Do you believe God is omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent? Its a silly question. It was the three Omnies we were trying to label when we named them "God". These attributes or qualities ARE that which we call God. They all speak of the wholeness or "allness" of EXISTENCE, KNOWLEDGE and POWER. That which you call "God" IS wholeness and allness. If someone didn't know what you meant by "God" (and really, how can you be sure anyone does) you would have to explain what it is that you are referring to as God. We assume that everyone's concept of God is similar to our own. "You know... ...GOD!" No, I don't know. Explain it to me.
If I asked you what is THAT which you call GOD, would you say... Infinite Being? AN infinite being? The All in all? The Absolute, unthinkable, indescribable Whozzis? A Father? A High Priest? A Guru? A Rishi? The perfect invisible Principle of all Life? Life itself? Love? To any of these mental pictures you have to leave the door open for multiple imaginings. If we can say anything accurate about that which we call God, it MAY be this: God is all possibilities and anything is possible. This allness brings us back to the three omnies. All power, all knowledge everywhere at once is THAT which I call God.
The name "God" doesn't work for me anymore. I can't stop thinking of God as a man when I call...Him...God. "He" isn't even a him. God is at once male and female and neither. God is Father and Mother and Son. If not, none of these expressions of God would have a physical counterpart. It may seem demeaning to consider God an "It", but that's what a combination of all things may be. Thinking we are exalting God by raising him to the level of a "person" we are actually exalting ourselves. For that which we call God to be envisioned as a person (male or female) is a downgrade. I have chosen a new name or title that is as neutral as it is powerful. I call God "The One". It may not work for general use, but I can use it talking to myself and with folks like you who have endured the explanation of it. Try replacing the old name with Wholeness or make up a name as William Samuel did - Isness.
Wholeness is the eternal state of the universe. The relentless parade of illusions that flash before us giving the appearance of a fragmented universe are creations of our mind. Every fragment is a device we created to make us comfortable in a lonely universe. The universe is one, and it doesn't get any lonelier than that. It may be this lonely state that makes Wholeness perfect. There is nothing to compare Wholeness to. There is nothing beside It. Now, it is impossible for a fragment of the whole to be imperfect and the Whole remain perfect. Imperfection is another illusion projected by a fragmented mind.
What about evil? Be specific. What evil......Who calls that evil? Who told you you were naked, Adam? In the beginning God created and everything he created was good. Then it says ALL the creation was finished. How clear can it be? Whatever lusts Adam expressed after he became self-aware...whatever defenses he erected...whatever fear drove him to flee from Wholeness - the lack he perceived was only real in his thoughts. And when lack is envisioned in the soul, it is only a matter of time before lack manifests before the physical senses. Of course there can be evil. But it must be created by a thought. Then the phantom receives flesh and like all manifestations, eventually fades away. Whenever the idea of imperfection is not given the attention it needs to formulate a mold for the coming manifestation, then conception will fail. But if an illusion is dwelt upon, the mold is filled with the creative power of attention and eventually formulates.
What if the only creative thoughts emanating in the world were edifying ones? That world has been called The Garden of Paradise, Heaven, Nirvana, Bliss, Shangrila... Whatever the label, the scenery is the same: Perfect peace, uninterrupted joy and never-ending love. Can such a place exist or is it another phantom, another illusion that we chase after in the night? I believe when all illusions are dissolved, nothing remains but perfect peace and eternal joy and love. They have been there all along beneath the rubble of our hideous nightmares.
The question I want to explore is: That rubble of illusion may also include our most glorious dreams, joyous emotions and the rest of the "good" side of feelings. Perfect peace may occupy the center point of the joy/pain see-saw where all contrasting experiences pivot. If balance is what makes life fulfilling then that balance will be found at the point resting on the fulcrum or it must include the whole see-saw. Whatever pair we place on the scales of experience (pain/pleasure, love/hate, building/tearing down, birth/death) balance is maintained only with the inclusion of both extremes. Remove the rider from one end of the see-saw and the other comes crashing down. The pairs of opposites riding the see-saw we call life are without a destination, but simply going along for the ride. Without them we would sit in the center and life would not be a journey. Even if we are pointlessly going up and down, up and down... problem/solution followed by another problem/solution... the heights of joy followed by the depths of sorrow - these contrasting feelings are our life. Without them we are hibernating in changeless perfection. Without a problem, we would not busy ourselves with the solution. Without a mission, we would not need any missionaries. Without a victim, you would not need a savior. Without a villain, who needs a hero? And its the very impetus of one that drives the other. Be happy in hard times, Paul advised. The deeper you go the higher you fly. The higher you fly, the deeper you go. Paul didn't say that. It was John......Lennon.
