for only the good, the loving and those who serve public good come to God. Hinduism believes that if you are good that the chances are that you are born with physical configurations that make thinking about God your primary preoccupation. As Hinduism sees it, our bodies are composed of three elements, the three Gunas: Raja, Sattva and Tamas. Raja makes for activity, tamas makes for indolence and sattva makes for thoughtfulness. Those whose brains are suffused of sattva are thoughtful and are likely to do the right things and are likely to be the ones to breakthrough Maya (the spell of self forgetfulness that keeps folks in the world of separation rather than recognize their unified nature) and return to God. According to Hinduism, in this world those whose bodies are mainly sattva tend to be born into Brahmin families, families that are spirit oriented…such as the Ndi Ishe Muo and Dibias in Alaigbo. The point is that you do not have to delude yourself into thinking that you are going to return to God, soon, if you are a wicked person. It takes a lot to stop the wheel of rebirth and stop coming back to the world of separation and resurrect to the awareness of oneness, the world of God.
For our present purposes, the normal person is likely going to be a Bhakti in his religion, in his approach to God. A few thoughtful persons, which experience tells us are generally less than two percent of any population, are likely to approach God through Jnana. All people, the Bagavad Gita and Upanishad tell us, can mix their basic approach to God with meditation, Raja Yoga. (Later Hindu thinkers added Tantra, Ayudi and Hatha yoga to Patanjali’s four yoga(s). The Tantric approach accepts the world as it is, and indulges in sense satisfaction but sees ones partner in epicurean hedonism as divine in nature. Go ahead and have sex, as illustrated in the karma Sutras, but see your sexual partner as no other person than a manifestation of divinity and love her. Ayudi yoga is Hindu medicinal practices; Hatha yoga is Hindu physical exercises. Good physical being coupled with proper exercise of the pranas, controlled breathing, is said to facilitate return to God.)
NEUROTIC PERSONS APPROACH TO GOD: IDEALISM AND FANTASY
R. D. Laing was, perhaps, the first Western Psychiatrist to observe that the mentally ill are closer to God than the so-called normal person. Eric Fromm did allude to Neurosis as personal religion but did not really explore that proposition. If you have worked with the mentally ill, as I have, you cannot not observe that they are, on the whole, more refined human beings than normal persons. I will be generous and put it this way: normal persons are closer to animals in their spiritual evolution and should not be blamed for their daftness. These people actually kill animals and eat them and do not feel like they are doing harm to living beings! How then are they different from mosquitoes that suck our blood and kill us? There is little difference between a normal person and a predatory animal. The neurotic to be person, as a child, sees the evils inherent in this world and cannot stomach them. He cannot deal with what it takes to adapt to this world: brutishness. In this world big fish eat small fish to survive. It is a dog eat dog world, a world of competition where the fittest survive and weak die. Our world is a cruel world, make no mistake about it. The sentimental cannot do well in this world. The very sensitive child surveys his world and appreciates what it takes to survive in it and is repulsed by the world he sees. Yet he is in that world and the desire to survive in the world is as strong in him as it is in all animals. So what is he supposed to do? He closes his eyes and does what he could to adapt to the world, but tries to use his imagination to come up with a better world. He hates and rejects the real world and seeks an idealized version of it. As Karen Horney correctly observed, neurosis is rejection of the real self, real other people and real world and desire to replace them with an idealized self and idealized world. The neurotic rejects what is and seeks to replace it with what he feels is better than it. Alas, what is is what is and no amount of imagination would alter the brutal realities of this world. Human beings are predators, just like lions and tigers and hyenas and feed off each other and that is all there is to it. The desire to transform the world into heaven is a chimera, a futile effort. The neurotic person sees the empirical world as it is, hates and rejects it, including himself, and uses his imagination to construct an idealized version of the self and the world and uses that pure mental construct to judge the real world. Of course he is mistaken, for the ideal is not the real. He lives in the world of fantasy, not the world of reality. He is therefore destined to fail in this world, for he does not do what the world requires of folk for adaptation to it. Nevertheless, the neurotic is aware of the real world. He is able to test reality, as it is, and know what it is. He is simply dissatisfied with reality, himself, people and the world, and keeps yearning for an impossible ideal self/society/world. He lives in a world of quiet desperation, trying to make his fantasy world replace the real empirical world we live in. He is going to fail for the mental cannot replace the physical. In our imaginations we transcend the limitations imposed on us by space, time and matter; but when those ideals are tried in the real world, physics makes them imperfect. That is to say that our world must remain imperfect. As long as human beings live in body, space and time they will probably be imperfect; human beings will always kill each other, exploit each other and the best that we can do is