The Very Dangerous G Word - GODSEARCH Episode 1
Hi, this is Michael Shevack. Welcome to God's Search. God's Search. What a crazy idea. I mean, how do you search for God? Does anyone actually know whether God actually exists? I mean, a lot of people have faith.
They have beliefs. But where's the proof? How do you know what you're searching for is real? How arrogant, totally, absolutely arrogant of me to say that you can actually search for God and even possibly come to find God.
Well, it is arrogant because no one knows God completely. And it's highly questionable whether you can actually prove God to exist. But on a God search, you're going to have the experience called God, the experience that we call God.
That's all you can do. If you're sitting here watching the computer right now on your screen, all you have is your experience of that phenomenon. You don't even know whether I actually exist outside of your own mind, except that other people around you can generally watch the screen at the same time and say, yeah, Michael Chevak exists, and God searches existing.
So the issue of God really boils down to the existence of anything, which is what is your experience of it? And is this experience capable of being experienced by other people so you can converse about it, so it can have some kind of objective reality?
Well, there is an objective reality to the experience called God. And if you ever wondered how you could have a God search, don't even wonder, don't even fret, don't even worry yourself about how you're going to do it.
The fact is, you're already doing it. it. If you're alive, you're on your God search. That is life. That is the mystery. That is the sublime, incredible, amazing, surprising, sometimes torturous and painful experience of living where you are coming to learn the highest good G-O-O-D, which many people might abbreviate by the word God.
That's what we're going to do here, is we're going to begin the adventure of searching for good, the experience of good. That's the experience that could be abbreviated by the word God, though scholars will debate whether or not that's actually where it comes from.
They think it comes from another word entirely, then good, from the gods, the little gods. But that's all academic stuff here. you're gonna have the experience of God. You're gonna have the experience of good.
And we're gonna uncover God, we're gonna discover God. And for those of you who have had some bad religious experiences, and there's a slew out there, religions are tumbling upside down. All the mainstream religions, they're plummeting.
People are not going to houses of worship anymore. Organized religion is out except for certain conservative and extreme groups. They know their brand, they participate in their brand and it works for them, and that's great.
But mainstream people are having some difficulties because their sense of reason and their sense of dignity that's in religious practice, it's not working for them. They don't wanna drink the Kool-Aid with, by the way, with apologies to General Foods.
It's a fun little brand, you put the little stuff in there and add water and you get Kool-Aid. Look, you may have a religion or not, okay? You may have a religion from your birth that worked for a while, but then you left it.
You may have tried different religions. You may be Christian, you may be Muslim, you may be Hindi, you may be Jewish, you may be Aboriginal, you may have many of the indigenous religions that exist all over the world.
You may have many of these things. And sometimes they stuck, sometimes they didn't. Many times you had questions, many times you felt guilt, which is a real common phenomenon in religious practice. Guilt, when you changed and you left it because your heart was connected, but yet you had to have your individuality and your conscience.
These are very complex, they're painful things, but they're part of the God search. They're part of the experience of life. And if you can get rid of the negativity and throw it out for a second and just treat them as part of the adventure, you know, the little bit of fear you get.
when you go on a roller coaster, which is part of the excitement, then you're prepared to approach a God search like an adult and not all wounded like a child. But let's face it here. God is a very dangerous word.
I hesitate to use it. And people know it's a dangerous word, which is why they abbreviated G hyphen D or X mass, because they don't want to particularly say that they can actually know who God is. They're afraid of it because the minute you do that, you've assumed the number one enemy, which is why people leave religion and relieve spiritual practice, which is authority.
We live in a, by and large, a democratic era. where people are valued for their freedom, they're valued for their conscience, they're valued for their individuality. And it is very, very unfortunate that the previous era of spiritual development was not that.
It was more consolidation. It was more crowd control. It was more organizing human systems and government religion was identical to government. They were inseparable until after the Enlightenment, where state and churches were separate.
