Have you ever felt compelled, have you ever felt pushed by whatever was happening around you to focus on one and only one thing? Well, that is what exactly happened to me just about a week ago. You see for a few weeks now one idea was turning in my mind, the idea that it is about time to do something different in our church service. I felt that instead of the normal explanation of the 7 principles, I needed to do something different. The idea that was coming strongly to me was that I needed to talk about GOD. But that was still in the idea stage. On Friday the 3rd of September as I was packing my bag to go into the hospital for my operation I heard on the NEWS that a gentleman, a philosopher Dr - I can not remember his name, wrote a book maintaining that the universe was created because of gravity and that the hand of God had nothing to do with it. Also at the same time I packed in my hospital bag a book to read, if I had the energy to do so. The book happened to be called, “Conversations with God” by Neal Walsch. Everything pointed to one thing; I had to do just that, talk about God.
God and our relationship with God
First of all I would like to concentrate on God. What do we understand by the word GOD. Yes I know, you will say God is the Supreme Being, the Creator of the Universe, the Unconditional Love etc. But how do you visualize God? Is he a HE or is she a SHE or an IT. To be honest that was my most difficult thing to understand. It crossed my mind since my primary school days but I only came to understand it recently, at the age of almost 50. I would like here to share with you some of those ideas.
First of all, for those who might not know it, I am of Greek decent, born and raised in Alexandria Egypt. I attended the Greek primary and secondary schools there and I was raised as a strict Greek Orthodox. Both primary and secondary schools I attended included in their curriculum Religious Instruction. So from a very early age I was taught about God, about the Bible and about some of the Bible’s stories. So from an early age I was told that God is Spirit and when I asked “Well, what is spirit”? I was told something like air. At that time I was very timid, very shy, so although that answer did not make any sense to me I did not say anything. In Church God was represented, was painted as an old man holding the globe in one hand and blessing the people with the other. Even that answer was not completely satisfactory. The Universe extends beyond the globe but I could accept the Blessing. Every morning my father used to walk me to school; which was only 10 minutes away from home. On our way we passed a small Coptic church (Coptics are mainly Arabs or Armenians who are Christian Orthodox but follow the old calendar and other old traditions,) which had an inscription on its wall in ancient Greek; it said “God is Love”. As a primary school boy I was really confused, what is God? I saw Him as an old man, which agreed with the statement that “God made man in His own image”. Yes He is Loving and I could agree with the statement “God is Love” but I could not understand how God could be something like air.
The years passed and in high school we learned a lot more about science and chemistry. We learned about the atom, the nucleus and the electrons. We learned how the electrons move in orbits around the nucleus. In chemistry we learned how different elements combine and share electrons etc. All very interesting information! It was only in the year 2000 when I put one and one together and I understood the concept of GOD. What I was doing wrong was that I was trying to understand GOD by definition instead I realised that I had to try to understand GOD by the qualities we attribute to HIM. God is All Powerful, All knowing, Omnipresent, All Loving etc. For some reason I started from God being omnipresent. Do not ask me why but that is where I started. How can God be omnipresent? He is either everywhere at the same time, in which case the explanation that God is something like air might make sense because only gases tend to occupy all the space they are in; or He could be able to move extremely fast from one place to another. Somehow I was leaning towards the first explanation that He occupied all the space around, but HOW? One day I was thinking about our solar system when I realised that it is very similar, or if you want an exact copy of the atom with its nucleus and its electrons. We have the Sun being the nucleus and the planets being the Electrons. Both electrons and planets move around the nucleus, around the Sun. They stick to their orbits and they never collide with each other. The question I asked then was, “What is the thing that stops them from colliding with each other, or stops them from falling down? Is there anything that might be filling the space between the nucleus and the electrons”? In reality science tells us that there is energy, there is an energy field around the nucleus that keeps the electrons in their natural orbits, the same applies to our solar system. There is an energy field that keeps all the planets in their natural orbits. Of course there is a lot of knowledge and wisdom in that energy to have placed the planets in those positions and have kept them there. The whole universe is a similar system where one constellation is moving around another and the whole system is held together by that enormous energy. That energy has a lot of knowledge and wisdom as we said above. That energy is an extremely powerful one; just remember if you split one atom you release a huge amount of energy!
