All That Is

When I was a child I was told that God created the entire universe. He, and of course God was a man back then, created all space and time and anything else that is in existence today; even the man-made items because man was created by God. Being a child I accepted this viewpoint. I would imagine a divine male doing some fantastic hocus-pocus and bringing all that is into being (or at least its most basic constituents.) I knew that God existed and created the Universe, however was left with the question: Who created God; How did He come into being?

I would play this thought game, an experiment in imagination, where I would imagine God prior to making real His creation. Then I would try to imagine the circumstances that could bring God Himself into being. I pictured a black void with some cool electric looking radiation coming together to form Him or simply seeing Him starting to manifest out of an endless void. But no matter what scenario I encountered I could always disprove it by noting the means in which I saw God manifesting himself are all means which god would later create. If he generated Himself out of electricity I knew it could be so because God created electricity. If he manifested out of nothing I knew it couldn’t be so because nothing (voidness) is still something and it could only be created after God had made it so.

For a long time I sat, discontent, knowing that no matter how hard I tried I could never determine a cause for God; never know the reasons or the mechanics of His coming into being.

Alan Watts put forth an idea of God that helped put a little clarity and understanding into my notion of God. His idea?

It is impossible and useless to talk about God.

At first this might seem a little incredulous and insulting. It puts in the face of all people tied to religion. Clergy make their money, they secure their future and the future of the church by professing to know what’s really going on. People seek them out for guidance based on the fact that they know how to accord human actions with the desires of the Almighty. In my opinion, however, the idea of “unknowing” ascribed to God is actually the most true and honest idea to have about God.

Watt's posits that in order to talk about "things" we must define them. This is easy on the mundane scales. We know that a cup of coffee is different than a stapler and from a dog. There are certain distinguishable traits that make it easy to differentiate between two things. We define something, not only by ascribing certain traits to it, but by saying what the thing is not. For example, you know that I am not you, at any given moment you are experiencing different thoughts, emotions, and we have a different history.

You also know that you are something different from the surrounding environment. The outside world operates based upon, cold, rational laws, while people follow social patterns and have some degree of free will. Everything is defined by what it is not.

So by defining things we draw a boundary around it, we box up the thing saying that everything on the inside of the boundary is what the thing is and everything on the outside is what the things is not. Easy, right?

This line of logic breaks down once we start trying to define God; defining the All. If God is the Ground of Being, the Essence in which all of reality flows out of, then by what definitions can we ascribe to Him, or Her, or It. We see here that God is the box that contains all boxes. But where is the box that contains that box? Once we start trying to define God, to put our finger on what It actually is, we find our self in a hopeless paradox. One that is never ending; once a new box is described another new box must be created to contain that box, then another, then another, into infinity.

Therefor, I posit, that God was never created; It always was. He is not eternal or infinite because these are measurements in time; God stands outside of time. He existed in space and beyond space. He does not exist yet he does not not-exist, he is beyond being and non-being. He is the doer of all things though he does nothing. He is the resolution of paradox.

There is a quote that sums up this idea perfectly: "the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we CAN suppose." The definition, the true understanding, of the Universe, of the "All That Is," will never be established (at least not by the human mind).