Start from the foundations

“I love the philosopher Descartes. A question he asks is, ‘how do we know whether or not we’re being deceived right now?’ In his Meditations, he starts out with the idea of understanding what he’s seeing, and asks if what he’s seeing is true. But to know if the sciences and the other things he’s seeing are true, he occasionally needs to demolish everything he believes in and start from the foundations. I read that, wondering how I can apply that to my life—how can I demolish what I know and verify that what I’m being taught is true.

“So I started out by asking, ‘what is God?’ Fundamentally, God is infinite and eternal. He can’t be physically infinite, but he can potentially be emotionally infinite and he cannot be a being as we know humans to be. And then if you strip away his attributes like ‘Father,’ God is still God. If you strip away what we traditionally perceive as male, God is still God. If you strip away loving, caring, or angry, God is still God.

“I really thought deeply about what God is, and can go into much more detail, but I realized God is consciousness. He is the consciousness of the universe and the underlying connection of all things. We are all conscious beings, aware of ourselves and the things around us. We’re all connected. And God can hear our prayers because he knows all things through this consciousness that he is.”