Does God Really Exist?
Many of us are afraid to ask this question - why? Because we are afraid of the answer, or afraid of the repercussions of what might happen to us if start believing there is no God. But to inquire about this may unveil the greatest discovery to humanity, yet.
If we believe God is the greatest, the king of heaven and earth, then why would we even dare to question this? After all, various religions have tried to describe this greatness with many details, many images, many rules, and many rituals -each having their own opinions. As a result, these opinions have divided people across the world for centuries. What if God really doesn’t exist? Why do we have so many of them in different cultures and parts of the world? Why are so many people afraid of God? Why would God want us to live in a divided world, where racism, wars, hatred, fighting, sorrow and greed exist?
Let’s look into this, together, without judgement or prejudices. The writer wishes you to know that I am not attacking or denying God, simply at the time of writing, inquiring if god really exists. The writer also wishes the reader to know that this is not an edited article - it is being written as the writer asks the questions without any presumptions, or attachment to beliefs. It is being written in a form of meditation.
The question we are asking at this moment is does God exist? God, like many other things, exists if you believe it exists. After all, isn’t this what many of us tell our children about Santa Claus? Just because you can’t see it, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Sounds fair? Therefore, to know the answer to this question, shouldn’t we try to first understand belief? If I believe that Santa exists, and you believe Santa doesn’t exist, then each of us, because of our belief, will form opinions and argue to protect our beliefs, each proving that one is true and the other is not. Hence, a classic case of how believing something divides us.
Let us say that my belief, which comes from my choice to believe, is different to your belief, which comes from your choice to believe. For example, if I believe organic vegetables are better for you than regular vegetables, then I have bound myself to that belief. Once we make a choice to believe anything (or not), we bind ourselves to that choice. If our choices are different about the same thing, then we have division. Therefore, as long as I am bound to a belief, my mind is completely unable to look at anything objectively, and the same applies to disbelief. The binding itself is the blinding. And, when we believe, we cannot see, we cannot be free. Whether we believe God exists or not, is the same problem - we choose to believe. So, can we ask the question, does God exist, without the binding of belief?
When we look at a flower, we can see that it is beautiful, it has a certain form, and shape, and color. It is there - we can confirm it as a fact that we are seeing it or even perhaps touching it. And, we all have an understanding that no matter what language we use, we agreed to understand and perceive what the flower is by calling it a “flower”. However, even though the actual flower itself is not really the word, but we need some way of identifying it with words, so we call it a flower.
Now, when it comes to God, it’s a little more challenging, because it is something that doesn’t clearly have a correlation with it. We can’t really see it so we can attach an image, or an idea around what god is. Indeed, this is what we have done. In various parts of the world, there are gods for thunder, and gods for rain, and gods for fortune, and gods in various images that promise different things, etc. And as such, many of these are related to things that we humans seem not to understand, or be able to control, or something greater than we ourselves, or something we admire to have within ourselves. And this creates inferiority, hierarchy, structure.
So what causes us to bind ourselves to the actual belief? Why do we seek out the question of why God exists? Why do so many people pray to God for some relief, or have some request, or need? There seems to be some relationship with the lack of not having something of the feeling of protection from something we don’t want. We seem to want to put our hope into something greater than ourselves and when we do, it seems to come out of this problem of inferiority - or needing to have something that we do not. After all, the God of earthquakes has the power to kill and destroy what we spend years building and protecting. So naturally, we might fear something greater than us. So, out of fear of destruction, or death, or pain, we create a God that helps us, that we can put our hope in to protect us rather than destroy us. We make ourselves soooo small, and god is soooo powerful.
But this attachment, this binding of the word God itself to whatever image we have chosen to bind to, is indeed an illusion and is not God at all. Yet, all around the world, we have alluded to worshipping a God of some kind; for which by the way, another person may not worship the same God but another God. Another person may argue that there is really only one God. And then we have stories invented over time that try and convince us to follow some kind of truth which is in conflict to another story that also tries to bind us to truth. So if this kind of “truth” is so true, then why is it that we are still asking this question in the first place? Illusion. We are not sure. We don’t really know. We are afraid to want to find out. It’s easier to live with the illusion of the images.
So, let’s remove the illusion of the images. What is left? Are we left with the state of this world? The mess, the wars, the protests, the confusion, the conflicting opinions, suicides, disease, cancer, education (which is not education), etc. Surely not for these too, are all created from illusion. How many times have countries gone to war “in the name of God”? If we believe in God, yet willingly destroy each other and the earth, surely we can see the end of this illusion, and what remains.
So, what remains after this illusion? This question is most notably and probably the most important question you will ever ask yourself. After all, who invented God? Did he create us? Did we create him? Let’s look at your concept of God. God seems to be kind, compassionate, loving, merciful, eternal. And, since he has created us in his image, then we are part of him, his image of being loving, kind, compassionately, merciful, and eternal. Wait…. are you? If God created you, then you must be incredible human beings, right? And we should be seeing a world of love, beauty, joy, ecstasy, even rapture, within all of you, not conflict, war, division. So then why is it that it seems he wants you all to live a miserable life? If God made you, why is it then that you are like this? So has God created you, or you created God? It seems, you have created God since as I wrote earlier, there are thousands of Gods invented over many many years. So humans invented God out of our own thought, our own idea and images, and then thought decides it’s important to worship the image that thought itself created :). Do you see how bizarre this is? So all along, we have been worshiping ourselves, that is, an idea of ourselves and calling it god. Interesting.
I am sorry if I have frightened you. If God has been created out of fear as we mentioned earlier, out of dependence, and our own sense of inferiority, then what we have created is only a sense of security that we need and we have called it god and we worship this god with money and rituals. What interesting behavior I was part of once - I never understood it as a child, just followed believing it was the thing to do and that it was the “right” way to do it.
There is also a beautiful understanding out of this. The beauty we see in God we often correlate it with love. And this is a great starting point. But to love something that is created out of illusion is also not really love. Love itself in its true sense lacks a word and no word can ever justify it’s real meaning. Perhaps, we can call it sacredness or holiness. If you honestly understand what this sacredness is, then you will know that the very love we are talking about is God. It’s not outside of you. It is not an image you create with your thought or that was created for you by someone else’s thought. There is nothing to look for when seeking God “out there”. And God is definitely not something that can be created by human thought - that is not truth, surely. However, to have a mind that is outside of hatred, fear, anger, sorrow, greed, selfishness, that is a mind that is completely outside of the concept of time, is a mind that can understand this sacredness.
So, what many of us do, is we seek-out gurus, religious leaders, other leaders, authorities, experts, etc. to help us to understand what to do to create this mind. We rely on them to help us feel safe and secure. We continue to seek throughout time and this is the cycle that we have been caught-up in for centuries upon centuries, forever depending on others to help us understand the sacredness of life; depending on books; depending on coaches; depending on thought-leaders, etc.
I come to you as no-one except with a message. The mere fact that you have read this far is because you yourself, is asking this question. For I am none other than a person like you, who experiences what you do, who wants to live in a world that is free of fear, where you are accepted for who you are no matter what, and yet not rely on any belief or set of beliefs to determine my direction when all the answers are within me, as long as I don’t resist the fact that I need to get down on my hands any knees and crawl around in the dark to find those answers. Don’t believe anything the writer says here - ask the questions for yourself if you want to understand that sacredness I write about here. Unfortunately, most people will say it is too difficult, and prefer to rely on the age-old problem of dependence. Where there is dependence, there is no love. Where there is vitality, energy, love for life, ecstasy, rapture - it is there.