We don't consider the low point of the see-saw ride to be evil and the high point good, do we? Its obvious that the cycle is a simultaneous movement in both directions at the same time. Where did we get the idea that the same process that moves us experientially has a good and evil side? Let me tell you a short tale to illustrate how good a bad experience can be.
Once upon a time there was a man who was so punctual and dependable he was almost famous for it. He had a set routine in the morning that he never deviated from. When he drove to work he invariably stopped at an intersection at precisely the moment an equally faithful bus driver arrived there on the cross street. He entered the office at 7:49 every working day for ten years. Then one morning he awoke to the horror that his alarm failed to sound and he was going to be late!! Oh, this was bad...very bad. As he rushed hopelessly to get ready the feeling in his gut would give him no peace. How could this happen? My perfect record ruined! This is terrible...bad, bad bad! He left the house nearly a half hour late, cursing himself and his alarm clock all the way. When he reached the intersection with the 4-way stop all his petty thoughts of failure fled from his mind. There in the middle of the intersection was the tangled remains of two cars and the bus which collided when one of the cars ran the stop sign. "That would have been me," he thought.
Do you suppose, at that point, he still thought oversleeping was bad, bad, bad? I'd say it suddenly changed to good, good, good...at least for him. How many times has that happened in your life? A disappointing turnout of some broken dream that later on saved your life, or your finances, or maybe your sanity. In most cases you'll never know what blessings your problems lead to. You may as well take every experience as the best thing that could happen to you.
Another similar tale follows the adventures of a man who had two things he loved with all his heart: his son and a prized Arabian mare. One day the mare ran away and the man was devastated. The next day the mare returned with a beautiful stallion. Now the man experienced the heights of elation. But when his son rode the stallion he was thrown and broke his leg. Suddenly the father is once again in deep despair. A few days later, however, a battalion marches into the village taking every available man off to fight a war. The boy with the broken leg is left behind and the father's grief turns once again to joy. There is, of course, no end to this story. The point is: Nothing in and of itself is good or evil. Nothing outside of you has the power to make you happy or sad, joyous or mad, but only what is inside you determines your state of being. It is the relationship of the parts to the whole that matters. But the whole, as we have already determined is immutably perfect. We can't see the "Whole Picture" from a limited vantage point. Our challenge is to see the biggest picture we can, but to accept by faith that even what we can't see is as it should be. Break a leg!
Now lets discuss the three Omnies one by one juuuuust in case someone asks you, "What do you mean...God?"
Omnipresence
That which is called God is everywhere. God is One. God is changeless. God is the All in all. If this changeless Being is going to become anything more than It is, it can only be in the course of an awakening by the creation to what the Creator already is. Before you can awaken, you have to go to sleep. That was a mouthful. Here it is in thin slices: You can become aware of an aspect of Wholeness that you weren't aware of a minute ago. Chew that thoroughly. You have just awakened to a truth that has always been, but you weren't conscious of until now. Chew, chew, chew. Just because an inspiration of the truth comes to you doesn't mean truth has changed. Just because error comes to you, and you believe it to be true, doesn't change the truth either. The only thing that really changes is when the sleeper rises out of a dream in the dark to see reality in the light of Wholeness. You are not changing either. What you awaken to, you have already been. At night when we dream, we believe the dream is really occurring. Upon awakening, we realize it was just a mental dream state. But how do we know that the waking state isn't just another level of the dream state? Perhaps we could awaken from our daydream and discover another reality and look back on our entire waking life as an illusion where two powers wage war in a divided universe, where creation must labor to insure that good will prevail over evil, where even God must fight an adversary for the throne on high. We believe this dream to be true for as long as we remain asleep. When we wake up we will laugh at the absurd notion that an omnipresent God can have an adversary. We will ultimately discover that the nightmare of good versus evil was another image in our waking dream.
Wholeness...oneness...God...is the only concept that has no opposite. It is what it is and there is nothing outside it. With nothing to compare it to, It can neither be good nor evil. It just is. Where does judgment of good and evil come from? It is born when the thinking mind is no longer an aspect of creation, but has taken the role of creator. Isness can be whatever the observer wants it to be. This is illustrated symbolically through Moses' story of Adam who named the inhabitants of his world and whatever he called it, that's what it was. The so-called curse that fell upon the thorny ground was not produced by God, it was a product of man's judgment. Jesus of Nazareth had a different world view. He hinted that "this world" was a dream state. Disease, poverty and death were thought-created images that could be conquered by higher thoughts, thoughts that had authority over illusions, thoughts that were based in the reality that Wholeness is perfect.
