God

And He said, “Hear now my words: If there be a prophet among you, I the LORD will make myself known unto him in a vision, and will speak unto him in a dream” (Num. 12:6).

“I will pour out of My Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams” (Acts 2:17).

“For God speaketh once, yea twice, yet man perceiveth it not. In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon men, in slumberings upon the bed; Then He openeth the ears of men, and sealeth their instruction, That He may withdraw man from his purpose, and hide pride from man. He keepeth back his soul from the pit, and his life from perishing by the sword.” (Job 33:14- 18).

Jung says that while the Catholic Church admits of dreams sent by God, most theologians make little attempt to understand dreams in relationship to God.

God and Christian morality is as incoherent as our own core of logic about our sovereign independent agency. He  (God) says he is the one who puts our will and thus our specific actions into us, but then condemns or glorifies us arbitrarily, to demonstrate His power. Even so, he continues to treat us as morally self-authoring entities, the origins of our actions. But he continues to maintain that it is not us, but only Him, who is the origin of our will, while still condemning or praising us. How can the potter be morally angry and impatient at his own clay products? God’s moral attitude is manifestly incoherent or self-contradictory.

In fact the whole image of God we have been given is ridiculous. God is shown as a male figure, never with a female aspect. Yet God, being the creator of Everything, so that all things have their source in Him??

The fundamental description of god in Hebraic teaching was ‘ain soph’ – the unknown god. Being Everything, it can never be a THING because things like maleness would be something. But it/God becomes something in expressing itself. For the word Elohim is usually translated as God, but it actually means gods. See Secret Bible

Example: As I experienced this, I realised that everything that exists is a part of that wondrous being. There is nothing that is not of its love. So that whatever arises in the universe arises out of, and as, THAT. The human sense of God is a realisation of the very substance of our own existence. The awe we might feel is from an intuition of what has been given us as our own being.

And as that great unity of energy and consciousness died, its very last impulse was for those new beings that might arise from its death. The impulse that flashed out we call love. It flashed through the universe permeating its every particle, in a way that we cannot yet perceive, but which is like a touch upon the pulsating chaotic movements of particles and lives. See Big Bang and God are the Same

Example: For a while I drew nearer the awareness of ‘God’. I wanted to be able to have a clear view of what this experience was and how to describe it. It seemed to me that there was no great astral, ethereal being we call God. In my awareness I sensed that there was something connected with the living bodies and minds of all things. It was something like music in the sense that out of the many separate instruments an overall sound arises.

Or it could be like the body that comes about from the unity of countless cells, yet is different than any single cell. A reality that does not have its base on any one thing, yet has existence nonetheless. So I saw God as a reality that is as ever shifting as music because of the changing face of physical events and mind arising from it. This thing ‘God’ is as near to us and as practical as our own heartbeat. If we feel our heartbeat and honestly ask ourselves what causes our existence, do we really know? We probably have some formulaic idea such as chemical or biological processes. But neither chemistry nor biology explain the full answer. What is at our base is a mystery, and it seems wise to me to stand before that mystery humbly and open to it in our dealings with everyday life.

My sense of God did not present itself as something that was an ultimate being causing all things, but as an intrinsic aspect of what exists, and that exists because of reality, and acts upon it. You can never grasp it because it always moves and evolves. I felt it to be like wind. Could I be the wind? It is featureless yet touching and influencing things.

Then a strong image of a snake arose. The influence of God, of the featureless power that can enter a human life and transform it was like a snake. The snake can bite you, and its venom may flow throughout your being and kill you. Most of us are very frightened of this. The reason being that the venom will take away your personal boundary of self. It melts the boundary of egoic self-interest, and personal connections with family and children, with choices in action. It replaces the personal interests and fears with a self that is part of the one great life. So, the fear of the snake is not because its venom is deadly, but because it transforms. It turns you into a being who is part of the whole. It robs one of the artificial walls placed between self and the collective pool of life consciousness.

Being a god: You are always the hero of your own life. You are the central character of your own drama of experience. As such you are the deed doer, the hero or fallen god, especially when the dream is portraying dramatic life events.

We are all deities. As it says very clearly in Genesis, “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: … So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”

So we are all the image of God – Unfortunately we live in a world that denies it.

Meister Eckhart has this to say of it: So now I name it in a nobler fashion… It is free of all names, and void of all forms. It is one and simple, as God is one and simple, and no man can in any wise behold it.’

Because God is neither male or female, darkness or light, the created or the creator, but is everything at the same time, it is foolish trying to define what is behind existence.

God in a dream can depict several things: A set of emotions we use to deal with anxiety – i.e. our own belief that a higher power is in charge, so therefore we are okay in the world and are not responsible – thus an escape from responsibility; a parent image from early infancy; a set of moral or philosophical beliefs one holds; self judgement; something/someone we worship; a feeling of connection with humanity; an expression of the fundamental creative/destructive process in oneself; a sense of ones living interaction or relationship with all beings and the universe.

So to dream of God might be an expression of your religious feelings or emotional feelings about God. But it is helpful to remember that if you have strong feelings for a friend, or think about them and feel uplifted or moved, the feelings in no way are that friend. They are only about that friend. So in most cases, when someone tells us they were moved by God, they are usually meaning they were moved by feelings or ideas they experienced about God.

God also depicts processes in oneself that can be enormously transformative. Seen in a very practical way, if a person has no belief that there is anything in life that stand beyond their present situation and weakness, they might never open to the possibility of it. Even if God is only an idea, opening to the influence of that idea allows the action within oneself of an enormous enlargement of functions such as self-healing, widening of awareness, and reaching beyond ones previous limitations and boundaries.

