During the last seven years or so I already wrote two articles about God, each coming from a different viewpoint. I also gave a comment about this subject to Joshua’s article What is God to you? of May 6th, 2018, which approached the subject from another viewpoint again, but not all comments are read, let alone remembered, by everyone. That is why I decided to quote it in this article, with a few small additions.
“I believe that there is no one definition to define God. If I had to choose a word it would be Everything. There just is not anything that is not God manifesting on one of the multitudinous vibrationary frequencies. In the lowest frequencies that would be without much, if any, conscious awareness, but still a manifestation of God. We cannot get away from God however we might try as we are a part of God. In our case with a very much diminished awareness as we put on a blindfold so to speak before we entered into this physical body in order to have certain experiences.
What fun is playing a game if you know all the best possibilities and the answers to all the questions already? The fun is in finding out and inventing new possibilities for ourselves. We do have all the potentials of God in us, even though they have not all been activated yet.
I think you can see us (humans, animals, plants, minerals, cells, atoms, quanta, planets, stars, galaxies, universes a.s.o.) as points of focus of attention for God. Each of us is a cell or an atom in a greater universe and is a universe to smaller entities. God as the highest entity of all is encompassing all of us and perceiving and experiencing through us. As we are experiencing through our organs and cells and atoms and maybe are ‘god’ to them.
There is no God that is separate from us but when you consider us to be the focal points in the feet of God (using the metaphor of a human body), as we live in the lowest and densest frequency vibrations, and the focal point that encompasses all is the brain, you can also imagine communication between the feet and the brain in order to make them function.
So while there is no God outside us because we are in God and God is in us, we still may want to experience communication and therefore pretend that God is outside of us.
The fact is that we cannot possibly understand how things are in Reality with a capital R as long as we are still wearing this blindfold. We are waking up though because we are now at least aware of the fact that we are wearing a blindfold and that this world is nothing but an illusion.
So maybe we should stop arguing about what really happened in whatever time and whatever place, because none of that is real anyway, except the Love and Conscious Awareness we gained from whatever happened in the world we created.”
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Today I want to focus first and foremost on the unconditional love and unity of God, which I also already mentioned many times in my articles and comments but which was explained so much more beautifully and completely by rabbi Zvi Ish-Shalom in the video of which you find the link here, and which I advise you to watch first, before reading the rest of this article:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eudhz0ylnW4
Personally I enjoyed this video very much, not only because it addressed so many things that I knew already, and had actually written about often as well because Hebrew numerology is at the basis of almost all my articles, but because there were so many new aspects as well.
I did not discover this meaning of the Name YHWH because of any Bible texts in the way Zvi described but very prosaically by just doing the math. The fact that the numerical value of YHWH, 26, equals 13 + 13 (echad + ahava) was immediately obvious to me, maybe because thirteen has always been my favorite number since I had a Near Death experience at the age of thirteen, in which I experienced this unconditional love myself. A love of a frequency that is far too high to be experienced as long as we still reside in our physical bodies. That is why I made this theme to the centre of attention of many of my articles.
Slowly it started to occur to me though that this principle is not only the Name of God, and the nature of His /Her/ It’s being but also of ours as we (everything from quarks to universes and beyond), is an expression of God’s being. God is experiencing Himself (to keep it short) through all of us, as we are all sparks of the Fire that is God, another Name, who temporarily descended into the so-called world of matter (which is described as a dream or deep sleep, tardema, in Genesis) in order to gain conscious awareness there by also experiencing the opposite of light, of love etc. in order to learn in this way what these and all other concepts really mean. All this has taken us a very long ‘time’ (within the concept of space and time), and many lives (within the concept of reincarnation) in order to come to the point where we finally recognize this process for what it is, and the fact that the essence of God is in effect our essence also.
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So our task in this life on earth and in duality is to learn to express this essence of our being, this unconditional love and also this unity (in diversity) in our own daily lives.
It means also to recognize and acknowledge that all major world religions in their essence are all about the same thing: unconditional love and unity in diversity, and that there is no one religion that solely is in possession of the truth whereas all others somehow got it wrong. And it means that we will have to cooperate with each other to reach this goal together. In a practical sense of course by practicing this unconditional love wherever we can. And by discarding automatic distrust of everyone who looks differently, or is of another race, country or religion, in order to reach this unity in diversity together.
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I am not going to explain every detail of Zvi’s video – he did that better than I ever could – but I do want to focus on one or two of the details.
Elohim, numerical value 86, equals ha teva, (the) nature, with also a numerical value of 86. The formless is the form. Spirit, the formless, has another, higher, vibrational frequency than matter, the form. So by entering the ‘mater’ial world in order to have experiences there in the form of all (life) forms in it God is lowering His vibration.
Mater is the Latin word for mother, so matter is mother stuff. Our material world is the feminine / mother side of God, and therefore Goddess or Divine Mother, of which we in our incarnated self are a part. So if you want to see God: look in the mirror, and remember with what purpose you came to this world: to bring unconditional love and unity in diversity back to her, as that is the phase we now have reached in our cycle of development.