God is a dangerous word because the minute you have anyone who proclaims, oh, oh, I know God, then that person becomes an authority. And when that person becomes an authority and you believe that authority to be completely able to encapsulate and portray who God is, then you have a cult.
You have a cult, and it's extremely dangerous. So the G word, not to be confused with the G spot, and we all know that, you know, sex and religion is a mess, too. Oh, well. But the G word, you have to use it very carefully.
That's why we're going to use it here as what is the experience. It's a very objective experience, the experience that we're going to call God, which if you look in scriptures, you'll see that this experience called God is recorded.
And it's not just going to be your experience. You'll be able to look back in scriptures. You'll be able to look back in books that are considered to be holy. And you will be able to notice that your experience is the same as experiences that have been recorded for millennia.
In the meantime, let's be careful with the authoritativeness around using the G word. No word in the history of humanity has caused more pride than the word God. It is misinterpreted. It is mistreated.
It is used to dominate people, hurt people, violate people, and destroy the relationship of the individual to their conscience and their body to substitute your own holy ego, your own sacred individuality and self for a group individuality and a group self.
It is all about control. So we have to be really careful. And if you think, by the way, it's only ancient, which it isn't, just take a look at what's going on. Just look in America, right? God and politics, it's blurred all the time.
It's kind of like what's going on. on Dune. You know, the Bene Gesserit are breeding the Kwisatz Haderach, by the way, which is a Jewish mystical term, the Kwisatz Haderach, a very mystical term of being able to be in all points of time and space and transport and translocate to different locations.
It's a very ancient term, but it's kind of like Dune, what's happening in the US. You have people who are reading, attempting to re-breed a kind of religious viewpoint of how to conduct America. And by the way, I'm not taking sides.
There is great truth to what is going on, otherwise it wouldn't exist. I'm not saying it's the complete truth, but there is great truth to it. You have on one side of the camp, a masculinist, conservative, cisgendered, capitalist, pro-American, and tending towards militaristic, traditional Western view, more similar to what's happened before the 1960s.
And God bless it, it's good stuff. It just needs its correct context. And then on the other side, you have a blue, tends towards feminist. It has intergender. It has different sexual variations. It's not tending to be overly capitalist.
It's tending towards social democracy. Sometimes it's called socialist. That's not true. But you see these two polarities, this red and blue. It's like color wars in day camp. When I was growing up, we went to day camp and we had color wars between the red team and the white team.
It was absolutely ridiculous. And I feel like I'm back in day camp most of the time when I'm dealing with politics. But you have two different, very religious camps. You have the Bene Gesserit from Dune, and then you have what Paul Atreides is dealing with on Arrakis, which is a very Muslim desert nomadic people.
This religious warfare is going on all the time because we are trying to find truth. We're trying to stand on something solid. Here, God is a very invaluable thing because if you can actually have an experience of God that is knowable and shareable and teachable and transmissible from one generation to next, we do have something solid to stand on other than shifting politics like we see in the Dune series.
But this is really, really a difficult thing, and we will talk about politics here because we will also talk about the bad religious ideas that are embedded in both sides of the camps. And we will talk about history and some of the things that went wrong because we are all living embodiments of history, and we have to understand where we come from, especially if we're in America, for example, where we threw off religion,
and we started to follow natural law and the Enlightenment philosophy of the European Enlightenment. So religion is something that's unavoidable. God is something that's unavoidable because the most important thing when you begin your God search, other than throwing off some of the bad experiences you've had so you can start afresh, is truth.
Truth is the foundation of it all. And we're going to talk about truth more later on, but let me just say something now about the certainty of God, proof of God. Proving God is an objectively impossible thing to do because if God is all and everything is in and of and part and parcel and some aspect of the one being, the one consciousness, the one deity, the divine nature from which any nature comes,
the divine reality, the reality from which all realities come, the experience within which each experience has its life and its context, then proving God becomes an impossibility because my proof is part of God in the first place.