So my friends, here it is. That energy is GOD. It is an energy that exists everywhere and hence OMNIPRESENT, it has a lot of wisdom and knowledge therefore ALL KNOWING and it also has an unimaginable amount of energy which makes GOD ALL POWERFUL.
That is how I found GOD, that is the reasoning I went through and how I clarified for myself this very difficult concept.
Reading the book by Neal Walsch I am happy to say that I found in there confirmation of my thoughts and more importantly I found some new concepts that explained a lot of other questions in my mind. Below you will find some of those ideas.
In that book God is referred to as “The I am”. He also says that God took a part of Himself divided it into small pieces and gave each one of us one small piece. Having that part of God inside us then we know everything and it is wrong to say that we came to this physical world so we can learn. All we have to do is simply turn inside and remember who we are in the first place. The book continues to say just understand that the word REMEMBER are two words joined together. One word is RE meaning again and MEMBER; which really means “to join again with the original member, with GOD” He continues to explain that upon our birth on the physical plane we choose to forget our origin and we come here in an effort to rediscover ourselves through our experiences.
Here I would like to make a side step as I remembered the explanation that the ancient Greek philosopher, Socrates, gave about life and learning. He said that life is a circle. We spend half of that circle living on Earth and the other half in the Kingdom of Death. Then we are reborn again on Earth and the cycle repeats itself. He continued saying that learning is nothing more than remembering what we have already learned in a previous life. And that happened four hundred years before Christ, about 2,500 years ago.
Walsch in his book continues to say that we learn by experiencing the opposite. If we want to understand “The I am” we must experience “The I am not”. In other words if you want to appreciate the good you must experience the bad because then and only then you will appreciate how good the good is. That statement helped me understand a couple of other concepts. Now I can understand the statement in the Bible that says “I am the alpha A and the omega Ω. I am the beginning and the end”. Why they chose the Greek alphabet it is beside the point; you can just as easily say the A and the Z. What that represents is a scale of measurement, where A represents perfection and Z the exact opposite. In order to understand the A you must experience the Z because then you will realize that the Z is 25 steps (or places) beyond the A. What is made clear here is that A is the first letter and its opposite is the Z. Now, judging you by yoiur knowledge and behaviour in life you are placed, let us say, in step (or position) E. Applying the Walsch's line of thought above, in order for you to appreciate the level you are on, you must experience the opposite of E. That opposite according to our scale must be 25 steps (or positions) behind E; which places it 5 steps behind Z or if you want 5 steps more negative than Z. That explains quite graphically why all those negative situations around the world in different places and at different times. They all depend upon our behaviour; we are creating all those negative situations.
There is another very beautiful reference in Walsch’s book; it talks about us being children of God. He says “God gave us a small piece of Himself, a piece to each one of us and because of that we are children of God. No matter how hard we work to show that we are not children of God the fact remains one, we are children of God and nothing can change that”. That reminds me of a family. Two parents have 3 or 4 children. They are all different from each other. One is very good while the other could be the black ship of the family while another could really be a terror. As a parent you love them all just the same, you do not treat the one any differently than the other. God loves us all just the same way, unconditionally and that is something we must never forget.
Before closing this little discussion I would like to refer to the subject of the gentleman who maintains that everything was created by gravity and that God has nothing to do with the creation of the universe. To be fair to the gentleman and his philosophy, I must admit that I did not read his book; all I know about his beliefs is what I heard on television and that news item may have been sensationalised. I can accept his theory but only if he explains two ideas. First I want to know what he understands by the term GOD and then I want him to tell us how gravity started. Obviously he is trying to say that God does not exist or it is not what we make it to be. Going back to the idea of the alpha and the omega if he maintains that there is no God then he admits that there is God but he does not want to accept it or acknowledge it. The fallacy here is that any theory about how the universe first started starts from an assumption. Let us say that you might maintain that at first there were some solid masses that started to move and the rest became as the result of this. This very assumption is GOD. Like in the case of this gentleman how did that gravity come about? Whichever way you want to see it you can not get away from that very initial energy that got the ball rolling and that initial energy is what we term GOD.
