Why does GOD exist?

[Moonglow]

Originally Posted by Greenslade

Hello Moonglow


What is faith though? And true faith implies there is a false faith - and false faith is not really faith at all. If one just knows it then it's no longer a question of faith, and often that knowing is far beyond the egoic mind that wants to come up with a reason.


The conversation about God is not a conversation about God at all and that's the one thing that's completely missing in all of this, so if the conversation is off to a bad start things can only get worse. Like 28 pages of waxing lyrical and flexing of the intellectual muscles and where has it brought us? Is there any conclusion, are we any further forwards at all or have we never really left the place we've always been?



What have we got out of it, Moonglow? So much waxing Spiritual and we're no further on. Really, what was the point? The conversation has never been about God - none of it. It has always been about agenda.


Love and hate lie on the same scale, and one is the polar opposite of the other. Underneath they are the same emotion, the difference is how we feel and how our reaction is manifested. Love and hate also have psychological components to them, the caveman brain has been programmed for survival and we automatically go towards what we Love and away from what we hate or fear. Just like a relationship, the feeling is Love because there's is a benefit to being in the relationship but when the benefit becomes a detriment it becomes instinctual hate.


Similarly with God. One of the reasons Christianity may have been so popular with the oppressed is because it offered salvation from the drudgery and poverty of everyday existence - Spirituality calls it mundane existence. When you get to heaven and you're seated t God's right hand everything will be perfect, the same as when you have those higher vibrations. So yes, the patterns remain the same after two thousand years and 28 pages of..... wisdom????

Hi Greenslade,

Faith to me is trust. So what develops this trust? Experience of some kind?
Can understand where you may be going with this in regards to knowing. For if one knows, then one knows. But doesn't this knowing "far beyond egoic mind" develop a trust with in? If so, then to have faith is to have trust and if trusted fully would it be questioned? Just my thinking on this.

Discussions about God can get tricky. Just because I may not relate to it the way another does, does not mean necessarily the other is not talking about God.
I just don't relate to it.

If Gid is with in us or as some may state "We are God", then aren't they talking about God? If God is a concept created by Humans to point to or relate to the Creater/Soirce/universe, then yes the conversation would be of concepts and ideas about.......

Is the whole thread about reaching a conclusion anyways? Or just an open space to exchange ideas, thoughts, theologies, ect. Gues it is in how the subject is taken.

God has good and some uncomfortable reaction with in me. It has been created to be. If not why are "we" discussing it? Is it to understand or just express ourselves? For me a little of both.

But, what is being understood and expressed? Ourselves. To play around a little here with a thought will add this. If we be of God then aren't we expressing God? More fairy dust being sprinkled?lol or is this what is going on?

It has been more then 2000 years in regards to God, as I understand. Christianity not the first and it seems in some regards "Spirituality" has become the new religion for some and the torch gets passed on to the next. Salvation and hope being offered.

In expressing it in words yes, can be lyrical, airy-fairy, idealistic, and at times inspiring. Those that experience what they do and thus create a knowing don't seem to say much or persist others follow. They just express what they do or simply say find out for yourself.

None of it can answer the question for oneself, if oneself does not find the question makes sense or is even relevant. Sometimes it just shooting the breeze.

Personally, I get other viewpoints which in some regards widens the view. At times also given the space to just express my thoughts and bounce them off someone besides myself. At time, get inspiration to look a bit deeper into it, if so desired.

Originally Posted by Miss Hepburn

Hi, What do you mean re what I bolded? Thanks.

Oh I just realized... so I will say it...you probably mean those that have had
no direct exp so made something up; "created a concept''...

Tolle said that there are two types of consciousness - object consciousness and space consciousness. He describes object consciousness as anything to do with mind/brain processes, so anything that involves knowledge, memory, reasoning.... He doesn't go into space consciousness so much but I think he's talking about Gnosis, which put simply is knowing without knowing how you know. That goes beyond the mind/brain and experience. "God is....." is object consciousness, which is form or a mental construction.

To me 'Supreme Being' is an attempt to imply more/higher knowledge but really it's yet another personification by the brain/mind.


Edit.........
I just found this and thought it made so much sense......

"Atheism in the name of God is an abandonment of all religious beliefs . . . giving up the attempt to make sense of the world in terms of any fixed idea or intellectual system. It is becoming again as a child and laying oneself open to reality as it is actually and directly felt, experiencing it without trying to categorize, identify or name it." -Alan Watts

Originally Posted by Moonglow

Hi Greenslade,


Faith to me is trust. So what develops this trust? Experience of some kind?
Can understand where you may be going with this in regards to knowing. For if one knows, then one knows. But doesn't this knowing "far beyond egoic mind" develop a trust with in? If so, then to have faith is to have trust and if trusted fully would it be questioned? Just my thinking on this.

Discussions about God can get tricky. Just because I may not relate to it the way another does, does not mean necessarily the other is not talking about God.
I just don't relate to it.

If Gid is with in us or as some may state "We are God", then aren't they talking about God? If God is a concept created by Humans to point to or relate to the Creater/Soirce/universe, then yes the conversation would be of concepts and ideas about.......

Is the whole thread about reaching a conclusion anyways? Or just an open space to exchange ideas, thoughts, theologies, ect. Gues it is in how the subject is taken.

God has good and some uncomfortable reaction with in me. It has been created to be. If not why are "we" discussing it? Is it to understand or just express ourselves? For me a little of both.

