What is God?

Ahnimus wrote:

I would actually be Buddhist, but I don't believe in structured beliefs.

I don't want to commit to something I may have to defend. I prefer to have plasticity in my beliefs.

sponger wrote:

it's dog spelled backwards.

Byrnzie wrote:

Jeeez! You and free will! :rolleyes:

I've not really given the subject too much thought because I don't think it really matters. But seeing as you're asking I'd say that I believe in a combination of the above.

Byrnzie wrote:

O.k. Well, you may not be surprised to know that my idea of what 'god' is doesn't resemble the Christian notion. Although this could be debated.
Simply put, I understand 'God' to be what the celts and Anglo-saxon shamans thought of as the 'web of wyrd'. Wyrd meaning mysterious, and, yes, 'weird'. Like all shamans the world over they understood there to be an underlying oneness which is interconnected by something resembling an energy field containing interlinking fibres.
This energy informs everything and connects everything, and it is what can also be described as spirit, or 'god'.
Quantum physicists arrived at the same conclusion when they discovered that beneath (or independent of) human perception of individual particles, these particles behave in a wave pattern. When perceived by us they take the form of particles. So that the world of separateness and individuality which we take for granted is in fact a cognitive construction.
The philosophers also arrived at the same conclusion. Kant understood that there is an underlying reality which is beyond the reach of our human cognitive make-up. The world that we know is there as a result of a combination of our cognition and the known, or phenomena, and of what he calls the noumena - or the unknown.
Schopenhauer then took this a step further with his notion of 'the will' which is the driving force of the world. The will he identified as the noumena infusing and directing all life with the desire to live.
Schopenhauer was one of the first westerners to introduce Eastern philosophy and mysticism to the West and he understood that these writings supported his own philosophical conclusions. His philosophy resembles closely that of Buddhism.
So that's it. I believe 'God' to be this 'Will', or 'Web of wyrd', or 'spirit', which, contrary to Kant but along with Schopenhauer, I believe can be accessed by mystics, and shamans e.t.c.
I certainly don't believe that 'God' resembles anything human, or that humans can experience 'God' through the medium of rational thought, or prayer, or through the medium of any church or priest.

Someone above mentioned L.S.D. That'll give you a glimpse, but then so will ayahuasca, peyote, mescaline, iboga, trance, and meditation.

As Daniel Pinchbeck says in the intro to his book 'Breaking open the head':

Among shamanic tribal cultures, plants that induce visions are the center of spiritual life and tradition. Tribes in Africa, Siberia, South and North America, and elsewhere believe that these plants are sentient beings, supernatural emissaries. They ascribe their music and medicine, their cosmology and extensive botanical knowledge to the visions given to them in psychedelic trance. For tribes in Africa, Siberia, North and South America, and many other regions, rejection of the visionary knowledge offered by the botanical world would be a form of insanity.


Many psychedelics are closely related to serotonin or other common neurotransmitters. Serotonin is believed to perform many functions. It helps to regulate sensory information - whether sense data trickles, flows, pours, or floods into the brain. Psilocybin, mescaline, and LSD are also alkaloids that resemble serotonin. The superpotent hallucinogen DMT ("NN - dimethyltryptamine") is a very close cousin to serotonin - the same molecular structure with the difference of two atoms. Serotonin Selective Re-uptake Inhibitors (SSRIs), such as the anti-depressants Prozac and Zoloft, limit mood swings by modulating the release of serotonin. Psychedelics bond to many of the same receptor sites as serotonin and similar neurotransmitters. That is the principle cause of their activity.


Think of the brain (as distinct from the mind) as a kind of radio. With "normative" levels of serotonin, the brain is tuned to "consensual reality" - something like the local Pop or Talk Radio station. By substituting psilocybin, Ibogaine, dimethyltryptamine, or some other psychedelic compound for serotonin and other neurotransmitters, you change the station and suddenly you begin to pick up the sensorial equivalent of avant-garde jazz, Tibetan chants, or another channel resonating with new and astonishing information. Yet your mind, the perceiving core of the self, remains more or less unaffected. In that sense, psychedelics - unlike alcohol or heroin - are not even intoxicating in an ordinary sense of the word.


Are psychedelics "good" or "evil"? In our culture these chemicals have been demonized, but like all profound and powerful tools, they are ambiguous. A computer can be an awesome educational instrument, or you can use it to play Doom fifteen hours a day. Psychedelics are different from other tools in one crucial respect: Because they work in the subjective domain of the individual's consciousness, the attitude one has before taking them shapes the effect they will have to an extraordinary degree. For this reason, laboratory conditions and the typical quantifying scientific method seem to be unsuitable for studying them.

Rock on Brothers and sisters!