How big is God? How big is the universe? Our finite minds try to conceptualize an emptiness that goes on forever in all directions, but it would be easier to dig a hole on the beach and put the ocean in it than to grasp infinity in a mental image. If we attempt to imagine the unimaginable, we might see the great Isness filling a space that is so large, the word large doesn't even apply anymore. We'd have to invent a new word for it... like Googolplex or Gazillion. But when we reach omnipresence... a state of being where the presence is everywhere no matter how big it is... the poor Being is no longer immense, but buried in a kind of cosmic cave-in. Everywhere that exists is no longer a home for the Being, but is the Being. Can you imagine yourself existing with no space outside of you? Well, isn't that the fate our omnipresent God has? No wonder this Being divides itself up in small pieces where it dreams dreams and forgets that it is alone by appearing as two. Beyond the appearance, the loneliness remains. The worm thought it saw another worm, but it was only it's tail poking out of another hole in the ground.
Omnipotence
If That which we call God, The One, is omnipresent, it follows that That One is all powerful. If there were two powers, Wholeness would not be possible. Having all power is much different than having the most power. When God is seen as the mighty conqueror of all who oppose him, he is merely the one with the most power. The lesser powers, like the hoards of demons and human rabble are subdued by the greatest power. But that's another fabrication of divided minds that can see nothing but division. All power is literally that - there is no other power separate from the One Power.
The paradox of omnipotence is: What can you do with it? To express a power, it has to affect something else. But there isn't anything else. An all-powerful being doesn't have anything to use the power against. The nature of a universal all-inclusive power is that it is completely at rest. The irresistible force and the immovable object are ONE. Wholeness is indestructible. It can only be transformed so as to give the appearance of change, but different arrangements of the same thing is still the same thing. There are atoms in my body now that may once have been in a tree in Africa, in a bird or a fish, or in the snows of Mount Everest. The atoms that now make up my bones may become your bones next year. Parts of you or me could have been in the blood streams of Abraham, King David or even Jesus of Nazareth. Same atoms, but what a different expression those atoms allow. A piece of wood is burned in a fire. It isn't gone. Its atoms are torn apart by the heat and released into the atmosphere to fly off and become something else. In the same way stars are born from the gaseous clouds of stars that have died. In the whole universe, nothing is ever lost.
As long as there is Duality, there will be conflict, opposition, friction. The opposing forces have the potential of infinite increase and the objects they affect can be affected all the more intensely. But can the force vs. object war escalate to absolute conflict? No. It can increase up to 99.9999...infinite 9's %, but if power reaches omnipotence all the power is absorbed into itself and all the meters abruptly read "zero". The omnipotence of omnipresence has nowhere to go.
But what about the apparent powers in the world we live in? Bombs still blow things up. Fists in the face still hurt, for that matter, so do words and even emotions. These can also be seen as transformations rather than destruction. The surf isn't destroying the mountains, its creating the beach. How you perceive something depends on how high your vantage point is. If you were a skin cell, you may not think drying up and dying is much fun. But as a human being with skin cells, you realize that their death allows you to go on living. On all levels, nature displays how things must change to stay the same and how living things must constantly die to remain alive. Two so-called forces that are supposedly against each other are still a great "nothing" disguised as opposites. For an illustration of this, we will leave the earth and view the solar system from above. Do you see the earth traveling around the sun in a near perfect circle? Two forces are at work to maintain a stable orbit. The sun's gravity is a force pulling the earth towards it. The earth is moving forward, thus, generating inertia that would send us out into space on a straight line. The force of gravity equals the inertia, so we stay the exact same distance from the sun. A force of attraction and a force of repulsion adds up to nothing. So we can say that the change in our distance from the sun is zero and that zero has within it the battle of opposing forces.
This is true of all matter and energy in the universe. Opposites, contrasting values, or waves of light/dark or sound/silence are the same nothingness pulled apart to reveal the extremes of the central point of rest. The righting of wrongs is the pursuit to bring the extremes back to the center, the place of peace and rest, the original state of nothingness.
Omniscience
Interesting word - omniscience. It implies all wisdom, all knowledge, or the state of having learned everything. You may question whether or not such a state is possible, even for God. You can know all that is revealed, but how can you know what has not yet been conceived? Isn't there new thoughts, new creations and new possibilities that are waiting to be formed? Isn't that which we call God capable of becoming more? Is it possible to declare, "There is nothing more to learn?"