And I can't remove myself from God in order to demonstrate God existing because then I move myself outside of God and then God is over here and I'm over here. the whole idea of God is completely destroyed, since the idea of a singular truth that encompasses everything, which is, generally speaking, what people mean by God on the highest level, that idea gets destroyed.
So proof of God becomes a little nutty, okay? And proofs in general are suspects since Kurt Gödel was the mathematician who kind of, in his incompleteness theorems, kind of question whether or not proofs and systematization of anything could be done.
The other tendency is, because we are in a scientific era, that we want to demonstrate something as existing, and we are biased by the religion called scientivism. You know, it's a religion, and science is not just out of nowhere.
It has a basic principle to it, is how do you demonstrate? truth, you demonstrate it by repeated experiments at different places in time and they produce the same results. That's basically the scientific method.
Well, that produces an objective reality and it's the objective reality we're going to use here because if I'm teaching something which you cannot have the experience of and then you can't compare it to other people's experience and get a sense that this is a reality, then you can't talk about anything that we might even consider to be real.
Again, whatever reality is, I have a lot of students that always are questioning whatever reality is. So here it does open up a can of worms which classically speaking religions have hidden from by saying well just have faith, just have faith, just believe, just believe.
It doesn't have to be proven just believe and there is a certain amount of truth to that because you can't fully rationally demonstrate the existence of God without destroying God but you can't do it.
So having faith and just believing really amounts to let's take the first step forward on a God search and see what happens. Now truth is the foundation to God. It's our first lesson here. This is our pilot to God search and truth is the foundation but truth is a very very tricky thing but for the time being truth which is that's what is and that's what is verifiable is our foundation.
We don't want any God search that can't claim truth or some measure of truth. We also will claim as we just hinted before that God is the ultimate unity. It's a unity beyond unity. It's a monistic unity.
Everything is percolating within the very being of God. It's unity beyond anything that we can call one, which can be one finger, or we can say, all of these fingers together are one. They form one hand or one set.
Also, God tends to be something which we link to a notion that we observe every single day called causality. There is this and there is this. This produces this. If I do this, it will create this. So you have truth, unity, causality.
These are the basic kind of secular ideas and notions that are embodied in the notion of God. Virtually, every single religion and spiritual discipline and teaching harness. They all harness these things, truth and unity and causality.
we have to kind of train the mind to see it. But for today's lesson, I want to narrow God's search down. The G word, as I said, is very, very, very dangerous, very dangerous. And I think it's very important on this first podcast on God's search to address a very ancient scourge, very ancient scourge.
It is the foundation of all biblical thinking. And we are tending to forget it. We are tending to forget it. And it's causing a lot of disruption in our society. And that issue is idolatry. Now idolatry, as the biblical prophets would put it, is worshipping any image of God, any image of God.
That's one of the problems in the Ten Commandments. You know, they tell you not to do that. Or any representation of God. It can be an image. It can be, you know, a sculpture. It can be anything. But it can also be an idea that we have of God, that the very idea that we have of God can be so wrong and so incomplete and so not related to truth, that that very idea stops you from gaining any kind of knowledge about God.
Or it just reveals a tiny bit of God. And it doesn't progress. It doesn't go to higher levels. You know, it's a stupid idea, it's a stupid idea and stupid comes from the Latin, which means to stop, it stops you from growing.
So you have to be very careful with idols, meaning human concepts of God that are not complete, they are false. And when you believe them and you give them your belief and you give them your faith and then you devote your life to them, they create nightmares.
Now there are all sorts of idolatry. There's religious idolatry where people worship things that are not true as true or as completely true when they're only partially true. There's a truth to the fact that there is a power in the sun, a very powerful life-giving force, and to a certain level of intellect and development, that sun certainly is a God.
But these days, when we're traveling to other planets and beyond even our solar system, we don't see the sun as a god. The Bible is very, very clear that it doesn't see the sun as a god, it just calls it a greater light, which was a tremendous advance to not create a god out of the sun.
