I experience an incarnated and implanted God!
When you hear the word GOD, you are more than likely thinking of a Supreme Being separated from and above human concerns. The predominant emotions associated with such a God are fear, respect, and distance. That is the image of God we see in the Bible, especially the Old Testament. If you read the book of Exodus, the God you meet there is a powerful and frightening figure. It is a God who refuses to give His name to Moses. It is a God who denies Moses an opportunity to see His face. Seeing God face-to-face meant death. The God of Moses is so terrifying and glorious that Moses is only worthy to see His behind.
I have no idea what God’s behind looks like; then again, I have no idea what His/Her/Its front looks like either!
According to a recent survey, 34% of Americans think that God is a distant figure.
Ben Franklin said: “A supremely perfect God doesn’t care one bit for such an inconsiderable nothing as man.”
The fact is that there are many images for God. You can experience God in many ways. It is not a question of a right image or a wrong image, but the image that makes sense to you.
You don’t have to buy into the portrait of God you find in the Book of Exodus, a frightening and intimidating deity who is distant from you. That is how the Israelites experienced God. You don’t have to bend your mind like a pretzel to adjust to the biblical view of God or accept the prehistoric ideas about the deity. You don’t have to buy into Benjamin Franklin’s idea of God, just because he is one of the founding fathers of America. You must experience God for yourself.
God is available and accessible to you even as the breath under your nose.
This is an instance where the advice, if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him, applies.
We have this notion that everything written on the pages of a holy scripture is written in stone, making them infallible and unchangeable.
Remember that stone writing belongs in graveyards, not in living, pulsating hearts.
Similarly, everything a famous person ever said does not have to be enduring and eternal for all ages, peoples, and circumstances. That is incompatible with living in an evolving universe with an evolutionary faith.
There is timeless wisdom in Scriptures and in the volumes of literature left behind by famous men and women of history of all nations and religions, but they also contain views and opinions that are limited, biased, and dead like the men and women who uttered them.
I believe in an incarnated and implanted God.
The Christian faith tradition is all about the Word becoming flesh, God becoming man. Unfortunately, the religion that sprang up in the name of that incarnated God, Jesus, pushed him back into the heavens, put him on a pedestal and Christians were advised to worship him rather than follow him.
Salvation through Jesus took priority over empowerment by Jesus. Salvation is about life after death, while empowerment is about life before death.
Preoccupation with the afterlife became the biggest impediment to our participation in the present life.
I experience God as being implanted in me through my own incarnation. People mistakenly think that incarnation is a term reserved only for the birth of Jesus. Incarnation simply means, in carnem, which means in flesh. So, anyone who is in flesh is an incarnation.
When you start believing that your birth is like the incarnation of Jesus — in essence not in degree — miracles will happen in your life, and you will also become agents of miracles for others.
The greatest obstacle to experiencing our deep unity with humans around us is our separation illusion — the mistaken notion that other people are different from us, making them aliens, causing alienation. In fact, the difference is only in the packaging. The other person is you with a different external form. It is the same content, in a different container.
Unfortunately, when our lives get twisted around the contours and concerns of the container, every experience becomes a matter of concern, every person is viewed as a possible culprit and life itself becomes a crisis. The antidote to that is to live your life counter-culturally, believing that we are cut from the same cloth.
Each of us is a chip of the old block — God. It is not just an opinion or a pollyannish platitude, but a scientific fact.
Few years ago, I was watching CNN and there was a story about a National Geographic study called the “Genographic Project.” It was titled, The Greatest Journey Ever Told: The Trail of our DNA. New DNA studies have shown that all humans descended from an African ancestor who lived about 60,000 years ago.
Population geneticist, Dr. Spencer Wells, who was leading this study said: “The human genetic code, or genome, is 99.99 percent identical throughout the world. What’s left is the DNA responsible for our individual differences — eye color or disease risk, for example — as well as some that serves no apparent function at all.”
I fell out of my chair when I heard that. I had thought that 50 percent of our DNA accounts for our similarities, and 50 percent for our differences. That is what my friends thought. When I told them about the study, their jaws dropped, their eyes popped out, and they said: “You cannot be serious.” I told them that it is a study sponsored by the National Geographic not the National Inquirer!
Living with conscious awareness of my deep connection to the person next to me has brought me enormous spiritual benefits amid life’s struggles and challenges. It has helped me become more calm, caring and compassionate, and less fearful, anxious, critical and judgmental.
(from Cosmic Kindergarten: Earthly Lessons for a heavenly life)
