When I wonder about God, I wonder what fish wonder about water. Do they think about water? Do they appreciate water? Do they challenge the existence of water? Do they realize water surrounds them? Connects them? Do they even need to know water is essential for their life?

What is God?

Humanity’s relationship with God is similar to a fish’s relationship with water. God is the connective tissue between all things. God is everything we are not. The light that surrounds our existence. The air that nurtures us.  The gravity that tethers us all to the earth. God is the love that flows through us. God is the hope that unites us. God is the joy we share. God is the nothingness we experience. God exchanges our energy. God collects the wisdom of our ancestors.

God created us so we could create God in our heart and minds.

God should not be personified. There is no pronoun in our language to encompass the entire composition of God. The closest word is the “everything,” but God is more than everything. God is more than all things we know to be true and untrue. God is everything there is, everything there was, everything there will be and everything there never will be.

Why wonder about God?

A fish doesn’t need to think about water to be a part of the water. Humans don’t need to think about God to be a part of God, so why think about God?

Water didn’t create the fish, so the fish doesn’t have a responsibility to the water. The water is responsible for the fish. Humans don’t have the same relationship with God.

God is all the coincidences that occurred leading up to the creation of your life. God is responsible for your creation, and God doesn’t exist without you creating God in your consciousness. We have a responsibility to think about God. If we don’t think about God, God doesn’t exist. If God doesn’t exist, our consciousness doesn’t exist. It’s an infinite loop. Thinking about God is the liar paradox that forms our existence.

Additionally, when we realize God is the life force between living creatures, we get a sense of how all things are connected. Our understanding of the relationship between all things help us to navigate our world. It helps us appreciate what we know and don’t know, and it gives us confidence we can influence and improve our collective situation.

How do we experience God?

Could a fish explain how she experiences water? Probably not. A fish doesn’t have context for her life without the water. Can we explain what’s like to experience God? I think we can. We can create context for our life, and then we can remove ourselves from the context to listen for God.

Humanity is bound to linear time. We all have a past. Memories give us a distant access to this past. We can think about life as we lived it once before, but our thoughts about the past are imperfect. We can’t synchronize our senses with the thoughts to truly reexperience something from our past.

We have a future. Our imagination gives us access to the possibilities of this future. The memories from past experiences can be blended with stories we have learned to form thoughts about the times ahead. These thoughts about the time ahead of us is also imperfect. We guess how things will be based on how things were, but we can’t account for all the variables that shape time ahead of us.

The context for our life is the tension between the past and the present. In order to be productive in society, we constantly pull from the past to look towards the future. The demands of learning from the past and preparing from the future distract us from time we actually are living. The now – which can be perfectly realized simultaneously by all sensations – becomes imperfect when we are distracted by the past and the future.

God is not bound to time. God experiences the past, the now and the future all the same. If we can free ourselves from the context of past and future, we can find ourselves aligned with God. We can experience God by fully realizing the perfection of life in the moment.

Beauty is God’s calling signal. Beauty, in any form, will hijack your attention and anchor you in the now. It’s impossible to approach the Grand Canyon and think about anything but the Grand Canyon. Even if just for a brief moment, the overwhelming beauty of the sight will vanquish your thoughts of the past and your worries of the future. You will be in the now. You will be with God.

Conclusion

God is a semordnilap of dog. Be nice to dogs.