My dear friends I do not want you to think that the ideas put forward above are the absolute truth. These ideas are the ideas that turned in my mind and helped me find what God means to me. The above discussion is meant to challenge you, to help you turn inside your higher self and there find what GOD means to you.
God Bless You.
God and our relationship with God
First of all I would like to concentrate on God. What do we understand by the word GOD. Yes I know, you will say God is the Supreme Being, the Creator of the Universe, the Unconditional Love etc. But how do you visualize God? Is he a HE or is she a SHE or an IT. To be honest that was my most difficult thing to understand. It crossed my mind since my primary school days but I only came to understand it recently, at the age of almost 50. I would like here to share with you some of those ideas.
First of all, for those who might not know it, I am of Greek decent, born and raised in Alexandria Egypt. I attended the Greek primary and secondary schools there and I was raised as a strict Greek Orthodox. Both primary and secondary schools I attended included in their curriculum Religious Instruction. So from a very early age I was taught about God, about the Bible and about some of the Bible’s stories. So from an early age I was told that God is Spirit and when I asked “Well, what is spirit”? I was told something like air. At that time I was very timid, very shy, so although that answer did not make any sense to me I did not say anything. In Church God was represented, was painted as an old man holding the globe in one hand and blessing the people with the other. Even that answer was not completely satisfactory. The Universe extends beyond the globe but I could accept the Blessing. Every morning my father used to walk me to school; which was only 10 minutes away from home. On our way we passed a small Coptic church (Coptics are mainly Arabs or Armenians who are Christian Orthodox but follow the old calendar and other old traditions,) which had an inscription on its wall in ancient Greek; it said “God is Love”. As a primary school boy I was really confused, what is God? I saw Him as an old man, which agreed with the statement that “God made man in His own image”. Yes He is Loving and I could agree with the statement “God is Love” but I could not understand how God could be something like air.
The years passed and in high school we learned a lot more about science and chemistry. We learned about the atom, the nucleus and the electrons. We learned how the electrons move in orbits around the nucleus. In chemistry we learned how different elements combine and share electrons etc. All very interesting information! It was only in the year 2000 when I put one and one together and I understood the concept of GOD. What I was doing wrong was that I was trying to understand GOD by definition instead I realised that I had to try to understand GOD by the qualities we attribute to HIM. God is All Powerful, All knowing, Omnipresent, All Loving etc. For some reason I started from God being omnipresent. Do not ask me why but that is where I started. How can God be omnipresent? He is either everywhere at the same time, in which case the explanation that God is something like air might make sense because only gases tend to occupy all the space they are in; or He could be able to move extremely fast from one place to another. Somehow I was leaning towards the first explanation that He occupied all the space around, but HOW? One day I was thinking about our solar system when I realised that it is very similar, or if you want an exact copy of the atom with its nucleus and its electrons. We have the Sun being the nucleus and the planets being the Electrons. Both electrons and planets move around the nucleus, around the Sun. They stick to their orbits and they never collide with each other. The question I asked then was, “What is the thing that stops them from colliding with each other, or stops them from falling down? Is there anything that might be filling the space between the nucleus and the electrons”? In reality science tells us that there is energy, there is an energy field around the nucleus that keeps the electrons in their natural orbits, the same applies to our solar system. There is an energy field that keeps all the planets in their natural orbits. Of course there is a lot of knowledge and wisdom in that energy to have placed the planets in those positions and have kept them there. The whole universe is a similar system where one constellation is moving around another and the whole system is held together by that enormous energy. That energy has a lot of knowledge and wisdom as we said above. That energy is an extremely powerful one; just remember if you split one atom you release a huge amount of energy!
So my friends, here it is. That energy is GOD. It is an energy that exists everywhere and hence OMNIPRESENT, it has a lot of wisdom and knowledge therefore ALL KNOWING and it also has an unimaginable amount of energy which makes GOD ALL POWERFUL.
That is how I found GOD, that is the reasoning I went through and how I clarified for myself this very difficult concept.
