True believers have firm beliefs regarding the nature of God. As I matured and became a university student of Western Philosophy, and even before that as I began to read important books while in the U.S. Army to get the GI Bill for higher education, I began to question the very existence of that which we call “God”. But, in my case, many years had to pass as I continued to think and study as my spiritual position evolved.
Beliefs rooted in our early conditioning do not change easily but they can and do in certain minds. Without going through my evolutionary history, after lengthy thought and study, I settled on a position in which I considered myself an atheist by belief, and an agnostic necessarily because of the human inability to know for certain.
I grew up inculcated in the Christian thought of Wesleyan Methodism. And it was that early life conditioning that I rebelled from or out of. Later, as a young man, I explored and was baptized in Roman Catholicism, but I rejected that religious philosophy shortly after beginning my formal university studies of Western Philosophy. Years later I began my personal study of diverse Eastern philosophical thought.
After leaving my relatively brief involvement in Roman Catholicism, I became fairly comfortable with my new position as a combined atheist and agnostic for fifteen years until a major change occurred during the mid-70s. While poet-in-residence at Montana State University
Circumstantially, there at Montana State, I was given a new translation of the Islamic Koran, the holy book of a religion I had zero interest in. I did not get farther reading it than the first very impressive opening prayer, interesting partly because “God” was referred to as “the One”, and because of the words, “Lord of the Worlds” plural. That evening alone at home in the mid-70s at age forty, I experienced an impulse to read that prayer aloud after fifteen years of non-prayer. When finished, I became incredibly, unnaturally sleepy. I could barely undress before falling into bed. Where my mind went, I have no idea.
I slept deeply that night, and when I woke, I felt different somehow. Light and clear, rested and alert. I felt compelled to go to a window and look out. The sky was exceptionally clear and bright. And as I witnessed all that “out-there-ness”, I experienced a deep inner knowing, a real-iz-ation that something called “God” exists! But different from any prior associations, and That or deity had nothing to do with religion! Suddenly I felt “at one” and “in peace”. I was “Home”. That was my new beginning, not a return to any belief or religion I had known or espoused prior.
I determined that the night before sleep, I experienced some sort of spontaneous “epiphany”, a spiritual epiphany or inner event that caused me to feel at peace and at one with all that is. I was “back home” but in a new way. And new “Way” was in and of something called GOD!
That, however, turned out to be only the beginning of my spontaneous evolution as a psychic, and shortly after, spiritual healer. Even though I had suddenly become a theist, it was in a new way. My renewed belief in the existence of God lacked definition. It was not the Christian God I grew up with, nor any that I had read about. I still, all these years later, lack a definite understanding of what the term “God” refers to. But, when the movie “Star Wars” came out, I found the term, “The Force”, very suggestive.
Since, I have used such terms as “The One, the Force, the First Cause, the Ground of Being, the All and other similar references. God understood as Spirit is also appealing. And some sort of Jungian creative principle or force is also appealing, a dynamic principle that involves the essential inner masculine and inner feminine principles, or, the One and the Two that begets the Three. That idea is both creative and evolutionary. In other words, and in a word, THE CREATIVE OR CAUSATIVE FORCE that is referred to in the original movie, “Star Wars”.
And, I tentatively believe that each of us is of it and lives within It or That, the God Force, All Mind or Spirit. “We live, move and have our being IN “Him” or That, as stated in the Christian Bible. For me, that is a powerful expression and highly suggestive. We, as humans, are “in” and “of” GOD. That statement of tentative belief is not “Anthropomorphic” as in the Biblical mythology that I grew up with.
So with all that in mind, I will leave this writing by saying to my readers, “May the Force be with you!”
This commentary ought to make a reader feel easier about remaining open to a tentative understanding of the God Concept. But, we may have to wait for further knowledge until after our physical death. And, it should abolish fears that certain religion instill in their followers. A next step in thinking may be to conjecture in regard to what happens after shedding the physical body.
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