Part of God's Creations; ITS&FYD:ch1pt2

God as Unity Creates Life of which we are a Part.

WHO OR WHAT IS GOD?

In which we explore how to refer God, as well as concepts that ‘belong’ to God, such as Creation, Manifestation and Expression. We then go on to consider what God might be wanting to carry out.

NAMING

First of all. The Language problem.

This discussion is about our personal relationship as a human being with a single source that some of us call God, and who we are in that.

First, we have the problem of naming and referring to this Unity; God, Unity, Universe, Life, Creation, Nature, the One, the Source, Allah, and so on. BECK uses ‘Whatever’ which is as good a name as any.

I could ‘cook up’ a single word to try to cover these concepts, or Unity could be a useful choice, but for this writing I’m going to use the word God because that is the word that means the most to me.

The English language has the pronouns ‘he’ ‘she’ and ‘it’ for males, females, and things. ‘He’ has traditionally and supposedly been taken to include ‘she’, but many women are quite tired of this, as in fact they do not feel included much if at all. However we do not have a pronoun to encompass a concept of Unity or a single source. If we use ‘It’ for God, we still get into trouble because it depersonalizes Her and feels essentially incorrect.

I am going to use Her and She when referring to God. Most of my readers will be women and of course (!) men should automatically feel included when I use ‘she’ in this discussion. [After all ‘he’ is included in ‘she’.] I have kept the capitals to remember the largeness of God.

God and Her Names. How to refer to this Bigness?

God has a lot of names which basically boil down to…

·      the ONE; Unity, Source, Allah, etc. ie, the Creator

·      and the EVERYTHING; Universe, Nature, All, etc. ie, the Created.

Thus, to repeat; God as a Unity or a Wholeness as a single source is the Creator of Life, as well as Everything that She has Created.

‘God as Unity’ implies that the creation of life comes from this particular Unity, a word that intrinsically implies that

a. something is unified or whole or complete, as well as..

b. it is possible for there to be a dis-unity or dis-union of something, ie there can be more than one part and these can be separated or split. These concepts are key elements in this discussion.

The crux of this is then, that this Unity is required for the Creation of Life.

What then, is this Unity of something that has been Split?

I tackle this question later, because it is a very big one.

God is Exploring Energy and Expressing what She finds.

She does this by Creating Life.

God Creates Life.

What then, is Creation?

It is an idea that has been manifested; it has been made in the physical world. It may have originated as an idea or inspiration, but now it can be seen in the physical. It is an expression of God’s concepts made apparent to God; God’s expression of Her Self for Herself. God’s expression is her owning of HerSelf to HerSelf (and us). God knows HerSelf by owning HerSelf. It is the expression that is the key here. ‘In the beginning was the word.’

And this creation has Life.

The definition of Life is that it can itself give life to another form in whatever manner, which can include service or support for the growth of that other life. Maybe we could say it has and gives energy for growth to another.

Thus, these creations have a life of their own apart from their creator. They can stand apart, by themselves.

That manifested thing, by definition, is part of the energy of the creator, and in the process of manifesting this creation the creator has learnt and now knows more about Her own Self and her possibilities.

God creates Life for Her own sake and Her own expression, as an Exploration of the limits of Her own energy for Herself. This exploration teaches Her about energy and who She is in that. She loves doing this and loves what She finds out about Herself as She does it.

Since this God-created thing has Life, it will want to find out about its own energy because that Life is part of God. And as it does so for itself, God finds out even more about Herself. [Consider for a moment what you have learnt about yourself from your children.]

Since God is exploring energy, Exploration will be a primary drive for living things. This fits in with Panksepp’s SEEK emotion in animals. (see GRANDIN).

It is something so intrinsic to all life that we can fail to notice its importance to us to be able to do so.

And so are we exploring.

How then, do we as human beings, and thus part of God and Life, explore the energy of our selves to find out who is there and express what we have found?

We do this by…

·      Being manifested/created ourselves; ie we are alive on earth. And

·      Checking out (exploring) what else God has created, and

·      Checking out (exploring) what we ourselves are able to create/manifest/express in our own lives.

·      Checking out what others have done and found in their explorations; ie their expression.

This exploration and what we make of it comes though our experiences of being human beings and there are an awful lot of experiences to be had on earth alone, not to mention anywhere else.

Thus, we need experience of life, as in, lots of ways of being, to explore fully the limits of our own energy. This experience brings us (eventually) an understanding/realization of what is intrinsically our own essence; our ‘who is in Here’. Learning what is our own takes time. Our understanding of Life is what we ‘make of’ our experiences of life

To sum up

·      God is a Unified Largeness which is exploring the limits of all energy.

·      This Unified energy can create Life which can create and/or support other life. It can give energy to another, and so on. (This is ‘Life Eternal’)

·      Creation is the manifestation of a concept. But the Creation of Life is something else. Creating is an exploration of self, as is the creation. (That which is created contributes to the creator’s exploration of self as well as the created’s exploration of self.) Exploring is built in to Life.

·      In fact, Life is for exploring. Exploring leads to understanding.

·      We explore through the experience of what is manifested in our lives. And thus we need Life on Earth for these experiences.

All human beings are part of Life and Nature and the created, and must therefore be also part of God. All Life is God. The challenge for human beings is not only to Create but to figure out how they can consciously Create Life from their own self, which is what God is doing.