build more jails and prisons to house the more depraved predators among them. The neurotic wishes that the world were an ideal, perfect place and lives in the world of fantasy; his mind comes up with ideals and he mistakes his self constructed ideals. The neurotic constructs ideals and thinks that they are of God. He is, of course, wrong for his finite mind does not comprehend God and whatever he thinks is of God is not God. He is the one who constructs ideals, builds castles in the sky and thinks that his fantasy castles are God’s mansion. No human mind on earth can comprehend God. However, God can be gleaned in meditation, in Samadhi, Nirvana, Satori, but when the individual returns to the world of space, time and matter his mind returns to being separated from God and other people, to being egoistic hence not of God; you cannot actualize God in this world for the world is a place of separation whereas God is union. The world is the opposite of God, as separation is the opposite of union. The world and heaven, ego and God, do not mix; they have different categories for understanding reality. (The term neurotic applies to all human beings, with some being relatively more neurotic than others. To the extent that a human being is dissatisfied with his actual self and seeks a more perfect version of it, he is neurotic. Are you totally happy with who you are, who other people are and what the world is? If affirmative, you are a cow, not a human being.)
PSYCHOTIC PERSONS APPROACH TO GOD
The normal person sees a rotten world and adjusts to it; the neurotic person sees a rotten world and tries to replace it with a mentally constructed ideal version of it but knows that his mental constructs are not the same as the real world. The psychotic person sees a rotten world and cannot accept it and uses his imagination to construct an idealized version of it. Unlike the neurotic, the psychotic forgets that the ideal is imaginary and believes it as real. I have witnessed young folk’s first psychotic decompensation, their trip of no return to schizophrenia and bipolar affective disorder (the two primary psychoses). Here is what, I think, is going on in mental illness. The child who is going to become mentally ill sees our world with amazing clarity. He appreciates that it is a Hobbesian world where folks are at war with each other and are oppressing each other. The normal person is criminal but does not know it! What is called normal society is pathological beyond belief; no wonder mystics like Jesus Christ overcame that world and left it behind them. The world is best passed by without cherishing it. Consider
When Cain killed his brother, Abel, his conscience, God, asked him why, he asked God in return: am I my brother’s keeper? It is our business how all of us lived. The psychotic to be child sees himself and all human begins as no good and uses his imagination to construct ideal human beings, ideal social institutions and an ideal world. He is generally perceived as dreaming and unrealistic by his peers. He doesn’t pay much attention to the external real world, and does not do too well at school and work, even if he has superior intelligence. At age eighteen, or so, the typical human child is pushed out by his parents into the real world. Now he does not just have to lazy around and wish for an ideal world, he has to go out and work for a living. Working for a living means operating in the real world, doing what the world rewards, competing in it, some winning and others lose. If he is at college he must compete for good grades or he is kicked out. The point is that in late adolescence the young person must adapt to the real world, swim or sink. Stress mounts in the young person’s life, as he is forced by the exigencies of living in an impersonal world where no one takes care of his needs, to make a critical decision, to adjust to the world on its terms or escape from it into fantasy. Some opt to check out of the world. Thus these decompensate (start hearing voices, seeing what is not there and being deluded). The psychotic has checked out of our world and from now on takes the world of his imagination as the real world. He now lives in his imaginary world. He is now whatever he had wished for that, in fact, he is not. If he is schizophrenic he thinks that he is God etc; if he is manic he thinks that he is the richest man in his world or the most beautiful woman in the world and that all men want to have sex with her. This person has flipped from normalcy to neurosis and finally to psychosis. He has lost touch with our brutal world. He does not want to live in our brutal world and has checked himself into a fantasy world of his making. Of course, there are biochemical correlates to all mental disorders. This essay takes the roles of physiology in mental states for granted. The relevant point here is that the psychotic has checked out of our world and entered the world of dreams where he is whatever he had wished to be but is not, in fact. He is now God, Jesus,
We give him the various neuroleptic and anti manic meditatrions but he does not want to live in our brutal world and prefers to live in his fantasy world. R.D. Lang observed that the psychotic is like a mystic. He is both correct and not correct. The psychotic is like a mystic in that he detests our world and wants to get out of it. But he is not like the mystic for the mystic does not use his imagination to invent an ideal world and live there. The mystic stops all thinking processes and negates our world, good and bad aspect of it; the mystic exits from our empirical world and returns to a different world, the world of union. The psychotic needs to give up his fantasy world, as well as our brutal world, and then meditate and return to the world of union.