But, what is being understood and expressed? Ourselves. To play around a little here with a thought will add this. If we be of God then aren't we expressing God? More fairy dust being sprinkled?lol or is this what is going on?

It has been more then 2000 years in regards to God, as I understand. Christianity not the first and it seems in some regards "Spirituality" has become the new religion for some and the torch gets passed on to the next. Salvation and hope being offered.

In expressing it in words yes, can be lyrical, airy-fairy, idealistic, and at times inspiring. Those that experience what they do and thus create a knowing don't seem to say much or persist others follow. They just express what they do or simply say find out for yourself.

None of it can answer the question for oneself, if oneself does not find the question makes sense or is even relevant. Sometimes it just shooting the breeze.

Personally, I get other viewpoints which in some regards widens the view. At times also given the space to just express my thoughts and bounce them off someone besides myself. At time, get inspiration to look a bit deeper into it, if so desired.

Hi Moonglow

This is where we come to a very different understanding of Spirituality. The question of "What is Spirituality?" has been discussed in these hallowed forums before and as far as I'm aware there was never a conclusion. It seemed that it had more definitions than there were people to have those definitions. So you ask what trust is but what's happening in the answering of it? By default we go through a mind process to work out what trust is, yet for me there's still something inside that won't abide anything that comes from the mind. It's as though the Soul/Higher Mind won't suffer that fool of an egoic mind.

The trust just is and it's either in communion with you or not. For some reason I have to choose my words carefully here, it's something I feel I need to do. I don't have trust and it isn't a part of me, it seems as though it exists in its own right. It just is, I don't have trust because I am trust and yet trust is autonomous and exists in its own right.

If you had lived on a desert island would God exist? If a branch falls from a tree and there is nobody there to hear it would there still be a God? If you'd been brought up a strict Pagan how different would this discussion be? How differently might you be thinking if your parents had been Native American Indians?

There's another God thread that asks why God doesn't show himself and it's the same mentality that begins with God's existence as a fact. One of the suggestions was that God could say that he would turn the sky green for a day, and everybody would know that God existed and he had that power. I wonder how many people would say the aliens did it and not God at all?

God's existence is a belief and people can believe anything they like. I walked away from a car smash (I'm fine, no injuries by the way) and I'm having difficulty in believing that I walked away from it uninjured. I'm here to tell the tale but I can't believe that I survived. I can also make the choice to believe God exists despite everything else, including the possibility that the belief in God/Gods was hard-wired into my skull.

Twenty-nine pages of Spirituality and here's the irony of it all. Alan Watts said that if you are Spiritual, you are God playing at being not-God. That's classical, right there. Is that twenty-nine pages of so much technical and lyrical Spirituality and for all the words of wisdom we don't even know what we're talking about? Twenty-nine pages of talking about God when we're really talking about playing not God?

You seem to think God is a concept only; it doesn't have to be.

“Theologians may quarrel, but the mystics of the world speak the same language.”
Meister Eckhart

[Little Creek77]

A God is an Easter Bunny. A made up entity used to control people with. Thus if you disobey the word of "God" you go to hell or what ever. It gives the church or ruling class authority.

[iamthat]

Originally Posted by Little Creek77

A God is an Easter Bunny. A made up entity used to control people with. Thus if you disobey the word of "God" you go to hell or what ever. It gives the church or ruling class authority.

What!! Are you saying that the Easter Bunny isn't real? Next you'll be saying that there is no Santa Claus.

But again this is talking about God within the context of a particular religious doctrine. Spiritual realisation is nothing to do with religion.

Peace.

[iamthat]

Originally Posted by Greenslade

Love and hate lie on the same scale, and one is the polar opposite of the other. Underneath they are the same emotion, the difference is how we feel and how our reaction is manifested. Love and hate also have psychological components to them, the caveman brain has been programmed for survival and we automatically go towards what we Love and away from what we hate or fear. Just like a relationship, the feeling is Love because there's is a benefit to being in the relationship but when the benefit becomes a detriment it becomes instinctual hate.

Love on an emotional level is conditional love, and can indeed turn into hate when conditions change. The emotional plane is a plane of duality (or the plane of polar opposites, same thing). But there is a higher unconditional love, which naturally arises from within, whatever the conditions.

Peace.

The problem with these discussions is some people speak from God realization and others see it as a concept foistered on them.

Look in reality, if there is God, that God is unknowable, yet sense-able. In the world of talk and duality, the closest way to point to is some words. So we have words: God is as good as any of them. Words don't matter so much as the realization of God-ness. Something like that.

[JustBe]

Originally Posted by janielee

The problem with these discussions is some people speak from God realization and others see it as a concept foistered on them.

Look in reality, if there is God, that God is unknowable, yet sense-able. In the world of talk and duality, the closest way to point to is some words. So we have words: God is as good as any of them. Words don't matter so much as the realization of God-ness. Something like that.

The realisations can bridge words through its own awareness and integration deeper. So then, one evokes the ‘feeling’ into words,images, symbols beyond ‘others’ who project their own version. Every version is right and true until ‘right and true’ no longer attaches to itself. Then of course it just is. And the isness can lead you in all directions, where directions exist and don’t exist, where is-ness exists and no is-ness exists. Now where am I? Somewhere but nowhere wandering through the whole stream of -‘none other’ than myself. My no self can be rather interesting...