God, the verb

In our quest for spiritual maturity, it is just mandatory that we understand our own childish habit of anthropomorphizing an external God through human imagination. In thousands of churches every Sunday, God is presented as something out there separate and apart from us and the rest of the creation. And he is presented as having all of the human emotions that we know.

There is an alternative perspective for those sensitive souls who are embarrassed by these archaic images. Buckminster Fuller said it best: “God is a verb, not a noun. God is not legislative code…and not proclamation law…and not ecclesiastic dogma and canon. God is a verb, the most active verb connoting the vast harmonic reordering of the Universe from unleashed chaos of energy.”

There is an ancient Chinese text that is completely in harmony with modern physics. “There is no Creator (out there). Everything produces itself and is not produced by others. This is the Natural way of the Universe.”

There is no Creator. There is only Creativity. And the word symbol “God” represents the creative energy that is inherent in the Universe and in all human experience.

We do not live today with the primitive and superstitious cosmology of a 3,000-year-old biblical age. We live today by the cosmology of Copernicus and Galileo and watching Earth rise from the surface of the moon.

We are still spiritually childish when we “seek” God. To “seek” something is to make an object of it and a subject of oneself. “Summoned or not summoned, God is here,” says a Greek oracle that demolishes school prayer, by the way. “God is the Nature and Flow of the Universe.” The “flea and God are One.” The “dung in the stable” and God are One, as Eckhart put it. Meister Eckhart, over 700 years ago, got it and understood it light years ahead of the church, who wanted to burn him at the stake. He also wrote, “to go around looking for God is like sitting on an ox looking for an ox to ride” and “do you want to see God? Look in a mirror” and “to watch a child pouring water into a glass is to watch God pouring God into God.”

Today, Deepak Chopra gets it. In answer to a question in an interview, “Are you an atheist?” Chopra said: “I was an atheist until I discovered that I was God.”

The Divine Reality is not to be found by “seeking” but by the daily experiences of seeing, touching, tasting, smelling, drinking, or “obeying the call of nature.” The One Spirit; the One Creative Energy; the One Reality moves through and within all that is Natural.

“Men and books lie. Only nature does not lie,” wrote Thomas Paine. There is no division between God and human beings…God and nature…human beings and nature…spirit and matter or the animate and the inanimate. All is One. All is a part of the Whole and not human beings or any other part of the creation is separate from the Whole…and as a symbol for the Whole, we use the word “God,” for want of a better word.

The French painter, George Braque, expressed it this way: “I no longer believe in anything. Objects don’t exist for me except in so far as a rapport exists between them, and between them and myself. When one attains this harmony, there is peace and everything is right and good. Life becomes a perpetual revelation.”

And so you see, God and the chair you are now sitting in are One. God and the literature you are now reading are One. God and you are One.