In some dreams however, one has an experience almost as if there is no separation between what is sensed as God, and oneself. This formless, often emotionless experience, may be thought of as an opening to your fundamental and core self.

The archetypal image of God when investigated in dreams, often reveals itself to be an underlying sense that we have within us of our own core self – and so therefore in some way – life itself, the creative impulse of life. This unconscious realisation that we are the Creator, that the holy essence of life itself is expressing as our own being, is so difficult to accept that it is usually projected outward to form an external God. We approach this external God as if it is something distinct from ourselves. Yet again and again, when people delve deeply into themselves they arrive at the realisation – I AM GOD – I AM THAT I AM.

The powerful emotions we sometimes experience about God may well be connected with our tremendous childhood need for love and approval from parents. But equally as likely is that the immense feelings we have about meeting God in a dream, may express the wonder and perhaps terror we experience in meeting the enormity of realising we are the Creator. As the ego melts and realises itself as the One Great Life, undifferentiated, there can no longer be a sense of real separation.

Example: When I explored the emotions that had surfaced in recent dreams about God, I came across something totally unexpected. I had decided I would treat the image of God like a dream image, and ‘get inside it’, find out what was behind it. When I managed to do this I found with amazement that my desperate need for my father’s love, a love he found difficult to express, had been transported into my internal sense of God.

At this point I suddenly saw that my urge for God is actually the urge for my father’s love. My unsatisfied urge to receive love from my father, became a power to create an image of a loving God, an image of a cosmic father who can love – and from this inner creation of the psyche I can get the love I need. I created a loving God because that was my need. But others may create an avenging God to deal with their feelings of guilt; or a mysterious beautiful ever present God to deal with a sense of parental loss, and so on. The image takes the place of real human love – a second best. I see also that it is much more honest to say – not God loves me – but I love myself. I have become the father. I am the God. I have dared to take on the role of father and God. Tony C.

Example: I felt myself to be a primitive tribal male. Suddenly I encountered a force – or what I saw as an immense being. This being I felt was a god or God, but looking back it wasn’t an all encompassing being, so was more like a god, or an aspect of God. My visual impression of it though, was of something so huge yet visible, that I was at first terrified, and so were my ‘people’. If one can imagine an immense skyscraper rising into the clouds and beyond, yet not a building but a living being, this was my view of it. This being I knew as the All Shaper. It was the power which gave form or shape to everything. As such it could influence the shape one had become through the errors of history or the deeds of ones family or oneself. The pristine shape or matrix which guides the cells to form organs could be restored.

There was a problem however. This being was terrifying and beyond the gods of my people. To stand before it or acknowledge it was akin to transgressing all the lore of the tribe, all its customs. So not only was the All Shaper something more than we had known before and so threatening to our – and my – world view, but also to take it as ones god was to break with all the tribal traditions and to stand apart and different to ones whole tribe. Christopher.

Here is another view of God – there can be any number of such views.

At this point I experienced the living God, the influence of which, (the spirit we had felt). I had been aware of this God before, but never in such detail. It was experienced by me as the buzzing, radiating consciousness of all creatures. It was the united consciousness of all people and creatures everywhere. Not simply an aggregate of influence, but a living unity of consciousness. In the dream “we” were praying to this God, which is at the same time, oneself and more than self, and I here understood how such prayers work or fail. Because this God is not simply separate people doing things in the outer world, but collectively is unified effort, and is both the individual and collective consciousness. It can therefore both receive, be influenced by, and influence, individuals and groups. But because it is the collective being, its buzzing being is concerned, if that is the right word, with communal interest, with the whole, with the individual in their relationship with the collective. Where there is a collective desire, it is so powerful it becomes a certainty in realisation. There is so much power behind it, virtually nothing could stand in its way. Even though at first it is only held in collective mind, a certainty of it becoming manifested is almost absolute. This is rather like insurance statistics as reliable guide to future events. So if we pray for something that is of value collectively, the power of “God” is behind its manifestation.

But what I saw was that this is only one form of God. There are many gods – but for some people, this appears to be the absolute God.

Example: Is it God that I will find?

My experience replies – If you so wish for a God, then you can create the experience of one out of your own longing and energies, your creativity – and such a God will be wondrous.

But when I look to the ends of my own experience I do not find a God. I find the fundament of my own being – a primal condition of awareness that is ever with me though seldom dwelt in. It is a reality not a God. It is a foundation in my being, not a being giving me foundation. And what is there to find save consciousness and its reality? It leads to no wonders – it is a wonder. There is no escape from myself. But there is the liberation of that realisation.

Example: I witnessed a conversation between a man and a woman, and the man says, “Religion; that’s surely a direction for failures and people who can’t really cope with facing reality.”

And the woman he is accusing of this inability to face reality says, “You poor person! Is your mind or awareness so tiny that you have never realised the forces and processes of your own body are beyond anything you understand? Can’t you see that your very existence is brought about by things so far beyond your knowledge that it is only a statement of your impoverishment to suggest religion is an expression of some sort of smallness and failure. Have you never understood that? Have you not seen that religion is not only an acknowledgement of what we fail to understand and yet depend upon, but it is also an opening to it, a willingness to relate to it? It can also be something far more even than that. It is can be an active loving relationship. And such love is an exchange, a sharing, a way of merging one with another. It is an exchange – a sharing of bodily fluids – the very substance of life. Is that something you are afraid of?”