The Nature of God as All that Is

Disclaimer

This is the first of two posts about what God is. How foolish is that, writing about such an enormous topic, and in just two blog posts? Obviously, this will be a superficial overview.

In this post, I will describe what I consider to be the most significant qualities of Spirit. In the second post, I’ll tell you what I have learned about (a ‘something’) that I believe fits this description of the qualities of God.

Also, you will note right away that I use several different names (all capitalized) to refer to God. This is because so many of us have lots of baggage associated with the word God as a result of religious indoctrination. My language referring to God will include the neuter pronoun It to avoid any reference to a gender quality in Spirit.

All of this is my opinion, my understanding based on years of thinking and reading and talking about this very important topic. These ideas seem internally consistent to me and they fit with my life experience. More importantly, when I am fully in touch with these ideas, I feel better, happier, more harmonious, more productive, and more responsible.

Bottom line: These ideas really work well for me so I want to share them with you. I am willing to adapt them to any new truth I am shown but haven’t found the need to do so in quite a while.

As far as you are concerned, I trust that you are an intelligent, self-sufficient, responsible person who can and will make your own decisions. I invite you to think about this and more significantly, to use these ideas during difficult times in your life. See how they work for you. And let’s talk about it.

Introduction

Ernest Holmes began his spiritual classic, The Science of Mind, as follows:

“We all look forward to the day when science and religion shall walk hand in hand through the visible to the invisible.”

Well, here we go. I have a deep and abiding interest in both science and spirituality so that quote really struck a chord in me. I see this collaboration between science and spirituality slowly manifesting in my lifetime. I will start with a discussion of spiritual principles first. And in the second post, I will show how I believe these ideas are connected to some recent scientific discoveries.

The Qualities of Spirit (God)

Infinite

One of the first posts on this blog was about the Infinite nature of God and what that means for you and me. Suffice it to say that this means that God, Spirit, is every thing and every one literally.

I refer you to this previous post for more details and interpretations of the significance of this fact. If you agree that God is infinite, please be sure to read this post to more clearly understand what that fully means.

The Triple “O”

I use this phrase to encompass the amazing qualities of Omnipotence, Omnipresence, and Omniscience. I am not being flippant or irreverent by referring to this as the Triple “O”. That phrase makes me smile deep inside as well as externally. It feels like I am telling you about the qualities of this awesome friend of mine. And I would much prefer to think of God that way than as an all-powerful parent to be feared.

I believe that most people would include these qualities as part of their description of their Higher Power along with being infinite. Think about what these words mean for a few minutes.

Consider that Spirit is the Creator of everything (see below), every thing. That would require a whole lot of power. It is literally staggering.

There are two types of power. (I’m not a physicist or engineer but this makes sense to me.) First, what I call raw power, like the power you find in your electric outlets, the power that comes from burning petroleum products, and the power from atomic fusion or fission. Humanity uses lots of raw power every day, gobs of it.

There there is also intelligent power like the power in the TV signals passing through your room and ‘informing’ your TV to display the show you want to watch. Add to that all the myriad of ways we use electromagnetic energy to transmit information in the blink of an eye.
All of that energy, all of that power, all of that information is Spirit. All. Of. It.

Omnipresent

Omnipresence means present everywhere as in:

“There is not a spot where God is not.” – Source Uncertain*

Wherever you are, all of Spirit is there with all of Its Power. If you need to connect with some thing or some one, Spirit is fully there with whatever or whoever it is and able to connect you to that person or thing.

Since Divine Mind is infinite, It has to be everywhere because It is all of every thing and every one. There is no thing and no one that is not part of Spirit (and that is a Divine Double negative).

So when you think about everywhere, what does that bring up for you? My initial thought is that means that Spirit is present all over the world. In the deepest depths of the ocean and on the highest peaks of the Himalayas.

But wait, what about the other planets? What about other solar systems? What about the other galaxies? What about … ? Yup, It’s there too! Not just a little bit here and a little bit there. But all of It everywhere, all the time, forever. Infinity for eternity.

You probably think they come from the people who first expressed them. Nope! These ideas came through those people not from them. Whether these inventors/artists know it or not, those ideas originated in the Mind that we all share, Divine Mind.

This statement does not diminish the accomplishment of anyone who brings something unique and valuable to humanity. Not at all! Instead, for me, it shifts the credit from conceiving the idea to being open to receive the idea and act on it.

The Creator of All That Is

God, Spirit or whatever you choose to call It is the Creator of All That Is. From the smallest subatomic particles to the entire universe, all of that was created by Divine Mind. And if there are other universes, if there is a universe of universes, all of all of (intentional duplication) that was created by the very same Creator.

Now just to be clear, this creation is not something that happened once some number (between thousands and billions) of years ago. It is an ongoing, continuous process that is still occurring right up to this very second. The Universal Laws that Spirit created are still operating now.

I don’t believe that Spirit is actively involved on a moment to moment basis. It created the Principles and Laws which sustains the creative process as you are reading this right this minute.

We hear a lot of talk about the creations that people have developed. But I think that is an unintentional misstatement. People don’t create … anything. We transform stuff. Spirit creates.

Transformation is changing the form of something from this to that, like changing flour, sugar, water, eggs, and other ingredients into a cake. Creation, as I use it here, is making something, anything, out of nothing, no thing. And we humans don’t do that. God does.

That is not to diminish the things we have brought into being through transformation. Transforming raw materials into a light bulb, a shirt, or a massive earth mover is no small feat. Nor am I minimizing the significance of developing an organization like a Boy Scout troop or a multinational corporation. It just isn’t creation.

Unconditional Love

The final aspect of Spirit for this post is that It is Unconditional Love. Not that it has Unconditional Love, it IS Unconditional Love. And, while this is the final aspect of Spirit I am discussing here now, this is not a full and complete description of the qualities of God. After all, I started this by identifying Spirit as Infinite so there is no way to describe It in less than 2000 words. In fact, there is no way to describe It, period. This is a frail attempt from my human mind.

What is unconditional love? It is love that is given with no conditions. It doesn’t matter who you are, what you’ve done (or not done), which religious faith you follow (if any), what you pray and how often. You are loved fully and completely because you are, because you exist. And there is nothing you can do or think or feel to change that. You can’t make it more or less than it is.

There are two parts to receiving love. First, it must be felt and offered by the giver. Second it must be received, accepted, and embodied by the recipient. And there’s the rub. To receive it, we must accept it.

Since we are created as free will beings, we can easily shut off that Love and frequently do so. We do that because, for any number of reasons, we decide that we don’t deserve it. But the recipient of love doesn’t get to decide whether it should be given. That’s totally up to the giver.

The full meaning of this is beyond human comprehension because it is mostly beyond human experience. We must resort to analogies to even begin to get it. So try this one. The sun shines on everyone and everything unconditionally. ‘Good’ people don’t get more or better sunlight than ‘bad’ people. By the same token, the Unconditional Love of Spirit shines on all of us all the time.

In the next post, I will describe something that I have learned about that seems to have all of these qualities. As hard as that is to imagine, I invite you to be sure and read that post. It completes this idea in a way that is concrete and satisfying for me.

Be sure and let me know what you think of these ideas so far. Especially leave a comment if you think I have omitted some significant aspect or quality of God. I long to have a discussion with others about this foundational idea. So leave a comment below.

* If you know who to attribute this quote to, please leave the information in a Comment below. Thanks.