Here we are again posing questions about the infinite with a finite system of thinking. Surely God can easily overcome such obstacles and abide in all knowledge. If it is not possible to know all "things" it is possible to understand all principles from which the endless variety of things spawn. For example, the principle of dualistic thinking compared to unity consciousness is the same for knowledge as it is for presence and power. With the dualistic mind, knowledge is categorized and filed as separate bits of information. You can boast or shame of having more or less of these bits, but you are always after more of them. Now more than ever before, knowledge has taken the place of physical might and monetary power as the currency of prosperity. Like power, knowledge can increase. It can swallow up lesser bastions of knowledge. It can, through error, decrease and decay. The knowledge of one school can wage bitter war against the knowledge of other schools. The same knowledge can be used for good or evil purposes. It can change a good situation to an evil one as well (eggs are healthy food... no they're not... yes they are...).
Like power, knowledge can only build to a possible 99.9...infinite 9's%. There is, as a matter of fact, always more to learn. But knowledge is only broken up into a stack of bits when our universe is broken up into bits. When we rise above finite thinking to unity consciousness, then there is only one thing to know. All the bits of knowledge and limited thoughts and concepts are but children of the one thought. Is it possible to think that one thought? Is it possible to know that ONE thing? Yes!
The one thought, the one thing to know is the combination of all thoughts and all knowledge all at once. It is absolute silence. Yes, silence is the one mother/father of all thoughts and all knowledge. Its the same principle as presence. It grows and grows until it is everywhere and then POOF! it is nowhere. Its the same principle as power. It becomes stronger and stronger until it includes all power then POOF! It is a state of rest. If it was possible to experience all-knowledge...POOF!... it would be experienced as silence.
All three Omni states are beyond any race toward infinite presence, power and knowledge. They are already here. If there is an Omni God, that One surely could not endure the torture of having all power and knowledge while crammed into the universe like a vacuum packed pound of coffee. Perhaps this is where the myth of the genie is born. Phenomenal cosmic power... itty bitty living space. Put yourself in that situation. You are everywhere, so there's nowhere to go. All space is filled by you. You contain all power, so there is nothing more to do. You know all things, so there is nothing more to learn. This last condition is the most unbearable. Imagine having no adventures, no discoveries, no questions to answer, no problems to solve, no mysteries and no more surprises. . . for all eternity. Your life could be reduced to the sad state of the man who hears the first line of a joke and waves it off saying, "Don't bother, I've heard this one". If there was an Omni God, It would probably commit suicide. In a way, that's what The One did.
Recently, a man named Jesus sacrificed his human form for his counterpart, his bride. About 3500 years ago, Moses told a story of a man named Adam who was put into a trance for the conception of his counterpart. As the story goes, the creator realized that, "It is not good that man should be alone." Since the man was made in the image and likeness of God, its feasible to imagine a time before anything existed when God said, "It is not good that God should be alone." Did God then hypnotize himself as he did Adam and in his dream state draw the world of Two out of his lonely self? Did he create judgments and opposition from inside and outside of wholeness just to have a life? Was ignorance created to introduce the fun of learning? Was amnesia necessary for God to have an adventure, be surprised, laugh at a joke? Did he have to invent hide and seek to escape the terrifying loneliness of all-presence, all-power and all-knowledge? Is The One broken up into bits to create relationships? To give meaning to Love? Are you one of the bits? Did Oneness die to itself to become you and I?
Wholeness is still whole. That can never be changed. What we perceive as bits and pieces are facets of a universal mirror. Each reflection has its own personality, qualities, and level of awareness, but all facets of the mirror are still just reflections of the One looking in the mirror. One facet doesn't know this, so it lives in it's own separate and static little universe. Another facet realizes it is but one reflection of the One and lives in a universe intimately connected and fluid. We are only as bound to our presently perceived facet as we want to be. The realization that the Omni states include us too, makes allness available to whosoever will enter into it. Don't be deceived into thinking allness is an ultimate and everlasting reward. We may experience the omni's, but of necessity, we will become I, however, we will not remain there long. We are spiritual travelers tasting the glories of world after world. It was never our intent to get somewhere. There is no place of peace. Peace is a journey toward our desires. But the journey is our desire too. Whenever we arrive somewhere new and exciting we absorb the wonder, rest our head for a night and as the dawn breaks we are drawn over the next hill looking for more . . . of our self.
This perspective charts a new course for those who have been seriously pursuing accumulation of things. There's a higher priority now. No matter what you have or don't have, no matter where you arrive or fail to... travel with a joy for the journey and an openness to take it all in freely and give it all away just as freely. We are not reservoirs of love, we are Love! Love is our true Self. It's the One and Only Self. We behold that Self and that is the Self we give...to our Self.