THE AGNOSTIC AND ATHEISTIC SOLUTION
Our world is such that those capable of thinking must find it meaningless and purposeless and wonder what kind of God would create this mess. If you are fourteen years old and you have not rejected traditional approaches to God, you probably are unique. To a thoughtful teenager, agnosticism is probably the only acceptable solution to the paradoxes of being in a meaningless world said to be created by a loving God. The agnostic claims not knowing and leaves it at that. Better still, he redirects his thinking to an effort to understand science and technology. I believe that society must provide all young persons free training in science and technology, up to, at least, Bachelors degree level.) Agnosticism is indecision, and, sooner or later, existence forces one to choose. Some choose atheism. How do you know that God does not exist? You can say that the conception of God-given to you by your religion is wrong, and they are mostly wrong, but you cannot make a categorical statement that God does not exist. To say that God does not exist is like saying that God exists, on faith. Both the atheist and the theist operate on faith, on belief. Neither knows that God exists nor does not exist but makes a statement based on not knowing and takes his faith as the truth. No human being is in a position to fully comprehend our universe. We are only beginning to scratch the surface of knowledge. Physics, Chemistry and biology are infants and probably need, at least, another thousand years before they begin to understand phenomena, as it is. Therefore, to build on the little that science currently knows, and say that there is no God is superstition.
PURSUIT OF THE EGO IS A BLOCK TO THE AWARENESS OF CHRIST
God created us as part of himself. Each of us has a self that is in God and God is in. Each of us is in all other persons. Each of us is an extension of God. Where God ends and each of us begins is nowhere. We are parts of the whole. We are the same and equal. We are unified with each other. This is our state in eternity. Each of us and all of us desired to separate from God, from other people and from our real self. Our real self is unified spirit self, the Christ. We could not separate from our real self, in fact, but seem to have done so in a dream, in a world of illusion. In our world of illusion each of us defines himself as having a self apart from God and from other selves. He houses that separated self in flesh, body, which makes it seem real to him. Each of us sees other people attack his body/self concept and he defends it. Each of us, in turn, attacks other people and they defend themselves. Attack and defense, like separation and body, seem to make separated self real in our awareness. The separated self, the ego, is now a block to the awareness of our real self, the unified spirit self. As long as the individual has a separated self concept, a self image, he is not going to be consciousness of the unified self that is his truth. The ego is a veil blocking the face of the Christ in us. The ego masks the real self in us. Underneath the ego mask, the human personality is another self, the unified self, the Holy Son of God, the Christ who is as his father created him. To return to the awareness of the unified spirit self, the Christ, the false self used to cover it up, the ego separated self concept must be let go. You must voluntarily relinquish all your self concepts, all your self images, all your concepts of other people and whatever you think that the world is. You must give up all the selves that you made up to replace the self God created you as. In meditation, you try to let go of your false ego self and then ask God to reveal to you who, in fact, you are. But do not try to tell God to tell you, who you are, just ask and remain quiet. The purpose of meditation is to give up the false self concept we made and use as shield against God and Christ. When we let go of all concepts of the self, good or bad, inferior or superior and become an open mind without concepts clouding it, we then experience our true self, the unified self. Alas, we like the self we made, the ego self, for it is the idol of our invention; the ego is our handiwork and we do not want to give it up. But give it up we must, for it is a false self. If we do not give it up the separated self and die still wishing for it, we return to the dream (world) and try again, and do so for many life times, dream times, until we give up the ego false self. A lesson unlearned must be learned. The lesson to be learned is that the ego is not our true self. When we finally give up the ego, the human personality, and have no conceptual self that we made to replace the self that God created us as, we end the wheel of rebirth and reincarnation ends. We no longer return to the place of suffering, our world, for to identify with the ego is to suffer. Without the ego all is peace and joy; without the ego all is love, without the ego all is bliss. (See A Course in miracles.) The ego is the root of human suffering; the ego ideal doubles human suffering. If you seek the ego ideal, as neurotics do, then give it up. When you give up your ego ideal you remove the block to the awareness of your real self, the Christ self. You feel peaceful and happy and connected to all life. The ego and the ego ideal interfere with human relationships. Those who defend their ego ideals, their so-called superior self always have social conflicts. They present their supposed superior selves to other people to relate to and if not related to as such, their false pride is hurt and they feel angry and quarrel with those not relating to them as big selves. When the big self is eliminated, social conflicts are overcome and the individual’s social relationships are improved. His work life is also improved for whereas before his big ego resented bosses and they resented him, hence conflict; now he is liked by his work colleagues, for people like humble persons. In the past he tended to go from job to another, unsatisfied, for none met his ego ideal or get fired because nobody can stand his superior attitude, now he is every person’s friend and his work life is improved. Without the pursuit of a superior ego self the individual experiences smooth social relationships, peace and happiness.
