Well, at least for me.
From PostSecret: "God isn't the one who is lost; we all are. God is where He always is... we need to stop trying to "find God" and instead rid ourselves of the things that we use to hide from God."
From
Wikipedia (Let me know if there are discrepancies or falsities here, for the most part though I like Wikipedia):
"Theism, in the broadest sense, is the belief that at least one
deity exists. In a more specific sense,
theism refers to a doctrine concerning the nature of a
monotheistic God and God's relationship to the
universe. Theism, in this specific sense,
conceives of God as personal, present and active in the governance and organization of the world and the universe. The use of the word
theism as indicating a particular doctrine of
monotheism arose in the wake of the
scientific revolution of the seventeenth century to contrast with the then emerging
deism that contended that God, though transcendent and supreme, did not intervene in the
natural world and could be known rationally but not via
revelation.
The term
theism derives from the Greek
theos meaning "god". The term
theism was first used by
Ralph Cudworth (1617–88).
Atheism is rejection of theism in the broadest sense of theism; i.e. the rejection of belief that there is even one deity. Rejection of the narrower sense of theism can take forms such as
deism,
pantheism, and
polytheism. The claim that the existence of any deity is unknown is
agnosticism, and can be compatible with theism and with atheism. The positive assertion of knowledge, either of the existence of gods or the absence of gods, can also be attributed to some theists and some atheists. Put simply theism and atheism deal with belief, and agnosticism deals with (absence of) knowledge; they are not mutually exclusive as they deal with different domains."
People idolize things more easily than I realized. Sometimes it's not an outright bad thing, sometimes it's initially driven by love or the divine but then the focus shifts from why you're focusing on something (the initial purpose) to that thing. And sometimes, we just obsess over really worthless and dumb things, or concepts.
Why would you idolize something like that? Or idolize another person even? People can be awesome but not to the point where you should waste your time obsessing over a person, or a conspiracy theory, or over worrying itself.
I saw my flaws briefly in a spiritual sense, as a form of idolatry or sin, and I was dumbstruck. Our flaws as humans are simultaneously our sins, particularly idolatry. We put worry and lust and other people and even things that aren't necessarily bad (like college or grades or craftsmanship or music even) in front of Divine Love, in front of the concept of love and God, and thereby do not allow ourselves to fully mirror or reflect any of the wonderful and beautiful things we honestly have the potential to reflect. When I realized this, I simultaneously got this intense rush of bewildering, Ican'tevendescribeitaslovebecausethatwordisn'tenough, love from I DON'T KNOW WHERE. It was out of nowhere and I just comprehended how much God loves me and how he is love, and what all of that actually signifies and means. Like, I had heard it before ("God=love", the "Jesus loves me!" shlup that you see on posters and stuff) but never truly understood or felt completed on the level I do now. I had never understood the significance and weight and value of what love means, and I was aware that I didn't, but I didn't understand how much it impacted how I live my life, even as a seemingly vivacious person.
When I saw how I actually idolized worry, idolized that boy who I thought I had something for, idolized college, and how it wasn't just me being stupid and silly, it was me sinning and being kind of mucked up with mud so I could only reflect glimmers of love and be a good person for personal gain, not for God or the Divine or for glorification of love itself....when I saw that, and was faced with not just the flaw, but the sheer EMPTINESS OF THE FLAW, which is the key to undoing the flaw and is actually more dangerous than the flaw itself...well, nature abhors a vacuum. Upon acknowledgement and no longer being blind to the emptiness, the emptiness instantaneously vanished, and the empty space was filled with a euphoric and joyous peace, a sense of worth and love and heightened awareness, and an entirely new way of seeing things outside the realm of just feeling or thinking...believing, something beyond love and normal comprehension. I will never abandon my ability to feel or my ability to reason logically...but I have developed the ability to believe and spiritual does not sum up that level accurately. No description or word does, not the way feeling summarizes and connotates feeling emotions, nor how reasoning connotates and summarizes reasoning and unbiased thought. Because belief and spirituality are not things you can try to pin down in language or human devices without totally staining and marring. Which is why I believe it's not from my own intuition or something along those lines, it's not from us, otherwise we would surely be able to use our own form of speech, in some language if not english, to describe it better. It's marred by my limited perception of it. And we can't speak of it or write about it without boxing it into a category of reasoning or a category of feeling, because it is on its own dimension and plane. We can't say "Christianity" or "belief" or spirituality even without a string of negative images and reasonable, sane doubts and blurring of the otherwise divinely pure concept by our flawed natures and our tendency to categorize and box things up.
