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God Brand
Ran left some interesting thoughts on my piece about God as anomaly:
“God” is a brand, with lots of associations we don’t agree with, kind of like the American flag. Do we try to redefine the brand for our own uses, or do we drop it and make something new?
I’m seeing this again and again from various people. Someone else said earlier today that God is a concept. Is this all that God really is to people - a brand, a concept, reduced to a commodity like everything else? I don’t ask this accusingly because I’ve on and off thought the same thing myself. I guess the question I’m really asking is: is God more than just a concept to you? And by God, I don’t necessarily mean a dude sitting on a chair in the sky. But that could also be included as well. I guess I’m starting to really ask myself whether a white-haired God on a throne is really better or worse than a God who’s nothing but a concept. It all seems just a little disheartening to me to not have anything but brand names and memeplexes to hang my hat on.
August 24th, 2005 at 7:30 pm
The word God is too powerful to drop. It has universal connotations which nearly everyone has an opinion about. But again, it’s just a word–and the connotations are usually political, not spiritual.
I think we need to recognize the validity of the Jewish belief that the name of G-d should be left unspoken, and images left ungraven.
August 24th, 2005 at 7:46 pm
I agree with Jacob. I tend to avoid the use of “God,” even when it would be commonly thrown into a conversation, I try to replace it with “Universe.”
I was writing about this in a fashion, but about chaos rather than God. I don’t consider chaos a brand, as I see brands as symbolic associations that people make to idendify themselves with in order to help define themselves. (Perhaps I should’ve called it “Chaos has a PR problem”?)
I believe in God as the ineffable force the lies beyond conscious awareness, a sort of cybernetic algorithm that ties together all consciousness, across all planes, and in effect is actually the underlying current behind the creation of the ego and everything the ego interacts with in manifest reality. It is beyond the manifest. It is beyond potential. It is the unmanifest beyond comprehension, the forces by which allows this game of ours to be played out.
August 24th, 2005 at 8:19 pm
I like what you guys are saying here about not being allowed to even speak the name of God. The whole G-d thing or the neologistic G@d has struck me as kind of preposterous though, since I never for a moment considered that “God” was actually his first/last name. Anyway, in one of my upcoming interviews, this idea of silence or secrecy comes up in more detail. Also in the Robert Laremy books, Spiritual Cleansings and Psychic Defense, Laremy openly refuses to give the name of the religion that he practices. It’s kind of cool because it means you can never talk about what it is, but are always forced into talking about what it is like.
It makes me wonder what kind of effects this would have on contemporary spirituality like gnosticism or chaos magick if you weren’t even allowed to say their names. I think maybe there’s something to this, although I’m not quite sure what.
Moving in a different direction, it’s starting to seem to me that belief in a concrete physical manifested God with white hair, robes and a big throne really *is* counter-cultural, almost to an extreme…
August 24th, 2005 at 8:26 pm
i agree with fell, that god and the universe can be interchanged.
i think of god as a moment of resolution, the peak where time stops– we’ve all been there right? that moment?
in a vibrating universe we are always heading for the peak or the trough.
i once heard god defined as a ’strange attractor’. this sounded good too. there is an inexplicable attraction of some unknown point in the future that we strive towards, that when we lookd back, looks like we were following a map of some sort.
god might be a place outside of time, that binds all time together. like if you go up in 3 dimensions, you see the land clearly (the 2d plain). then god must be at a ninety degree angle to time, so as to see all of time simultaneously, which isnt that weird when you consider that string theory involves up to 11 dimensions and presumably our brains contain these dimensions as well.
August 24th, 2005 at 11:21 pm
LIFE!!…that’s how I’d “define” (not)God. Not a concept, not a metaphor, not this or that, not even something ineffable or mysterious… and not Consciousness or Mind projected out large onto the universe, either, that’s another anthropocentric projection, a more subtle version of the white haired man on the throne. And not simply a “living universe”, that’s just another concept. LIFE!! That says what can be (sort of)said, anything else has to be lived. Or more correctly, LIVED!!
August 25th, 2005 at 12:01 am
That’s awesome, Lemuel. It also answers the question I raised before about how people are always looking for “evidence” of God. Life is all the evidence you should need. You’re living it. You are evidence that you’re alive.
August 25th, 2005 at 1:54 am
If God were a little less than what it (?) is; maybe we could talk about it (?). As it stands, it’s a logical impossibility–no word encompasses everything with the exclusion of nothing (and vice-versa.)
Even nothing becomes a thing when you name it.
Addendum: I was reading a manga where the main character at one point screams in rage: “Parents kill their children by naming them!!”
More food for thought.
August 25th, 2005 at 2:02 am
jeez… upon further consideration, “life” really is about the best definition of God I could ever imagine. To me that pretty much says it all. to talk about life and talk about god, they would be synonymous. and perhaps the further we get mired in abstraction and the farther we get from actually engaging moment to moment life, the less potent and more thinly spread we feel god’s influence
it’s like the martin luther quote where he says the gospel is written in all of nature.
August 25th, 2005 at 2:06 am
Can you find that quote for me Jacob and paste it in here?
August 25th, 2005 at 2:14 am
God writes the Gospel not in the Bible alone, but also on trees, and in the flowers and clouds and stars.
Martin Luther
Martin Luther was pretty dope, I definitely believe he had gnosis–at least before he went nuts.
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/martin_luther.html
August 25th, 2005 at 2:16 am
heh if you think about it, that quote is almost like a roundabout justification of astrology and all sorts of “…mancys”
August 25th, 2005 at 2:50 am
I believe this is where the concept of Chapel Perilous as rite of passage comes in. There is, indeed, a higher order of perspective and being, the so-called Secret College, whatever name whatever culture has for it.
I believe something nameless is out there, it’s a way of being that you come across in your journeys and experiences. It holds no name for it needs one. It is is wise, thus its members acknowledge one another in that requires no language.
I am sure Jesus, Siddhartha, Ghandi, Jung, and many others are chilling out there as we speak.
August 25th, 2005 at 1:32 pm
I’m not worried, God never gets fully thrown out. Eventually in a period in history, people’s evolving awareness clues them in: “Dear God! God is bigger than we thought!” Sometimes the inadequacy of the old God concepts push people to drop ideas about God completely in frustration, but the mystics and philosophers are always going to be churning out new understanding on the subject.
And interesting point about history - until very recently, the word “Atheist” was a slander word that meant “this person does not believe in the correct type and conception of God,” rather than not believing in God at all. In Europe, the overuse of this word in the public always indicates a concurrent revolution in God-thought occurring at the same time. Its easy to see how if your choices are between a Christianity of the Demiurge and Atheism, Atheism feels more solid. Who wants to believe in a great big bearded Jewish-Zeus? Not I.