PURSUIT OF IDEAL PERSONALITY IS A LIMITATION
No person on planet earth knows whether God exists or not. At best folk speculate on the existence of God. Conjecture is not truth. Folk tend to accept their religion’s conjectures about the nature of God and use them to organize their lives. But these definitions of God are exactly those, definitions constructed by human limited minds. Our definitions of God limit our understanding of God. One must, therefore, do what Hindus and Buddhists do: give up all conceptions of God, negate all thinking, and keep quiet. Have an open mind, a mind without any apriori conception of what God is or is not. Jut keeps quiet. In the meantime, love all the people around you and try as much as you could to forgive those who wronged you. As I pointed out elsewhere, it is impossible to forgive all wrong doers and still be in this world. Jesus forgave all wrong doers, including those who destroyed his body and exited from this world. If you practiced radical forgiveness, like Jesus did, you would be defenseless and not defend yourself when other people attack you. If you did not defend yourself and you are living in world of attack, you would be killed. Make no mistake about it, if black people did not strive for freedom evil white men would enslave them, today and pretend to be Christians. If you forgave all their evils, they would still kill you and you would exit this world and return to the world of spirit. To live in this world, you must be defensive; all that you can do is be relatively less defensive. Love and be relatively forgiving. Then leave it at that. Your life would probably be peaceful and happy. Peace and joy are not trifle gifts.
If you are neurotic and pursue an idealized self, I have the following to say to you. You were probably born with generalized organ weakness ala Alfred Adler’s inferior organs and inferiority feeling. You were probably unable to cope with the impersonal, tough exigencies of our world. Indeed, you may even have a weak stomach and your intestines are unable to easily eliminate feces from your system and you feel constipated and bloated, carrying feces around you, and its fumes poisoning your system. (It is not that you eat too much, but that you are unable to eliminate the little you ate hence carry it around for a long time. Eat very little, if possible, organic non-processed food, and mostly vegetables; human beings do not need the much meat folk eat nowadays.) Your generalized weak biological system probably made you feel that you are unable to cope with the exigencies of this world, and as if your life is threatened and you felt fear of dying. In childhood, you probably developed extreme self consciousness and felt that other people were looking at you and seeing your weaknesses and you did not want them to see you as weak. You then embarked on pursuit of a big, important and powerful ideal self, a self that you thought that if you became it that you would adapt to the exigencies of this world and be liked by other people. (I have just described avoidant personality disorder, the fear of social rejection and the avoidance of people so as to avoid rejection and maintain a semblance of an important self. Avoidant personality is one of the neurotic personalities.) The pursuit of an idealized self concept has confounded your problems. It is true that a human being must have some sort of self to live on earth, after all life on earth is defense of the separated self (the human personality). The pursuit of the separated self is responsible for most of the psychological pains human beings feel. If peopled did not have self concepts and self images they would not suffer psychological pain. Buddha recognized this fact 2500 years ago. To have a separated self is to suffer psychological pain. But if you let go of all self concepts and did not defend any kind of self, you would die and exit from this world. It seems a catch 22 situation. In the meantime, the neurotic, who in addition to pursuing the human separated self also pursues an idealized separated self, gives himself double psychological pain. He lives in extreme suffering. He can reduce his pain to normal proportions by eliminating his desire for an idealized self. I am aware that the person who seeks an idealized self has felt so must of his life; in fact, from the time he developed self consciousness, perhaps the first year of his life. Nevertheless, the idealized self is a futile self, it is a crazy, insane self and one should never seek it. Though its pursuit gives people some sort of neurotic motivation/ambition, it gives them tremendous anxiety and restricts their enjoyment of the little there is to enjoy in this world. Please do not think and or behave from the perspective of the idealized, perfect self. Whenever you find yourself thinking or acting from the ideal self, stop and