Somehow, you CAN put all three planes together...reasoning, feeling, believing, and though they do not normally cross over and aid each other in a manner one would like...they all encompass the concept of BEING, of existing fully and to the most full and fulfilling extent. No time will be wasted (at least, for me), things that are meant to be understood will be understood, things we feel will be felt, and things we can believe but not describe will be...and exist, and give us delight in existence beyond our own shallow interpretations of delight from worldly things.
I am enlightened. It wasn't a knowledge-know, it was a belief-know, and I suddenly saw things from a third plane, I didn't just feel or know things, it's not black and white. Believing doesn't go under feeling something, feeling something is not an umbrella for beliefs as many Christians seem to describe it as. The realm of belief and spirituality is its own plane of perception and existence. It's beautiful.
...You don't even have to call it God, I honestly don't care, but I will call the Divine concept of love/him that, although that's such a terribly limited way of describing it and carries so many wrong and overthought and human connotations regarding his love and glory (which again, are poor words to describe).
I'm almost done. I pretty much just crazily rambled all over the place, and it probably doesn't connect for you in the same way it does for me, at least in some aspects but that doesn't matter. It's okay. I didn't post this to debate with people about God, I didn't post this to try to pin him down or put him in a box, I posted this to try to describe what it means to put him in a box, the level of meaning behind love and other words, how I understood those words but I didn't as much as I thought I did, how we idolize things aside from love and waste our lives away in that manner, how there's a totally amazing third other aspect of perceiving things beyond thinking and feeling that carries over into everything, and how mind blowingly UNPERCEIVABLE and divine and beautiful love is, at least for me. It probably comes about it different ways for different people, and if you think I'm "wrong" or my perception on how we are as humans or my perception on perceptions (woah man, Inception) or my perception of the Divine does not apply to you or match up with your opinions and perceptions, THAT IS TOTALLY FINE AND THAT'S ALL THE MORE WHY WHAT I REALIZED IS SO AMAZING!!
It doesn't matter as long as you find a way to get to that level of peace and simplicity and all-encompassing love and joy. I would never ever ever want to idolize and devote my life to anything else outside of love again, and yet so many people do, they idolize money, or even more frequently, WORRYING about money, about the world, about not understanding things, about not being able to find a someone. They think they love or understand another, and yet when they and we love, it's such a mangled and restricted form, and we don't devote time to truly appreciating it or trying to reflect it in a better manner. We devote trying to understand things as though that will make them easier to handle or deal with, and in some cases that's true, but in others you don't have to understand something completely to still *get it* or be happy. I will never fully understand or comprehend God, or what it means to love, or what it means when one of my friends says they love me or if I tell my mom or friend or siblings I love them. I will never understand them as people fully. And however detached and awful that sounds, we're all connected not by interests or differences or similarities in opinions, but by the divine love that manifests itself in the form of life, in us, that flows out in between and around us. We can only send and receive a marred form of it from each other, but it's enough, and if one can ever get a surge of the kind of love that I pretty much just did the other night, then that's all that matters, because if you can hold on to that sense of purity and simplicity and love that hits you, you're going to be just fine. Words fail to remotely touch the meaning we place behind them.
It's so hard to describe and wrap my head around and yet such a simple and beautiful, intensely pure thing. You'll know it when it hits you.