So religions have always had their issues with idolatry. Scientific idolatry is something that people have discovered in recent years, for example, Aristotle used to believe, and we tended to believe it for a thousand years, that when you place an object down on a table, it does not move unless another force comes to move it.
That was Aristotle. Well, that lasted for quite some time until Isaac Newton came along, and he proposed just the opposite, which is everything is already moving until some force stops it. In the case of Aristotle, there's a force of gravity that stops it and places it on the table.
Then Newton became a kind of belief system, and he tended to believe that time was everywhere the same. Everywhere there was a kind of homogeneous rug under the universe of time, and time was everywhere the same.
That was pretty good. He was able to predict the rotation of all the planets, but he had a little bit of problem because the rotation of Mercury around the sun was very pesky, and for some reason Newton wasn't able to predict that.
He was able to predict the other planets. Well, it took Einstein to come in and question whether time was everywhere consistent. It took Einstein to show that gravity can bend light and that there were shifts around Mercury and for him to mathematically predict the rotation of Mercury.
And he had to change some of the beliefs, some of the idolatry around Newtonian thinking. You see, whenever you take a belief and you believe it's so 100% that it is unchanging and fixed and then you force other people to think in that direction, think in that direction and don't think beyond that direction, you create a dangerous idolatry, a cult of thinking.
A lot of the Dune problems we're having where we have all sorts of religious wars taking place and subtle philosophical wars and our democracy is turning into an opinionocracy where everyone has their gods.
And every single person has a different opinion and a different viewpoint. Well, that problem is due to idolatry. Wherever there is conflict, there is missing knowledge. Quote me, if I don't live to the next God search podcast, remember this.
Okay. Wherever there is conflict, there is missing knowledge. We don't need the conflict. We just need to be open to say, aha, there's conflict here. We have less than the experience of God. We have less than the experience of good.
We have less than the experience of truth, less than the experience of unity. And what we are creating through the causal nature of God is less than the experience that would create unity and truth and wholeness and happiness and harmony, which is also part of the God search, which we'll talk about in more detail.
So the important thing on our first podcast, our first step on this God search is to remember, don't believe any one 100 percent. Do not trust anyone 100 percent. Do not trust me 100 percent. Don't trust yourself 100 percent.
Don't trust clergy 100 percent. Don't trust any religion 100 percent. Don't trust any scientific view 100 percent. Please don't trust any political party. They both have pieces of the truth, but they're arguing, which is a sign that they're both missing a piece of truth.
So be very, very careful because you'll fall into that trap. Be careful about trusting anything that has a human view to it. That is. put forward as absolute truth. It is an idolatry that will rip you apart and prevent you from growing with apologies to certain religious people, from evolving.
Okay, idolatry is the single biggest cognitive distortion to your God search. So be careful about it. We're warning you at the top because everything that we do will be a systematic process by which we gently and delicately retrain the mind and the heart and the will so that you can experience more beautiful and more sublime experiences of God because that's what God searches about.
So don't worry about that. And as a footnote, by the way, that's why many, many religions did not, were not comfortable asserting who God was. God was. They just wanted to deal with what's called negative attributions.
This is very common in Buddhism. It was common in mystical Judaism. It was common to just say, well, God is not this, God is not that. Hindus say, I think it was Hindus. They go neti neti. All right, God's not this, God's not that.
God's something that's beyond us because they don't want to get trapped in the idolatry of fixed thinking and organized religious or spiritual thinking, which is fixed because it stops the living, amazing spiritual experience.
No one wants to use the R word anymore. The R word for religion. Mainstream people are leaving it. Religions are tumbling. Everyone wants to be spiritual. Ah, now what's spiritual? We'll save that for the next podcast.
Anyway, this is Michael Chevec. Thank you, honestly, for joining me on, on God's search. You know, uncover God, discover God, recover from a bad idea of God. It's God's search. And, hey, if you're alive, you're already on it.
Join me next time. Thanks so much.