give it up. It is a waste of time doing so; moreover, it is very unproductive and gives you psychological pain. Only think and behave from the real self. Do not ever judge yourself and other from the idealized standards of the ideal self. Better still, think and behave from no-self Phenomenologically speaking, you saw the world as it is, hated and rejected it. You have used your imagination to construct an idealized self, idealized human beings, idealized social institutions and idealized world. You are trying to transform you and all people to your ideal conceptions of them. In your mind you think that you are doing the right thing. Alas, you are not doing the right thing for the world is not your mental construct and can never be so. You are now a slave trying to live up to the ideal self concept and self image that you constructed. You are now in bondage to the ideal self you posited try to become. All your behaviors are role playing, behaving as if you are your ideal self. Here is the truth: You are not your ideal self and the people are not your ideal conceptions of them and the world cannot be your ideal image of it. You are the constructor of the ideal self; you are the thinker, the imaginer; the thinker, imaginer and dreamer is not his thoughts/imagination and dreams. Moreover, you now limit yourself by trying to live according to your mentally constructed ideals. Just as normal persons use their constructions of God to limit their thinking and behavior, you are now using your pursuit of an ideal self concept to limit what you think and do. You are now a person in bondage, a slave to your ego self image. You are in the bondage of the ego, the idol of your invention. You worship this golden cow that you made, as if he is who you are, who other people etc. In general, the human personality is used to limit the individual’s thinking and behaviors. Those who pursue ego ideal selves doubly limit themselves. To be creative you must let go of your personality, the ego separated self, normal, neurotic or psychotic. Give up your ideal self concept, give up your ideal self image, and give up all conceptual self; do not seek to transform other people, social institutions and the world into your conceptions of their ideal versions. Then keep quiet. Do not try to-do anything from whatever is your understanding of who you are, good or bad. You do not know who you are. As noted, just attempt to love you, love other people and do what in your opinion serves social interest. Love and serve all,
You cannot understand God. Thomas Aquinas struggled to use Aristotelian categories to understand God and wrote beautiful rubbish about God. Eventually, he discarded his books and engaged in gardening, without thinking about God. No one can understand God. As he gardened and tended trees, loved his fellow human beings and tried to forgive them their evils rather than try to understand the impossible, he experienced peace and joy. (See his Magnus Opus, Summa Theologica) Peace and joy means that one is close to the bliss of heaven. If you are in peace and are happy, you are at the metaphoric gate of heaven. You are not in heaven, for you still see you in body, in form, in the world of space and time. To enter heaven you must be formless spirit. To be in God you must give up your separated human personality, normal, neurotic or psychotic. In heaven, that is, in oneness there is no you and I, there is only one self, a self that we all share. That self has no name though if it makes you feel good you can call it God. There is God; he is the whole; each of us is a part of that whole, in Christian terms, a son of God. Each of us is Christ, the divine son of God. But that self is not the self you currently know yourself to be. That unified self cannot be explained in human categories, for it is ineffable. Just love and forgive and serve people and leave it at that. In the meantime do recognize that the human personality is a limitation, that it limits what you think and do. Therefore, to be somewhat limitless, you must give up all self concepts and self images that you have (it is impossible to give up the ego self and still be in this world of the ego; hence I said somewhat). Accept that you have no separated self and do not defend any self that you think that you are. Accept that you do not know who you are. If you are honest in making and practicing these statements, your true self, a unified self, will dawn on your mind by itself. CHOICE AND RANDOMNESS
If one can choose to let go of ones ego, to give it up, logically one must have chosen to have it in the first place, for one cannot give up what one did not choose. On the other hand, science teaches that we are victims unto whom the environment acts on, that chance and randomness determines our fate. Spiritual psychology accepts the role of choice in human affairs. Helen Schucman said that we chose our egos and the bodies that house them. If one has a weak body one chose it. One chose it to feel weak, so as to compensate with superiority feeling. One set the whole thing up to justify seeking a special self, what I have called an ideal self. Clearly some folk are not yet ready to accept this level of responsibility and like Richard Dawkins want to see chance and evolution determining them. That view is okay. Different folks are at different levels in their evolution on planet earth. For me, I believe that I choose whatever happens to me, how I do not know. I am not a victim of the world. I chose my ego separated self concept and can let it go and have let it go and feel peaceful and joyous.
