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Word Gems
exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity
"The Eternal our God is One"
- that is, God is Singular Pervasive
Reality. Everything, without exception,
is a manifestation of an eternal unity,
a transcending ubiquitous consciousness.
There is nothing else - nothing other
than this Singular Divine Totality.
return to the main-page article on "God"
Preview and Summary: We learned from Dr. Amit Goswami, quantum physicist, that consciousness, not matter, is the ground of all being; that, all is contained within Universal Consciousness - God. Herein we find the same principle expressed by an ancient biblical verse: "The Eternal is One."
Everything that has a beginning is also subject to an ending.
But there exists a domain beyond the reach of time’s degradation. There, things simply exist, eternally, have always been, have no opposite, no duality, and do not suffer loss.
Elsewhere we have discussed how the opposite of death is not life but birth. Life is of God, and all attributes of God have no opposite: love has no opposite, joy has no opposite.
a Singular Pervasive Reality
The things of God are all-pervasive, fill the universe, never abate, cannot be overthrown - and seeming threats to such are merely apparent, not real; just the mad delusions of the Small Ego.
For example, the concept of "Satan," a mythic abstraction, cannot be the opposite of God. Universal Goodness has no opposite because everything that exists expresses a sweet singular cosmic essence of having been conceived in love.
All things represent the Goodness of God; even that which, in distorted myopic views, we deem to be Evil. But this is misperception, like a child calling the dentist a bad man. All things fit into a pattern of leading us into a mature consciousness, without which we could not enjoy our coming eternal life in Summerland.
The Eternal our God is One - that is, God is Singular Pervasive Reality
Dr. Gerald Schroeder, MIT physicist and Hebrew scholar, is one of the great teachers. The following is an excerpt from one of his excellent books, "The Hidden Face of God." Therein, he explains that "the Shema" - an epicentral prayer of Judaism, to which Jesus himself drew special attention - speaks to the fact that God exists as Singular Pervasive Reality!
"Hear O Israel, the Eternal our God, the Eternal is One!" is no banal pronouncement that there is but one deity. This is not the point of the Hebrew text. Dr. Schroeder enlightens us:
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... a unity pervades and underlies all existence. This is the meaning of "the Eternal is One" (Deut. 6:4)…
But don't think that this is the kind of one after which might come the quantities two, three, and four. Nothing as superficial as a number is being revealed in these statements.
Rather, the infinite metaphysical as perceived by the physical is an all-encompassing, universal unity…
“You shall know this day and place it in your heart that the Eternal is God in heaven above and on earth below” (Deut. 4:39). ain od -- a Hebrew expression in this verse meaning there is nothing else.
That is to say, there is nothing else. Nothing other than this singular totality.
Everything, everything with no exception, is a manifestation of an eternal unity, a transcending ubiquitous consciousness, which many label as God...
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Those who preach a Satan-figure outside of, and in opposition to, the will of God do not understand how such gross, errant notion violates not only a central precept of their own purported Infallible Book - a concept affirmed by Jesus himself in the New Testament: "The Eternal is One!" - but also rails against the very substructure, the architectonic reality, of the entire cosmos: There is nothing else - nothing other than this Singular Divine Totality, One Universal Consciousness, The Great "I Am," in whom "we live and move and have our being."
All things - including that which people deem to be evil - directly or indirectly, come from the hand of God. As the "Course In Miracles" wisely asserts, "All things are lessons God would have me learn."
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'the Eternal is One, there is nothing else': the parable of the two whirlpools
Elenchus. Our statements concerning “the Eternal is One, there is nothing else” are not easy to understand.
Kairissi. Which is why quantum mechanics’ assertions are also non-intuitive; that, consciousness, not matter, is the ground of all being in the universe, and that everything derives from Universal Consciousness.
E. It’s not intuitive because pretty much everyone is a materialist at heart. It’s really hard not to be; I mean, trees and tables, people and pineapples, all seem very solid to us. And not just solid, but they definitely seem to be “out there,” separate from ourselves.
K. It’s a hard sell to suggest, as the quantum experiments indicate, that everything is connected.
E. Moreover, mind does not live in a little house called the brain, but instead, the brain, the whole body, all people and the entire universe, exist within mind, within Universal Mind.
K. We’d like to report to our readers that we’ve encountered what is probably the best analogy to explain “the Eternal is One, there is nothing else”…
E. … and also that everything comes from, is made of, consciousness, Universal Consciousness. Let’s introduce Dr. Kastrup:
Dr. Bernardo Kastrup, PhD philosophy, PhD computer science, for many years worked at CERN, the large hadron collider in Geneva.
E. Given Dr. Kastrup’s credentials, he’s probably the leading spokesman in the world today in terms of explaining the fraudulent doctrine of the primacy of matter.
K. He’s very hard to argue against. His erudition and sharp angle on logic reminds me of this:
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863-1944), On The Art Of Reading: "A very well-informed person is an object of terror."
E. This quote makes me smile, and readers will want to get Kastrup’s books for the full account, but for our purposes here let’s focus on his brilliant analogy of the two whirlpools:
K. Each human being corresponds to a different whirlpool; each person with his or her particular points of view and field of personal consciousness.
E. But here's where the fun begins. The whirlpools are not exactly stand-alone entities. These "bodies" are not substantive at all but only apparently so. And they might seem to exist "separately" in a vast ocean but, in reality, are connected, as each merely expresses, in a unique way, the underlying medium which is the ocean.
