My Understanding of the Nature of GOD.

“Let us make humans in our image.” (Genesis 1.26)

Using this text as a starting point, I wondered “What about our human image reflects the image and nature of GOD?”

Side note: Although I quote exclusively from the Bible in this article, I am not a Christian; I simply respect the ancient wisdom of the Bible.

For all the beautiful paintings depicting God as a human, I think that it’s obvious that our human body doesn’t actually reflect the image of GOD! I mean there isn’t some bearded old man in the sky!

I believe that our ‘Human Trinity’ of Spirit, Mind and Body, offers us a solid starting point to understand the image of GOD. I should add that the trinity I envisage is not the same “Father, Son and Holy Spirit” Trinity of Christian dogma.

Our Human Trinity.

Here is my understanding of our Human Trinity.

Spirit is our subjective consciousness, our soul, the creator of our personal experience on earth. I believe that we are “perfect Spirit enjoying an imperfect human experience”. Spirit is the seat of our conscience and all that we consider ‘good’ such as love, kindness, generosity, happiness, etc..

Mind is ‘the brain in action’, the interface between our Spirit and Body, and includes both our subjective and objective intelligence of which 5% is conscious, subjective intelligence and 95% unconscious, objective intelligence. For example, my subjective intelligence decides to pick up a glass of water. My decision becomes an instruction to my objective intelligence to run a pre-installed program (i.e. a learned behaviour) that activates millions of cells in my chest, arm, hand and fingers in such a way that I pick up the glass.

Body is the interface between my Spirit and the world. It is comprised of energy and matter. Matter is the physical substance of my body while energy exists in two forms; subtle energy being the ‘life-force’ within the body, while gross energy, derived from the food we consume, being the energy our body uses to perform its functions.

The Trinity of GOD.

Supreme Consciousness, Spirit, is subjective intelligence and the ultimate designer of everything that exists. Perfect love, the source of all that is good; how else could we, GOD’s creation, value love so highly without it flowing from a perfect source?

Universal Intelligence, is objective intelligence, the creative force that brings the universe, both visible and invisible, into existence and holds everything together in near-perfect order.

Unified Field, the energy from which everything that exists is formed; matter and energy being one and the same thing as Einstein demonstrated with his famous formula, e=mc(2); energy equals matter multiplied by the speed of light squared.

Two important implications.

There are two important implications arising from this understanding of the nature of God that I think are worth mentioning here namely, “delegated authorities” and “objective intelligence”.

Delegated Authorities.

The first implication is the relationship between GOD and humans and, in particular, the manner in which GOD delegates their authority to humans. Understanding the nature of these ‘delegated authorities’ may help to clarify how things work and clear up some confusion when contemplating the nature of GOD; for example, “How can a loving, all-powerful GOD allow bad things to happen?”.

The first delegated authority is the spiritual authority GOD delegates to each human being in the form of “freewill”. The gift of freewill offers every human the means to break free of our unconscious, animal instincts and, in so doing, to rise to our higher potential. Without freewill, humans would still be competing against the great apes for space in the jungle.

The gift of freewill presupposes a responsibility to exercise our freewill wisely; unfortunately few people ever do! For example, it is well documented that over 90% of ‘heath issues’ in modern society are the consequences of lifestyle choices. How wise is that?

Parenting may be a good example of delegated authority. A wise parent raises their child to be a healthy adult and then grants their child the freedom to exercise their GOD-given freewill without interference. Therefore, when a parent witnesses their adult child doing something they consider unwise, does that parent have a right to force their adult child to do what they believe is the right thing? Of course not, that would be overriding their adult child’s GOD-given freewill. The best a wise parent can hope for is that their adult child might seek their counsel in important matters, and that itself presupposes a well-established relationship based on mutual trust and respect.

The second delegated authority is the collective authority GOD delegates to the human race to ‘have dominion over the earth’; “let them have dominion over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth” (Genesis 1.26). It seems patently obvious that human beings are failing to wisely exercise their delegated authority as a species.

Are we doomed or could we, by some miracle of consciousness, wake up and heal the earth? As long as there is breath in us, we would do well to believe that we can ‘lift humanity to a higher level of goodness’; at least we can begin by lifting the level of goodness in our own lives! That would be a good start, wouldn’t it?

Objective Intelligence.

The second implication is the objective nature of Universal Intelligence. To understand how objective intelligence might work, let’s consider something that humans have ‘created in our image’, the computer. Computer technology demonstrates the principle of objective intelligence very well and may reflect, in some respects, the working of Universal Intelligence.

The computer operator, is the subjective intelligence. The computer operator decides which programs to install on their computer and then provides specific instructions when needed; for example, in order to produce this document, I have installed LibreOffice Writer which I use it to type my articles.

The computer itself is the objective intelligence. The computer can run any program that has been designed to run on its operating system. The computer has absolutely no discretion; it will just as easily run a malicious virus program as it will my Libre Office Writer program.

As I type this document, I punch a sequence of keystrokes while the objective intelligence of the computer converts my keystrokes into letters and words on the screen; to make that happen, the computer’s objective intelligence must execute a multitude of background instructions between keyboard, CPU and computer screen. And when I hit ‘save’, objective intelligence ensures that the document is correctly saved to the hard drive.

A personal story. As a teenager I installed the habit of smoking into my objective intelligence. Later in life I decided to quit smoking and I tried to uninstall the smoking habit but, like some malicious malware, it proved virtually impossible to uninstall. No matter how much my conscious, subjective intelligence wanted to quit smoking, my subconscious, objective intelligence, kept running the malicious smoking program; the craving would set in and eventually I would succumb to the temptation and buy another packet of cigarettes. But one day my eight-year old daughter returned from school having just learned of the dangers of smoking. As I lit up another cigarette, she turned to me and asked “Dad, are you going to die?” The fear in her eyes was heartbreaking. I immediately extinguished the cigarette and crushed the packet and made a promise that I would never smoke again. Program uninstalled! And that was over twenty years ago.

Is this the way the objective, Universal Intelligence operates? I believe it might be and that I have just begun to scratch the surface of its significance in my life.

My Understanding in a Nutshell.

This diagram puts all of the above into some form of context;

The Circle around the earth represents the collective authority GOD delegates to all humanity, the quality of which reflects our collective GOD-consciousness or unconsciousness.

The Circle with the single person represents our personal delegated authority; the size of the circle could represent our personal level of GOD-consciousness.

The Circle with two people in it represents the collective authority of a group of people which may be a family, a local community or a nation; again the size of the circle could represent the collective level of GOD-consciousness of the group.