God for me, isn’t a being in the sky, but a creative life force all around me, present in all things.

As my regular readers will know, I’ve been on a journey of self-discovery over the last year and an existential crisis. After much research and reading of the scientific evidence, I came to the conclusion that there must be a God, but that, since I have no evidence that He intervenes in our day-to-day affairs, He must be a Deist God. A supreme, unknowable entity made everything, then stepped back, letting It’s creation evolve through the laws of science.

Although I still think that, I think I’m evolving this existential view a little more. I’ve been reading a fabulous book called a History of God by Karen Armstrong in which she outlines how religious belief has been shaped since the dawn of human history. 

In it, she explains that it was primarily through Aristotle that the western concept of a monotheistic, hierarchical, eternal, supreme and single, God arose. He conceived of an Unmoved Mover, a single cause of all motion and activity in the universe, though he did not attach a divinity to it. Judaism may have borrowed this concept, or arrived at it convergently, but it grew from there. 

Other parts of the world however, did not follow down this path. In Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism and even Hinduism, God isn’t a monotheistic, supreme external being, doling out justice on the world, demanding fealty in order to gain entry into His magical, heavenly kingdom in the sky. These faiths have taught for thousands of years that God is all around us, in all things, a fundamental power which sustains everything. God is not an idol to be worshipped, but a state of enlightenment which can be reached through transcendent practice. They believe such states are natural to humanity, that they can be attained by anybody. (My Eastern readers will be thinking – Duh, you’re only learning that now? 🙄)

This idea, of an innate God present in all things, ties in with my own lived experience. God for me, isn’t a being in the sky, but a life force all around me. In the natural world. We tend to think ourselves as separate beings, distinct from each other and apart from other living things in the world around us, but that isn’t completely true. Yes, we have our own body, our own persona, but by the force of gravity, we all attached to the same earth. We all walk the same soil, tread the same paths. The fundamental forces that flow through all life on earth, and even the universe, is connected to us, is part of us. 

And the latest models of reality support this idea of a universal quantum field, a fundamental level of energy underpinning all matter, which permeates everything and from which all things emanate. Everything is connected, however distant it may seem.

In this way, God is not an Almighty Being, but an almighty state of being, which is bound up within the essential fabric of our existence, and an inherent part of life itself. It isn’t something to be feared or worshipped, but something we have to find; through meditation, yoga, prayer and spiritual practice. We find God by tuning ourselves into the very fabric of the universe. 

God is the wind and the trees, it is the sun on the flowers, and the rain in your hair. God is nature. God is evolution. God is revealed through science. God is the art you have created, or the goal you have achieved. God is a nebula erupting in the cosmos, or the black hole swallowing time and gravity. God is the delicious food you had for breakfast and the plants, animals, flowers and insects that brought you it. God is the bioelectric force of life itself. From the fundamental particles of matter, to the elemental, evolutionary forces that bind everything together. God is energy. God is everything.