Who is God Anyway?

"All over the world, human beings are worshipping a God which they consider to be separate from themselves, somewhere up in the clouds.  For the most part, those who pray and participate in daily or weekly rituals are simply following in the footsteps of their ancestors, going through the motions without having a mystical experience. Christian doctrine teaches us that human beings are made in the image of God. And this is indeed, true, but not in the sense that God is a human-looking being up in the sky with whom we will meet some fateful day. In truth, we are God-not as individuals-but as the whole of all life in and out of form.

            One can say that everything a sculptor creates, she makes in her own image. The sculpture may not be made in the image of the artist's physical body, but nevertheless it is made in her own image, the image of the essence of her being.

            The essence of our being is a shared essence which has manifested in many different physical forms and personalities. We are like music wanting to play-so we create an orchestra-one musician for each instrument needed to have a full musical expression. God is the music and we are the musicians we created before we were we, back when together we knew ourselves simply as I.

            Certainly our human minds cannot begin to grasp the infinite. As physical beings, our awareness is directed at things which seem finite. We experience life as something which begins and finally ends, like the years and the seasons. From a physical point of view, we perceive everything in finite terms. "Nothing goes on forever." It is surprising that the English language even contains the words infinite and forever. These are vague notions, at best. And in the same way, that which we call God is an even vaguer notion, as vague as the awareness of our own true identities.

            In fact, everything does go on forever. Because God goes on forever, and God is the name we give to all that is, the great everything. There is simply nothing which exists that is not God. Therefore, since God is a never-ending event, and God is everything: everything is a never-ending event. Only the forms change. Only the shapes, the colors, and the faces change.

            It is our confusion between form and essence which causes this great identity crisis. If we cut ourselves off from our awareness of the essence of life, then we have cut off our ability to perceive our own essence as well. It is no wonder that we confuse our essence with our forms. If we are a society of beings who believe that we are nothing more than our physical forms, then that event which we call "death" would naturally seem like quite a threat to everything that we have come to know and love-the end of our connection with the world, with our loved ones, with nature, and with God. If we have no sense of our own infinity, then we have no sense of God. And until each of us really understands that she is God, not by herself,--but as a whole with all that exists with her-she will have no understanding of her own identity. So, rest assured that most everyone you meet in the Western World is suffering from a paralyzing identity crisis. This, alone, is reason enough to have compassion for one another."          

                                                                                    --Maya Sarada Devi

Regaining Consciousness in the Western World: Radical Essays on the Human Experience.