CONCLUSION
God cannot be defined. But since we all want to define God (hence define ourselves, since we are part of God) and give him human attributes, try this definition for size. God is love. Separation from love is separation from God. If insanity is separation from love, then insanity is separation from God. If sanity is return to love then sanity is return to God. Love is union; God is union. It follows that sanity is return to love and union. To be sane is to be in the union of God and his creation. All mentally ill persons are persons who are separated from love, from God and from other people and the healing of their mental illness are for them to return to union with God and all people and love all people, including their real selves, unified spirit self. Whereas the officially certified mentally ill are called the mentally ill, all people are mentally ill. All people are hallucinating and deluded; all people are seeing what is not there, hearing voices that no one speaks and believing what is not true as true. Our world is a dream, an illusion which we believe to be true when it is not true. Mental health means overcoming our world of separation, forgiving what is done in the world of separation, that has not been done, and returning to the world of union, love and God. Escape from our physical world and return to the world of spirit is the nature of health. No one who has escaped from the world of separation can be in the world of separation, our world. Folks can attain the attenuated world of light forms guided by the Holy Spirit; that world is some sort of mental health but not quite mental health. (Even that world of light forms is not our world; no one in it can be in our world; it is the world those who have experienced near death claim to see. Each of us has both our dense physical body as well as a light body made of photons of light. That light body, also seen in our nightly dreams, is still a false body, for everything in form is false. Only the formless is real.) True Christianity teaches negation of this world and return to the world of unified formless spirit. No one on earth can be mentally healthy, normal may be. The normal are adapted to this world and, in a manner of speaking, are more mentally ill than those trying to escape from it via neurosis and psychosis, as R.D. Laing said in His Politics of Experience and The Divided Self. Helen Schucman, a Columbia University Professor of Psychology pretty much agrees with Dr Laing and said that normalcy is deep sleep and dreaming, a sleep where the individual has not seen the light of God yet and is not yet beginning the awakening process. As she sees it, the neurotic and psychotic are also in sleep-dream but have a glimmer of the light of God but instead of seeking true spirituality try to use their minds to construct their own versions of heaven, which are fantasies. In her view, psychosis is running into deeper dream. As she sees it, folk must give up their sleep-dream and awaken to God, by embracing the gospel of love and forgiveness taught by the immanent God, the Holy Spirit. (A Course in Miracles.) Instead of seeking the things of God, love and forgiveness, we seek the things of the world, the ego and its fantasies. Seek ye first the
Our true self is unified spirit, not the false separated egos housed in bodies that we currently identify as our real selves. God is unified spirit, one spirit that is simultaneously infinite spirits. Each of is one of those infinite spirits that makeup God. One God manifests in his infinite parts, infinite children, all of whom are his one self and one mind. On earth, we live in bodies (separated self) and must make the most of them through science and technology. One is not teaching immediate escape from this world; instead, one wants to use science and technology and reason to make the most of this world of ours, illusion or not.
Ozodi Thomas Osuji September 26, 2006
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Posted by Robot| 26.09.2006 22:49