Spirituality

What you think God is colors every thought and belief you have. This is true even for people who don’t believe in God or a Spiritual Supreme Being because no one is exempt from the Law of the Universe.

The Science of Mind and New Thought definition of God is not what most of us grew up believing or at least what we were told. But the greater our definition of God/Spirit, the greater and more powerful our connection to it and ourselves. It is a basic principle that we must embody if we are to use the creative power we have been given.

This shift or growth in our definition of God will be easily embraced by some and more difficult for others. It depends on where you are starting from.

For me, somehow, somewhere inside of me was a knowledge -- a knowing -- that there was some "Great Spirit" responsible for all the things I saw in nature. From observing nature, from high school chemistry and biology, I saw how everything worked together so perfectly. I didn't have a name for it then, but it had to be some fantastic, perfect Intelligence that had put all this stuff together. Now I call it Universal Intelligence; Divine Mind; Nature; Life; Good; Cosmic Consciousness; Spirit; Creator; Love and Law; Source. Oh yeah, and God.

God. This is my evolving definition of God. This is the Science of Mind definition of God.

Let's look at it from a scientific perspective.

Scientists will tell you, the more they study things, the more they see a mathematical perfection in everything. It is beginning to dawn on them that something of unfathomable intelligence has brought these things into existence in such perfect proportion and harmony. An Intelligence, hmmm. The scientists are giving a name to this Intelligence – they are calling it God. Imagine that -- scientists proving there is a God!

This is not exactly the God I grew up with. With my Catholic upbringing, God was a humanized being, an Old Man, up there, in heaven, that we pray to, with Jesus as his son who was once on Earth.

And therein lies the folly in my religious upbringing -- a "humanized being". We (current standard world religions like Judaism, Christianity, Islam) have all made GOD IN OUR OWN IMAGE.

Wait, isn't that backwards? Doesn't the Bible say: God made MAN is his (its) own image? Yes, the Bible has it right, but we read it backwards. We interpreted this to mean thus: we see a physical man, God made Man in his image, therefore, the man-image we see must be what God looks like.

We have applied the vices and weaknesses of humankind to a Spiritual Being. A vengeful god, a jealous god, a punishing god. Don't those adjectives more accurately describe people? How can those adjectives apply to an omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient Spiritual Being? The answer is, they really don't. They don't describe this Universal Presence and Principle of Go(o)dness.

I am not here to debate the language of the Bible – this time. I am asking you to rethink what you think God is. Expand your definition of Go(o)d and you will expand your expression of it. When you do that, when your God becomes a Loving, Universal Presence that works through an impersonal, unchanging Law, your whole world changes. It will change your outlook on your life. It will change how you interpret and analyze everything. It will change the way you think, and that is the way you change your life.

What if your God was not a disapproving, capricious, punishing, unresponsive old man way, way separate from you, living up in heaven?

What if your God was a Presence within you and surrounding you? What if your God was a Power, a universally singular Power that was all Goodness? (That would kind of eliminate the devil theory, wouldn't it.) What if your God was all-giving, only able to give, incapable of refusing to give and unable to take anything away? What if your God was a Creative Principle that did its creating by KNOWING, knowing only itself as the oneness and the allness, bringing everything into form through an unchanging, immutable and impersonal Law. And what if THAT was the God in whose "image and likeness" we were created.

Whoa.

Hold onto your smallness, folks, if that idea scares you. But I am here to tell you of your Greatness, of your oneness with the Greatness. This is what God has given us -- the ability to be exactly like itself, IF your definition of God is an Intelligence, a Power, a force, a presence, an impersonal principle and all-giving lovingness. This is the real image and likeness we are made in.

Our "likeness" to God is this: we have been given a mind that is capable of thinking just like Divine Mind (God) thinks. In fact, we are that Divine Mind individualized. God's Mind is the Universal and our minds are the individuated. But it is all the same Mind, and it all works the same way. Therefore, we create, through the use of thought, our own individualized experience, the way God creates with its mind on the universal level. We are just a capable of creation as God. We just do it on an individualized scale. That is how we are like God. This is not some self-grandiose stance, this is God-given and God-ordained. This is the natural progression of Oneness of God. If there is nothing else but God, then we are a part of God, and we have been endowed with the qualities (image and likeness) of God.

Again, take a clue from nature. Scientists are discovering that everything is Energy. Way down, at the most microscopic level, are the same particles that make up you, and me, and so-called inanimate objects, all zooming around it their own tiny orbits. Which leads to the conclusion that all is one and one is all.

So there you have scientific observation that there is a universal oneness to life and that the oneness is a perfect Intelligence. Metaphysically, that means we are all of the One, and that One’s nature is Divine Intelligence. As we start shifting our definition of God to a Universal Presence and Power, Science and Religion merge onto a common path.

Creativity is our nature. My expanding definition of God allows me to experience a connection to the Divine because it is within me and all around me. It allows me to think of myself as a part of the Power and the Presence, that because of this, I can create every experience I want in my life with the full creative power of God supporting me. I have Dominion in my Life. Think a better idea of what God is and how it exists in your life.

Namasté. -- "The spirit in me salutes the spirit in you."

Copyright 2005, Tina Montalto

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