My personal philosophy, and feel free to disagree here, is this:
If God is an entity with a personality, and we all interact with that personality on various levels of intimacy, then surely our experience and understanding of God is an individual thing? For example: if you only know your Boss in a workplace situation and he runs his business with a tight management structure; you may consider him to be stern and petty. His wife however, experiences him at home. If, when he gets home, he is more accommodating and mellow, then she will have a completely different view of him. Is one more right than the other? Or are these just aspects of the same person?
Similarly with God: as I have travelled further down this journey to get to know Him (assuming He is a Him of course), I have learned different things about Him. Indeed, my concept of God has changed many times as I’ve learned and experienced different things.
This developmental approach to God has permeated even conventional Christianity. How you perceive God as a child is very different to how you perceive God as an adult. How you perceive God as an armchair Christian will be very different to how you perceive God if you actually study the Bible (or the Koran, Dharma, Talmud etc...)
Now, of course, I am going to be crucified by some for the perceived: “all religions are a path to God” platitude. I must emphasise: I don’t believe that. Or maybe I do? I haven’t decided yet. My journey to get to know my friend God is not over. But what I have seen is that getting to know God is a process. Just like getting to know anybody else. (Even taking just the Bible as a source: it seems evident to me that God has several distinct personalities or moods in the years chronicled by the book. He is Loving Creator, Largely Ambivalent, The Destroyer of Nations, and the Saviour all in one tome. This would suggest to me that God is not as consistent as we often imagine. Like any other ‘person’ interacting with other ‘people’ he seems to go through phases. (This is often explained as being part of “God’s Plan”, but if there is a plan, and there is nothing we can do to alter this plan, then why do we pray for things? Why don’t we simply skip ahead to: “God’s Plan” and simply wait out the results? But that is another question for another day.)
So in a nutshell: here’s where I’m coming from: I was born onto this planet as a human being. I was raised to believe that there is a God, who made me, looks after things and generally keeps things in line. At some point, I realised that:
If there is a God, I was doing a pretty terrible job of getting to know this entity that went to all the trouble of making me in the first place,
That ambivalence was at best rude, at worst, if many of the religions are to be believed, a one way ticket to a very uncomfortable, fiery end,
That perhaps this was all hokum and yet another way society has developed to keep us in line.
Now I would have loved to have been able to just accept this whole “God” thing as it came, God knows that would have been much easier, but it just wasn’t in me. If I was to get to know God, I had to be sure I wasn’t just talking at the ceiling. That’s where Theosophical Anthropology came about for me. I needed to understand:
Why do we as humans have such a yearning for God?
Where did this yearning come from?
What, if any, is the point of all of this?
And who is this “God” person anyway? (With great respect to Douglas Adams!)
Taking a Post-Modern approach: I would look for answers without seeking to find them, I would read anything that came my way, mindful of my preconception or judgement, and I would try to live what I was reading. My research still takes this form. Thanks to this approach, I have studied Ancient Greek and Latin, read so many books my toes hurt, and have, at one point or another studied: Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, the Verdic Scriptures, Krishna Consciousness/Bhakti Yoga, Shiva Worship, Satanism, polytheism, the mystery cults, early Christianity, medieval Christianity, modern Christianity, the occult, Sat Sang, Theosophy, various cosmologies (plenty more on that later), African mythology, and a host of other marginal beliefs. This blog is my way of starting to put it all together.
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Thanks for joining me on this journey! Read on by clicking here: http://talkingattheceiling.blogspot.com/2011/09/betting-on-buddha.html
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