I was sitting on the porch with my friend when out popped a question I've been asking myself a lot lately: What is God? The question unsettled him; he wouldn't talk about it. So, I kept it to myself, and haven't asked anyone else. Other than the religious, people seem to be afraid of this most important question.
I never took the idea of a Judeo-Christian God seriously. A literal being who resides in heaven, passes judgment, and intervenes in our lives neither appeals to me nor makes logical sense. To believe in angels, demons, and everything in between; all the miracles Jesus performed, and the stories filled with supernatural events; to take all this literally is almost ridiculous. I emphatically reject this version of God, this humanized, Earth-centric, overblown vanity project we've created to help ourselves feel important.
More interesting to me is the idea of God being a collective consciousness that permeates the universe. It creates things through natural laws and passes "judgment" through karma- the tendency for moral actions to reciprocate themselves, like the way physical ones do by way of Newton's Third Law (for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction). Yes, even mental actions can have equal and opposite reactions, leading to consequences. These are less rigidly defined than physical ones, but they are part of the same principle.
I like the way Neale Donald Walsh explained it in Conversations with God. God is everything. All religions seek to explain it using different ways. It communicates with us through thoughts and feelings. It has no form, sex, or shape, but exists in everything we can sense. This is a God that loves us unconditionally, like our parents, and unlike fear-based, judgmental ones. If God is everything, it is thought and emotion as well: everything we've ever experienced, painted by the hues of perception. Since we can access these, we are able to communicate with some of the many pieces that make up the infinite range of what God is. We do this every day, and we don't even realize it.
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