A couple of interesting questions come up for me after reading this commentary by Andrew Cohen.
First off, the question, How does God feel?, is pretty cool. What does HeShe feel like? More importantly, what would HeShe not feel like? If we see the purest Being as a conscious manifestation of the Infinite, or the Absolute, or God, or Whatever, then there can be no static boundary between God and anything else. Therefore, the question really becomes, What is NOT God?
When you experience that state of purest Being, you are experiencing how God must have felt before the universe was born, and you are also experiencing your very own deepest self, which is not separate from that empty, groundless ground.
That Ground of Being, however, is only one part of the nature of God. God is also everything that emerged out of that nothingnessthe explosive fourteen-billion-year process of Becoming. And when God takes that momentous leap from formlessness to form, the feeling experience changes dramatically.
I couldn’t agree more with this, but it brings up my second point: we should be aware of the tendency to confuse variance with separation. Being and becoming are expressions of the same Infinity. So, too, are bliss and anguish. So for us to say that, “God feels like this… or doesn’t feel like that…” only works to confuse and conflate the subtleties of dualism with the unity of the Absolute. Mistaking the limited for the complete provides an inherently sticky place for the ego to start to measure its own progress as it works on becoming enlightened.
Lastly, the ego can also get spiritually inflated when it becomes certain about anything. This is especially true in relation to things like how God is or isn’t; how He feels or doesn’t; whether He is at peace with things or not. Perhaps this is why the following quote was so fascinating to me:
That is how God feels all the time about creating the universe. And God never experiences relief. So when God leaps from formlessness to form, he, she, or it enters an almost agonizing state, where the desire to create or to become is overwhelming and ever unfulfilled.
Who is it that would know? Who is it that cares? Whatever the case, the questions are pointers to great spiritual opportunities should any of us look at the roots of the inquiry. Even if we can’t address the core of any of this, it’s still gutsy to assume that we can tell how the Infinite, or God, feels.
What do you think?