K. Each whirlpool is made of the same water, comes from the same source; so it is with apparently individual human minds.
E. Kastrup points out that these whirlpools-as-people are neither truly separate nor substantive but are "just undulations - disturbances - of the medium," be it the ocean or Universal Mind.
K. His thought-provoking definition of reality is a collection of "excitations" of Universal Consciousness.
E. This "parable of the two whirlpools" helps us visualize the meaning of "brains exist within consciousness" rather than "consciousness existing within brains."
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Editor's note: the following is offered as a light-hearted example of how both good and apparent evil issue from God's hand; all is given and allowed for our long-term development.
Viktor Frankl, Man's Search For Meaning:
Ultimate meaning necessarily exceeds and surpasses the finite intellectual capacities of man; in logotherapy [which focuses on finding a purpose in life] we speak in this context of a super-meaning. What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms. Logos is deeper than logic.
A psychiatrist who goes beyond the concept of the super-meaning will sooner or later be embarrassed by his patients, just as I was when my daughter at about six years of age asked me the question,
"Why do we speak of the good Lord?"
Whereupon I said, "Some weeks ago, you were suffering from measles, and then the good Lord sent you full recovery."
However, the little girl was not content; she retorted, "Well, but please, Daddy, do not forget: in the first place, he had sent me the measles."
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Is 'God' a personal God, with personality, who knows us individually, or just a life-principle to be found in all aspects of creation?
This is a question that is debated on the other side. Opinions vary. For example, in the books featuring the channeled direct-voice mediumship of Emily French, we find intellectuals over there discussing this issue.
As I look at all the evidence, I must come down on the side favoring a “personal God who knows us” while also acknowledging that “God as a universal life-principle” is also true. This position of complementarity, not contradiction, reminds us of Niels Bohr’s proposition.
In the “evolution” research report we looked at the mathematical evidence strongly indicating that the complexity-harmony we see woven into the fabric of the universe could not have come to us via randomness.
This suggests that a real, living, Intelligence subsumes it all. Each of us has what we call "personality," a sense of personhood, because - to my way of thinking - we reflect the archetypal source of personality and personhood.
While accepting these statements, we also deny that deity is a "sky-God, somewhere 'up there', with long white beard, sitting on a marble throne". Such image represents fodder of ancient myth, the ignorance of primordial peoples, and has no place in reality. God is "spirit," is consciousness itself, is not a "thing" in the 3-D universe. More than this we have difficulty affirming.
This is a large subject, one that we shall be investigating for a very long time to come, even in Summerland. However, here is one testimony from the other side which sees things as I do:
The following is from Flashes of Light from the Spirit-land, through the mediumship of Mrs. J. H. Conant, by Allen Putnam, Frances Ann Conant, 1872.
Question. ls the Deity a being, or is he a principle pervading all Nature? If the latter, why do you address him as a being, in the invocation?
Answer. That our God is a personal, and also an impersonal God, is equally true. Since the God-power or God-life is everywhere, he, it, or she is of course personified everywhere. I believe in the worship of all that is worthy of worship. If it is the flower, let us worship there. If it is the human soul, let us worship there. If it is a lofty thought, let us worship there. Wherever we see anything, or perceive any state, either of mind or matter, that is worthy of worship, there we should worship.
All Spiritualists, I believe, consider God to be an infinite principle pervading all forms, occupying all space. I believe this. I have seen nothing during my life in the spirit-world to cause me to believe otherwise, I did not believe it when here [on Earth].
But the Book of Life hath been so widely opened to me since death, that I can come to no other conclusion than that God is a principle pervading all forms, and occupying all space. God is in the atmosphere, and is the atmosphere. God is in the sunlight, and is the sunlight. God is the sun and the shadow. He is everything, and is in all places. It is absolutely useless to endeavor to confine God to any particular place or state of being, for could we do that, we should rob God of the God-power. We should at once chain this great eternal principle, this infinite life, to finite space [thus limiting God]. We should [by this confinement of God] at once bring it down within the scope of [limited] human analysis.
And I, for one, am glad we cannot. But we have been so in the habit of addressing this Deity, this Power of Life, as though it were a [mere] man or woman, a [mere human] personality like ourselves, that it is very hard to change our course ... as I before remarked, our God is a personal God, and therefore it is proper that we should thus address him.
Editor’s note: In my opinion, some of the best discussion and reasoning concerning the ontology of God [what God is] will be found in the science books of Dr. Federico Faggin.
God is Universal Consciousness, which provides the underlying essence of matter, of all things in the universe. (See the "quantum" page.) However, I do not see how we can avoid speaking of God as a “personal God.”
The mathematics of probability strongly lead us to Intelligent Design. (See the "evolution" page.) Can there be such a thing as an Intelligent Designer if said entity is not also, in some sense, an Intelligent Person? How could there be intelligence without an intelligent person?
We speak of God’s love. Despite what skeptics view as a heartless and cold universe, there is a mountain of evidence to suggest that the universe was also created for our pleasure, education, developmental needs, and the like. All these are properly viewed as expressions of love. Can there be such a thing as a God of Love if said entity is not also, in some sense, a Loving Person? How could there be love without a loving person?
We might apply this reasoning to a number of attributes we ascribe to God, and when we do, I would say, it is unavoidable not to also judge said entity as a thinking, rational, feeling Person.
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