It’s almost a universal question: I don’t believe in a God envisioned as an old man with a white beard in the sky, but I’m open to the existence of a Universal Principle. How can I know? Can you Prove God?
Obviously you can’t take anybody’s word for it. You’d have no way of knowing if they were themselves misled or mistaken.
So it has to be a personal revelation, from within, or deduced by some other means
It’s good to be a skeptic and apply critical thinking but I think it’s equally important to question our basic assumptions about life as well. Otherwise our pre-conditioned bias shapes our ability to perceive beyond appearances and habitual awareness. A bit of critical thinking proves to us that the way we commonly experience the world is far from the whole picture.
After all, by any scientific standard, the world is not as you see it. You only perceive the limited spectrum of visible Light while a world of other frequencies pass right though you. Your body molecules co-exist in the same space as countless cell-phone conversations, radio and data transmissions. It’s plain that our senses can’t be expected to perceive some divine frequency.
It’s plain that our senses can’t be trusted to give us a clear picture of anything. The information from the retina of our eyes comes to us upside down and backwards after being inverted by the lens of our eye. It is our brain that magically flips our whole visual experience of the world right-side up! There are also sounds we can’t hear, and smells we can’t experience, even if our dog can!
The more science discovers about the world, the more dreamlike it looks. All the mass of this whole planet could be squeezed to the size of a baseball by the intense gravity of a black hole.
I appreciate the scientific method but try to wrap your mind around this indisputable truth: We don’t really have any reliable proof the world exists as a physical reality at all! To be honest about our experience, at the personal level, all we have ever experienced is though consciousness. All proof of the world, all our pains and loves, it has all come through our consciousness alone. The only thing in life that is truly proved is consciousness!
There is no way to even prove that you’re not dreaming your whole existence from a higher level of yourself.
Which is exactly the same reason you can never prove God.
Because God is manifest as the totality itself and not as an object within it. If God appears in creation, it is by extension. We keep trying to prove God is a unit within the universe when God encompasses All!
Even if a divine powerful being were to appear before us all, it would only prove that angelic powerful beings existed.
The Nature of God is another matter.
We wonder why science hasn’t yet discovered proof a supreme being. It’s like asking people in a dream to prove who is dreaming. It’s impossible because a dream-being’s entire world is comprised of the consciousness of the dreamer.
How can you prove “Something” that is “EveryThing?”
But does something have to be proven to be experienced?
Mystics have discovered that God can be personally experienced because the nature of the Divine Universal Power is the essence of our very being. Be experiencing pure consciousness within, you are aligned with God and your True Nature.
But how will you recognize something that you’ve always been experiencing? You’ve always been your Soul. Your True Self witnesses the mind and emotions. But how can you prove this?
The Soul cannot be the object of experience because it is the Eternal experiencer. It’s like looking for the Retina of your own eye without any mirror.
It is said that Love is a primary characteristic of our True Nature. You may be experiencing God every moment your mind gets out of the way and Love arises. But how can pure experience prove God?
Because we cannot arrange proof of God using the fairly tale assumptions we project on God. Many people project the Strong Father image on God. They take all their authority issues and project a judgmental harsh leader onto a concept of God.
Because the Real God may not care whether you believe in “him” or not, as God Encompasses Your Being. You are always perfect, just as you are. It is natural to be limited as the journey of your soul is evolution in the process of Life Experience.
So God doesn’t push “the Truth” onto anyone. For God, there is no need to collect people’s prayers and Worship. Spiritual Paths worship God to align the Heart to the sacred Energies of Spirit. That is not for God’s sake, it is for our sake.
Something I’ve learned is this. If you address the Universal Spirit sincerely and honestly, you will unfailingly receive some answer in a way you can comprehend. Sadly, some people have such tight expectations regarding what “a response” from God looks like, they can miss the message. If you expect a Burning Bush or a blatant miracle, you’re not listening and watching closely enough or with an open mind.
Inspiration and divine communion can come from within, or can be reflected in life events. Sometimes you will experience synchronicities that would be impossible if the Universe were mechanistic. You may experience clear intuitive knowledge arising form your inner consciousness. You might have a realization about nature of “Presence” The tangible energetic experience of another which is enhanced when that person is focused and centered at the Here and Now.
It is the mind’s tendency to make assumptions about what our identity is like. What we assume to be ourselves is the soundtrack of our mind talking to itself. We keep track of our history and fear our future in the stream of associative thinking that our minds live in. That cloud of self-referential thinking gets a life of its own, as thought is a form of the consciousness of life itself. The Soul witnesses this habitual thinking and gets lost in the drama.
Even thoughts can’t be accurately captured by scientific sensors. Mystics understand that science doesn’t yet have the technology to penetrate subtle dimensions. Physics is still going deeper into the mystery of the Universe but all signs point to there being a Universal Energy behind everything.
Someday science and spirituality will meet but we need to acknowledge our limitations at this early stage of mankind’s evolution. A few decades ago science had no inkling of dark matter or dark energy, and yet now they claim those things comprise the vast majority of the universe, even as we still know little about them. There is obviously a lot we don’t know and can’t yet prove.
Let’s assume Einstein was correct and that all energies are manifestations or variants of one Energy. You can say whatever is the universal “Everything” could be defined as God. The question becomes if this universal power is omnipresent and omniscient. What is its nature?
Even if the statements of the world religions could be disproved, it would do nothing to disprove a Universal Power. It would only show our limitations in conceiving what is far beyond our minds.
It is said that this world is a place where Souls gain experience through the challenges of being in a dense body, numbed to the Spirit’s innate powers of perception. That numbing by density also makes us unaware of our higher nature, of God.
Still, as awareness itself, God cannot be divorced from earthly life. Our awareness is constricted into the form of a singular person living in a meat suit. Still, it is by the consciousness which is the nature of our soul that we are aware. This is how one can experience God. Pure awareness is what we are when the mind subsides. We regularly experience this, however dimly.
Meditation and Mindfulness release us from our painful habit of thinking incessantly. Then it is possible to “listen” for the experience of God as your peace within, and in your awareness of Love.
In these meat bodies we only have access to a pinprick of the cosmic awareness and energy that is the Everything, but that is the portal to mystic experience of the source of LIfe.
You’ll feel your own presence and notice the presence of others. In this way you awaken to the undercurrent of God in every moment of Life.
May you Experience the Presence of God in your Heart
Baba