[Notice here that the terms God, Life, Nature, the Universe, and your own self/person (as a created entity and part of Life/Nature) can be used interchangeably. What?! Really!! Well, that’s the logic of it.

A drop of the ocean is still part of the ocean and holds its properties within itself. What then? Does this make a difference to you, and how you might treat yourself or others?]

The next concept is..

Exploring energy is a delight.

God loves exploring and what She finds out about Herself and She loves her creations and what they find out about themselves. This ‘finding out’ gives us Insight.

Insight = to see inwardly/Internally/inside; to gain an understanding about our internal or intrinsic truth or beingness or the energy of our own self.

[I will be using See with a capital ‘S’ to denote insight.]

Seeing is an Internal Insight into the Truth of Self. It is a making sense of a plethora of information of any kind from our own and others’ experiences. It is an internal certainty that arises as we remember and understand who we are bit by bit. We have learnt something about ourselves and it is as if we have given ourselves a gift. The body sensation is of a ‘ding’ or an ‘aha’ or ‘the light turned on’ or we feel ‘lighter’. It is delightful and it de-lights us; there is a bit of joy here. We also tend to feel more relaxed and can breathe more easily. We ‘encompass’ more and become a bit ‘bigger’; we grow. We learn more about ourselves and that discovery feels good.

NB. Having Seen It feels good; the process of getting there may not.

God delights in her Insights and so can we.

There are some other things to notice here as well.

·      Insight takes time; a lot of time and a lot of experiencing. Yet, once we have it, we don’t really care any more about how long it took to get it, and that can be a long time.

·      Once we have it, we cannot lose it, ever. “Insight is the wealth of the Soul.”

·      It does not come through theory; it comes through experience and the understanding we gain through that experience.

·      It makes us feel bigger in terms of allowing Life to be as it is. We have encompassed more of our own energy; we know ourselves more and have thus ‘grown’. We can allow and accept Life and what it has shown us. ‘Live and let live.’ This process can ultimately lead to trust.

Thus the logic of Creation, Manifestation, Exploring, Expression and Seeing implies that we must be alive on earth for us to be able to See ourselves. We can only gain Insight into ourselves through experiencing what we ourselves are manifesting in life. How do we know who we really are if we have no experience of/from/within our selves?

NB. The use of the words ‘understanding/realization’ and ‘insight’ are being used as, ‘there is no real understanding without experience’. The trouble with using words such as these is that it is possible to think you know or have knowledge of or understand or have insight into something if you have studied it enough and so on. In all this discussion I limit the use of the word ‘understand’ to what you end up realizing out of your own experience. We may sympathize with others, but in fact rarely really ‘understand’ another’s experience unless we have pretty well experienced the same circumstances.

So, What Might God be Wanting For Herself?

How do we think that we might know? If we are a part of God, then God can’t be that much different from us. Well, what gives human beings the most pleasure and satisfaction and can we extrapolate back up? In this I am using human psychology to guess at God’s.

·      We know that creativity and self-expression are important.

·      We know that relationships are important.

·      We know that family and children are important.

·      We know that feeling good about ourselves is important.

·      We know that exploring is important.

·      We know that experience is important.

·      We know that we need experiences to truly find out about ourselves (Insights).

Consider this extrapolation.

The crux here is that God wants to explore and experience everything because She knows that truly Understanding Who She Is and what She can encompass comes only from experience and that these insights or Understandings are fun. She learns more about herself as She experiences it all. She loves finding out about Herself and expressing that.

She also loves her creativity in terms of both loving the act of creating and feeling good about what She has done, as well as loving the things that She creates. She wants to share this creative ability and this great delight in it all.

So God breaks Herself up into squillions of bits so that each can have fun as well. She is now nothing but her creations and yet She is in everything. (Nowhere and everywhere at the same time. A fine example of God’s many puzzles.)

Since they are part of Her they get to experience and understand for themselves and so does She. As we learn to know ourselves, God learns more about Herself. In this manner everyone wins.

and we want what God wants because we are each a bit of God.

To See, to Know our Selves and to Create New Life as we Express that Self.

Your experiences and understandings help you define you.

The experience is absorbing and the understanding is enthralling. We’ve ‘Seen’ something.

We are creative beings; it is automatic, but the real question is ‘what have we created?’ and thus ‘how do we feel inside about what we have created out there, i.e. the result’? We too are looking for that feeling of satisfaction with what we have created or expressed from within our selves; to feel good about what we have done.

Parts of God

Each of us is created by God and are a part of God and are thus also God, because Everything is God. Well, logically that’s what the names we use for God are implying.

But, as parts of God, we need/want to be able to explore our own energy and to experience what we manifest in Life. If we want to See ourselves (and thus God) we have to be apart from God to be able to do this.

We are a Part having to be Apart to See God.

God has worked out that the only way we can See ourselves and See God is to be apart from Her.

When we are a part of God, we are simply God. As a foetus growing in a womb is part of the woman and not an entity in its own right, so are we when we are part of God, and it feels heavenly to be merged in this way. As the child separates from the mother as it is born to begin its journey of differentiation, so we need to be apart from God to enable us to See Her plus define/know Our Self as separate or differentiated from others.

Humans do seem to have this basic feeling memory of ‘heaven’ internally and do want to find it again. But my argument here is that this ‘heaven’ feeling comes from being part of God which we actually are always, but in Life on Earth we are learning to see God and ‘know’ ourselves by being apart from God.

But we don’t like feeling apart. It hurts and we feel frightened and lost and cold and alone.