My Personal Belief System

I am sometimes asked about my beliefs, in the context of the existence or nature of God. It's one of those questions that everyone's bound to face eventually. Someone recently asked me, "What is your personal belief system?" a question so dangerously broad and open ended that in my attempt to come up with a good answer, I ended up writing quite a lot. Since it is something I think about, and care about, and something that I will no doubt be asked about again in the future, I will leave my response here for anyone who is interested.

My personal belief system is... I'm not sure. There are lots of different things I could probably call it, and just don't want to. I might actually qualify as a Christian depending on how loose your definition is, but probably not. I certainly don't think of myself as one, and don't want to. I could call myself atheist, but that's not entirely true - I believe in spiritual entities and interaction between them, energy magic and things like that, and so I don't think my "belief system" quite counts as atheist.

Do I believe in God? ... Yes. Not as a person. When I think about it, when I am feeling spiritual and profess any belief, I believe in God in more or less this sense:

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There is a force imbued in everything that exists, whether we believe in it or not - plants, animals, humans, dirt, stars, space, time, spirits, etc - with a certain element of unity, deeper than outward appearance, behavior and chemical differences, but that can and does affect these things in subtle ways, by its very nature. I don't know, and don't think it really matters, whether this force is actually what matter is MADE of, purely, or only part of it.

I as a human being, with an independent mind, act as a separate-entity most of the time, but I am always at least somewhat attuned to the part of me that is God, is spirit. Sometimes I am attuned to it more, sometimes less, depending on how much I am distracted by things like pain, desires, physical needs and other concerns that I have to address as a separate-entity in order to survive - I AM liable to suffer, for instance, were I unable to eat food for an extended period of time. The more I focus on things and react to things as a human being, a smart animal, a separate-entity, the less I am in communion with God. It can be very frustrating sometimes to attempt to let go of such things and return to a sense of unity, a state closer to God.

I personally think that I have at least in some parts of my life gotten quite good at keeping myself open to God. I have experienced times of enlightenment, when I felt guided - an inspired moment in which I suddenly felt or knew that I should do a particular thing, and so did, and it turned out to be exactly the right thing to do. Similarly, I have an uncanny knack for finding good, helpful things at extremely convenient times and noticing them enough to take advantage of them. Not that all of my needs are met, or anything like that. I will often suffer for a while for some reason or another, and face it and sometimes even get through it like a separate-entity human, a smart animal acting like a smart animal to get through a difficult situation. I find that I often cycle between periods of enlightenment/guidance and prolonged detachment from God.

I see God as... not exactly the source of magic, but something that makes it possible, the thing through which it works. A person, or, presumably, any other entity with Will, can project its needs and desires through that unified spirit, subconsciously. It generally works best, or, for large enough effects to be noticeable, only at all, when the person is inspired, in a mindset which is closer and more open to God. It requires action, a sort of determination, to come to fruition, probably because the spark of determination that occurs when a person acts to accomplish what they want or need to do is what turns idle desire into actual Will. Sometimes, that Will becomes manifest - subtle influences of entities acting on the amount of God's intuition they are attuned to, subconsciously or otherwise, will bring people who need to interact with each other together. If you've ever seen the first episode of the new show, Touch, it demonstrates some extreme examples of the way this might work quite well, but manifests the sign of people who need to interact in numbers coming up in their lives.

If God has a single grand 'Will', as many people seem to think, It is certainly not straightforward, and only hinges on single people and events inasmuch as the tiny parts of God within the people influenced by those events will them to happen or not. Even that much can be incredible and dramatic of course, but it is silly to think that all of reality is thinking about you, or your wedding, at any given moment.

If I were to guess what the "Will of God" really were, I would guess that it is more or less the deepest and most moving collective desires of the whole of existence, which must at once be extremely complex and subtle, and at the same time primal, deep, and surprisingly simple. For example, the thing many people say, that the Will of God (or God itself) is Love. It seems to me to fit - the experience of love is moving, primal, deep and although essentially simple, it is full of subtleties and confusion. And most importantly, although expressed in multitudes of ways, it is a drive that seems to be shared by almost everyone, more or less, depending on the person, and how much they are willing to step aboard and follow the right intuition to let life, or God, "bring them there".

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Take or leave that as you wish. You asked about my belief system, and obviously, there is a lot more I could say about it, but hopefully this explains the base of it to you.

I wouldn't normally call the spirit force God. Too many people talk about God in (what seems to me to be) disgusting and stupid ways and I really just don't like the word. Never have. Sometimes I call it All, which seems, to me, appropriate, because it is, after all, everything. The Force, Goddess, Essence, or Aether would all work too, but as with God, each of those words also has, or at least has developed, other different meanings, with which is is important not to confuse the concept.