A friend, a close friend, someone I love very much asked me last year if I believe in God. This is my answer -

It is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, most of my life in fact.

I grew up with Churches and Bibles, sin, hell and repentance. Very early I came to understand that I do not believe in God as a distinct entity, discrete and removed from “us.” I do not believe in God as a single “someone”.

I do, most definitely, believe in the divine. I don’t believe what I think is strikingly new or different but I do believe in -

God: There is but one substance, one being, one existence – one material. It clumps together and is made animate by the reverberations that pulse through it. The same force that moves the planets in their orbits causes my heart to beat. The matter that is being bubbles like a caldron. Any given moment finds this material on its most infinitesimal scale unique in its configurations. All configurations will come into being, each renders existence into forms we cannot preconceive. Like sound that vibrates through fluid, there is a vibration that continually activates being. It organizes being into (ever shifting) form.

Intelligence: Being has mind. I have mind. The same conditions that lead to my mind provide for the mind of being. It may be the mind of sleep running on dream logic and I think not self-aware. Yes, naively I believe we all have access to this mind. I believe that we can open ourselves to it, and to one another. I believe that we can turn our attention to one another and find those places where we touch. I believe that we can know one another, at least some small bit. Maybe this knowing is nothing more than imagining, but what is knowing anyway?

Prayer: I believe in it.

Time: 30 billion years from now is only 30 seconds away. As inevitable as this moment are all moments. While experience causes us to imagine something else, at a certain point the expansiveness of time and the inevitability of the coming of a moment, of an event, makes it clear that all there is no time, there is only now.

ESP: I believe that it is possible to know things through “other” means. I believe that when I look into the face of another that is open and present, I believe in that face I see the face of God.

Life after death: well there is no death, at least in one-way of thinking, there is only reconfiguration and the ability to remember or not to re-member. The survival of identity depends on some configuration, some clump of being, preserving those memories that construct identity – and as we all know, memory is highly fluid and subjective. Postmortem identity – I have no idea but I am certain that it is a profound shift. On a personal level, I believe in fate and in fact in destiny and some part of me believes that those monkeys typing furiously will write me (and you) in and out of the script on more than one occasion.

The Devil: is that stalking evil which is doubt, fear, suspicion, selfishness, hate – cynicism. Any state of mind that keeps us, or others, from the warmth of fellowship, from love and joy, from the passion of life - is evil.

In the end – what I believe most profoundly is that Good necessarily means to be here in this moment, to open ourselves to contentment, to love, to joy and to not make war on the joy of others. To ease suffering where we find it and to share what is good as best we can.

It is easy to say and difficult to achieve.

How I came to believe these things:
Plato
Plotinus
Animism
Animals of all sorts including cats and dogs
Harry Potter
Buddhism
Siddhartha
Jesus
In directly Judaism
Derrida
My Mother
My Father