The title of this article is the Nature of God, and of course I meant something like the essence of God with this term. But nature as ha teva, in the literal sense now proves to be also an aspect, a side, of God. And what a beautiful aspect it is.
With the term ha teva I was immediately reminded of Haganat ha teva, the society for the protection of nature in Israel, which used to organize all sorts of beautiful trips into nature during the time that I lived there during the last century. Maybe they still do. I was also reminded again of the beautiful flowers in spring, and the beauty of the deserts – the Negev, where my husband used to live for a few years before we met, and the Sinai – among other things. There nature shows itself in a most majestic way and can really be experienced as divine. Of course the Sinai belongs to Egypt again these days but when I lived in Israel it still belonged to Israel and it was not yet spoilt with asphalt roads and tourist accommodations, as so many areas of nature are these days. I went there for an eight-day trip with a group of people from our village, under the guidance of Haganat ha teva, in May 1973 and never forgot the experience. I did get some understanding for the grumbling of the people of Israel who had to track through it for forty years though. I would probably have started to grumble much sooner than they did for beautiful though the desert may be, it is also barren and not for the life of me would I have wanted to wander through there for such a long time.
Mother Nature (God) shows both a beautiful and majestic side and a grim one in regions like deserts and mountains and (stormy) seas but also a soft and loving one in flowers, budding and flowering trees and young living beings and the like. The nature of the Mother really is awe-inspiring and inviting unconditional love.
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My desert experience in 1973 was awe-inspiring but so was the experience of the Yom Kippur war half a year later. As our Christian village had been started in order for Christians to be solidary with the Jewish people after almost 2000 years of discrimination, persecution and murder of Jews by Christians, this village was intentioned to be non-missionary and the purpose originally was just to assist the – in the beginning still young – state of Israel by getting to know the people – all the peoples – and by starting and assisting enterprises that would support the economy. We would have to learn to listen to the Jews for a change instead of foisting our religious views upon them. It also meant to be solidary with the Jewish people in the case of an attack by other countries. So running away was not an option when this war suddenly came upon us. This placed us in a very special position in which we had to adjust to the situation as it was – we were very near the northern front – and somehow that put us in some sort of bubble in which we lost all fear and experienced the Presence of God very clearly in a way I cannot really describe. It was definitely Love.
There were miracles too, one of which I already mentioned in my article about miracles, but here is another one. Of course we were very much focused on the news and I remember one occasion where I was listening very intently to the radio in order to find out where the attacking forces were exactly, and taking it all in, until I suddenly realized that I was listening to a Hebrew broadcast, and I did not know any Hebrew to speak of yet. Up till then there had been no time to attend any Hebrew classes as there was too much work to be done. As soon as I realized that the broadcast was all in Hebrew, it became unintelligible to me. Sort of like Peter sinking into the water of the Lake of Tiberias as soon as he realized what he was doing by stepping out of the boat in order to walk to Jesus over the water.
Another aspect of that war was the fact that it had meant so much to the people around us that all of us had stayed with them during that war, as one of the survivors of the concentration camps of the Second World War told us when we visited them later after the war. We had not been able to do anything at all to help anybody during that time but purely the fact that we were there had been of some comfort to them. It gave them a feeling of not being deserted by everyone in their hour of greatest danger again.
Something comparable happened many years later in Vietnam, in 2008, when we were there to celebrate the wedding of our second son to a Vietnamese girl. One of the uncles of my daughter in law had been with the Vietcong during the Vietnam war and had been terribly wounded; he had lost an arm and an eye during that time and had many internal wounds as well. Of course this had a great impact on his attitude towards people coming from western countries. Since the end of that war in 1975, when my son was not even born yet, he had refused to meet any person from the west but now he was more or less forced to meet with us. He took a seat at the table right across from our seats and immediately wanted to know what we thought about the fact that our son had just married a Vietnamese girl. He obviously expected that we would not really welcome a Vietnamese daughter in law but was pleasantly surprised that we did not show any objections to the marriage. And then he pointed at our youngest son, who sat beside us, and asked what we would think of it when he too would want to marry a Vietnamese girl (and indeed, in the few days we had been in Vietnam he had already managed to fall in love with one and he is married to her now!). We told him that that would be perfectly fine with us and with that statement a huge weight of distrust and maybe even hatred seemed to fall off him and he became a changed person, totally accepting us. We did not do anything, we only were there in a positive state of being and that made all the difference.
Being is the essence of what it is all about, being unconditional love and being willing to be part of a unity in diversity.
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This interlude about the second meaning of the nature of God and what followed sort of interrupted my explanation about the term Elohim but there is a second form of Elohim, which Zvi did not mention within the context of his presentation.
The first form of Elohim means God – or really Gods because it is a plural form – but these Gods are a unity and act as one, which becomes clear in the form of the verbs which are used, that is, the singular form. We find that to begin with in the creation story where already in the first sentence it is written Bereshit bara Elohim et ha shamayim we et ha arets: In the beginning created Elohim the heavens and the earth. The verb created, bara, is singular. And so are the verbs used in the following verses.