Reading the book by Neal Walsch I am happy to say that I found in there confirmation of my thoughts and more importantly I found some new concepts that explained a lot of other questions in my mind. Below you will find some of those ideas.
In that book God is referred to as “The I am”. He also says that God took a part of Himself divided it into small pieces and gave each one of us one small piece. Having that part of God inside us then we know everything and it is wrong to say that we came to this physical world so we can learn. All we have to do is simply turn inside and remember who we are in the first place. The book continues to say just understand that the word REMEMBER are two words joined together. One word is RE meaning again and MEMBER; which really means “to join again with the original member, with GOD” He continues to explain that upon our birth on the physical plane we choose to forget our origin and we come here in an effort to rediscover ourselves through our experiences.
Here I would like to make a side step as I remembered the explanation that the ancient Greek philosopher, Socrates, gave about life and learning. He said that life is a circle. We spend half of that circle living on Earth and the other half in the Kingdom of Death. Then we are reborn again on Earth and the cycle repeats itself. He continued saying that learning is nothing more than remembering what we have already learned in a previous life. And that happened four hundred years before Christ, about 2,500 years ago.
Walsch in his book continues to say that we learn by experiencing the opposite. If we want to understand “The I am” we must experience “The I am not”. In other words if you want to appreciate the good you must experience the bad because then and only then you will appreciate how good the good is. That statement helped me understand a couple of other concepts. Now I can understand the statement in the Bible that says “I am the alpha A and the omega Ω. I am the beginning and the end”. Why they chose the Greek alphabet it is beside the point; you can just as easily say the A and the Z. What that represents is a scale of measurement, where A represents perfection and Z the exact opposite. In order to understand the A you must experience the Z because then you will realize that the Z is 25 steps (or places) beyond the A. What is made clear here is that A is the first letter and its opposite is the Z. Now, judging you by yoiur knowledge and behaviour in life you are placed, let us say, in step (or position) E. Applying the Walsch's line of thought above, in order for you to appreciate the level you are on, you must experience the opposite of E. That opposite according to our scale must be 25 steps (or positions) behind E; which places it 5 steps behind Z or if you want 5 steps more negative than Z. That explains quite graphically why all those negative situations around the world in different places and at different times. They all depend upon our behaviour; we are creating all those negative situations.
There is another very beautiful reference in Walsch’s book; it talks about us being children of God. He says “God gave us a small piece of Himself, a piece to each one of us and because of that we are children of God. No matter how hard we work to show that we are not children of God the fact remains one, we are children of God and nothing can change that”. That reminds me of a family. Two parents have 3 or 4 children. They are all different from each other. One is very good while the other could be the black ship of the family while another could really be a terror. As a parent you love them all just the same, you do not treat the one any differently than the other. God loves us all just the same way, unconditionally and that is something we must never forget.
Before closing this little discussion I would like to refer to the subject of the gentleman who maintains that everything was created by gravity and that God has nothing to do with the creation of the universe. To be fair to the gentleman and his philosophy, I must admit that I did not read his book; all I know about his beliefs is what I heard on television and that news item may have been sensationalised. I can accept his theory but only if he explains two ideas. First I want to know what he understands by the term GOD and then I want him to tell us how gravity started. Obviously he is trying to say that God does not exist or it is not what we make it to be. Going back to the idea of the alpha and the omega if he maintains that there is no God then he admits that there is God but he does not want to accept it or acknowledge it. The fallacy here is that any theory about how the universe first started starts from an assumption. Let us say that you might maintain that at first there were some solid masses that started to move and the rest became as the result of this. This very assumption is GOD. Like in the case of this gentleman how did that gravity come about? Whichever way you want to see it you can not get away from that very initial energy that got the ball rolling and that initial energy is what we term GOD.
My dear friends I do not want you to think that the ideas put forward above are the absolute truth. These ideas are the ideas that turned in my mind and helped me find what God means to me. The above discussion is meant to challenge you, to help you turn inside your higher self and there find what GOD means to you.
God Bless You.
© Copyright 2011, Pakenham Spiritualist Church