However, there are also other Elohim; gods which are idols. They each point in a different way and they create chaos instead of order, hatred instead of love. In their case an accompanying verb is in plural, which I have however never seen explained anywhere by anyone.
An example of these idols can be found in the time that the people of Israel are asking Aaron to make gods for them in order to lead them to the Promised Land because Moses took a long time to return to the people from the top of the mountain where he received the Ten Words from God. In Exodus 32:1 it is written: Ase lanu Elohim asher yeelchu lefanenu, Make gods for us that will go before us.
In that sentence the plural form yeelchu – they will go – was used, so they really asked for gods who would lead them back to slavery because that is the only destination such gods can lead us to.
That is also a lesson for us because the reason why the people asked for such gods must have been that they did not have enough trust in the God who had delivered them from Mitsrayim, the world of duality, the world of slavery. They had not expected that the journey to a Promised Land would be a journey through a desert, through challenges and uncertainties, a journey during which they would have to learn to take decisions themselves again, and to face an uncertain future for the time being. They had not expected that the journey would take a long time, ‘forty’ years. Forty is the character Mem, which as a word means mayim, water, and as such also is a symbol for ego and emotions. They would have to learn to deal with all that in the desert during those ‘forty’ years.
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Doesn’t that sound familiar to us in the circumstances we are in now? It has been more than clear that the actions of humanity have taken the earth to the cutting edge of where she can go and now we face a very uncertain future if we do not turn around immediately and start behaving in a very different fashion, towards the earth, towards all creatures that inhabit the earth and also towards ourselves so that we finally will be able to face a future again in which unconditional love reigns over all and where we all will have become a unity in diversity which lives together as one and which expresses all the qualities of the God we could never find when we were looking in all the wrong places and going into all the wrong directions.
This journey may lead us over difficult roads, which at times seem unsurmountable. But we have to go this road if we want to reach the Promised Land, Kana’an, which has the numerical value of 190, whereas the numerical value of Egypt, Mitsrayim, the land of slavery, is 380. Symbolically this translates as the Promised Land being the world of oneness, of unity in diversity, as opposed to the slavery of Egypt in the world of duality.
The way out of this world of slavery and through the desert of uncertainty is shown to us by Jesus. No, not the person who was born some 2000 years ago, who came to deliver us from our sins, who was The Son of God. That has become the doctrine of Christianity, a faulty doctrine in my view. I believe that Jesus was and is A Son of God and at that time came to show us that we are as well. He came to show us the way how to accomplish what he accomplished.
Jesus in the Bible is a symbol and a process; a way back to unconditional love and unity in diversity and a road which we will have to go ourselves. Nobody else can do it for us. Jesus the person may have been the one who came to show all of us this way. A way which has nothing to do with Christianity or any other religion as such, although of course the followers of each of those religions are invited to walk this road as well.
The Hebrew name of Jesus is Yeshua, and yeshua is a word as well. It means help, rescue, salvation. Our way to salvation is the way of the cross, the crucifixion of the ego and the birth of the Christ Consciousness after that, which I described extensively in the articles in the links below:
http://www.spiritofthescripture.com/id3124-an-esoteric-interpretation-of-the-crucifixion-of-jesus.html
http://www.spiritofthescripture.com/id3450-the-birth-of-the-christ.html
The Crucifixion of the Ego
There remains one other image of God to explain and that image is that of God as the Father. My view on that can be found in my article The Other Son , which shows God as an unconditionally loving Father who accepts all His children in all of their diversity.
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For those of you who want to get a complete overview of how I have come to view the concept of God I provide you here with the links to the two previous articles I wrote about this concept.
Does God exist? Is there consciousness outside of the body, or life after death?
What if the purpose of Creation is the Evolution of God?
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I invite each of you to seriously consider what I presented you with in all this material and to comment on it if you feel like that. I hope to be able to reply to your comments but the fact of the matter – and the reason why I have not been writing any articles at all during the last eighteen (18! The number of chai, life) months is that I have been and still am ill, and that writing anything at all takes a lot of energy, of which I still have preciously little these days. Besides that my eldest son has been diagnosed with incurable cancer in 2018 and our youngest suddenly became ill a few days ago with symptoms that may point to the corona virus. Today he was finally tested but the result of the test he will not get for another two days. His wife is having a very difficult pregnancy and is not able to do anything herself most of the time. Our grandson has immediately been put into quarantine again and spends a lot of the time at our house, while my husband is helping out at theirs as well. So when my son will prove to be infected, my husband and I will probably be as well. And what that means to me in my condition is anyone’s guess. But it certainly made me go much deeper in writing this article.
The need of the present circumstances of the world during this hectic period and our own condition suddenly urged me to write this article and gave me the inspiration and the strength for it as it obviously is something we have to become aware of right now.
I hope to be able to reply to your comments but I cannot guarantee that I will be physically up to it so if you do not hear from me, you now know the reason.
Unconditional love and unity in diversity really is the centre that everything revolves around. It is the nature of God. It is the task for all of us. And it is the essence of our being. Jesus already told us so when he told us that we are gods.