God Consciousness – What Is It?

Getting To Know God

The first step to God consciousness is getting to know the divine nature of God. This knowledge, as imperfect as it may be, lays the groundwork for the next step, which is becoming consciously aware of the presence of the Spirit living within your mind.

Although the full character of God is far beyond our grasp, and despite the limitations of mind, it behooves us to stretch our imaginations to the uttermost limits of comprehension. By doing so, we not only deepen our understanding, acceptance, and love of the divine nature but also improve our reception of the spiritual gifts of God.

When it comes to knowing God, we cannot judge the divine nature solely based on humanity’s minimal knowledge, limited awareness, or religious doctrines. No matter how much we think we know God, no matter how much we grasp the true nature of this First Great Source, there will always be so much more to know. Having said that, we do not need to know everything about God to achieve God consciousness.

Getting to know God begins by understanding that God is the First Source of all things—the primal source of all reality. Indeed, except for God, there would be no such thing as reality. God is the Supernal Ancestor of all things—the limitless power at the center of all creation—beginningless, endless, timeless, and spaceless.

There are many concepts of God to contemplate. Becoming familiar with some of these helps to raise our minds to superconscious levels of God consciousness (see the section below, Essential Concepts of God).

God Awareness

Consciousness is a state of awareness associated with self-consciousness—it is our experience of self as well as our awareness of something within ourselves. It is this awareness of something within us that is the beginning of true God consciousness—an awareness of the presence of God. It is a consciousness that goes far beyond thoughts or words.

Our growing awareness of the Spirit Within relies on our intellectual capacity to know God—it is a consciousness of divinity that unfolds on increasingly progressive levels of realization. Anyone of average mind has the capacity for God consciousness. It is only our individual depth of understanding or comprehension that varies.

As an illustration, a swaddling infant may be completely unaware she is enclosed in a crib or in a room but, as she grows, she begins to recognize the crib and the room as separate entities and, as she begins to move around, she notices other rooms, each one with a specific purpose, such as one for sleeping, one for eating, and another for entertainment. Later, she realizes that all the rooms are part of her house and are contained within it. And later still, as she experiences life outside the house, she sees that her house is only one house on a street with many houses.

But she also becomes aware, perhaps unconsciously, that the house is more than just a house. It is also a home that carries meaning, a place where she learns to appreciate different values, a dwelling where she learns duty and loyalty to family, and a community where she learns about social interactions and greater morality. In other words, the house connotes meaning and value in both the intellectual and spiritual states of her consciousness.

At each stage in this venture of consciousness, the girl experiences a gradual increase in the understanding, meaning, and value of the house and, therefore, a greater consciousness of the house in the context of the whole. Each stage of consciousness is a more comprehensive level of reality perception, but each level of perception is relatively true. This step-by-step process of increasing consciousness is the same process we go through in our attainment of God consciousness.

Just as the young girl became aware of various levels of house reality, so it is that we become aware of various levels of God reality. We first come to understand the idea of God, a purely intellectual pursuit that any child can grasp. Secondly, we begin to realize the ideal of God—a more advanced recognition of the true nature and attributes of God. And last, through personal experience, we come to realize the spiritual reality of God, a consciousness of the actual presence of the Spirit Within.

To Love Is to Know

It’s easy to judge others prematurely because of their inconsiderate actions or rash words, but when we understand why they act the way they do—when we consider their circumstances in life and what they may have endured or suffered, we become more compassionate and merciful. And just as we come to love others by getting to know them, the same can be said of God. By understanding the true nature of the Divine Source, we come to admire and adore this nature.

But with some distinction, we can never truly know God until we first learn to love this supernal Being with all our heart, mind, and soul. Our reverent love for this eternal Source of Love opens our minds to the true nature of God and thereby heightens our grasp of God consciousness.

God consciousness, therefore, goes hand-in-hand with our increasing ability to know God through love. We are simply returning the extraordinary love that God lavishes on us, thereby forging a profound love relationship with our Creator. This love is real. It is not an artificial feeling of euphoria. Neither is the presence of God a figment of your imagination. The truth is, you can be as certain about the reality of God as you can about the reality of any other person in your life. It’s a very real experience.

But for all that, many have difficulty loving a parental God or giving any kind of adoration to a Creator Spirit. The reasons for this vary, but in some cases, our aversions can be traced to poor parent-child relationships. Children naturally draw strong correlations between their earthly parents and an ideal heavenly Parent.

The effects of poor parent-child relationships run deep, making it extremely challenging for victims of misguided or abusive parenting to picture a loving, heavenly Guardian. Even much later in life, it’s difficult for such wounded souls to dismiss or even discuss their hurtful, formative memories.

But any confounded or misguided thoughts about the true nature of God must be resolved if we wish to progress in the spirit. The truth is that the personalities of our parents have nothing to do with the personality of God. Family metaphors are used only because they best represent the truth about our relationship with God. It is a way of creating a desired ideal that exemplifies perfect family relationships.

Fortunately, over time, as fathers and mothers become wiser, more caring, and more loving, their children will be better equipped to envision a wise, caring, and loving heavenly Father.

God Is Someone

An important step in God consciousness is the realization that God is someone, not something. One of the most profound realizations we can have is that God, as the First Universal Personality, is a personal being. God’s personality, along with his precious gift of personality to us, is the very thing that allows us to make an intimate connection with this Spirit Being.

God is not a person as we commonly conceive of one, but this infinite Source is a person in the sense that we can come to know him in a meaningful way, just as we can come to know our next-door neighbor. God is personal not just because he is intelligent and conscious but also because he can know and be known, love and be loved.

As we discovered in another article, having a personality is what allows us to recognize and interact with other persons—it is the ability to have intellectual contact—to communicate. We are conscious beings who can share individual life experiences, discuss personal problems, love each other with unselfish love, and know each other on a profound level of understanding.

Knowing God as a person is not something we can ever discover through reason or logic alone. An eternal and infinite God who is the source of all reality cannot be limited to the confines of human logic or the fetters of human philosophy. Nor can there be any logical limit to the scope of God’s manifestations. Nevertheless, we can increasingly realize the truth of this Divine Person through our very own religious experiences—through spiritual communion and spiritual insight.

As the creator of all things, God embraces the personal, the nonpersonal, the prepersonal, and the superpersonal, or any other state of personality you can imagine. God must have a personal side in order to interact or commune with personal beings. The Creator of a universe is much more than just a spiritual force or universal intellect.

God is far more than the thing he creates. If we envision God as an energy or force, then how does this inanimate energy express love? Love is a personal act, a feeling of devotion between two or more persons. The Divine Spirit is a personality with whom we can converse, a friend to whom we can reveal the innermost desires of our hearts, a being we can love.

God is the First Person and the creator of all personalities in the entire universe. Our experience of God consciousness is our experience of this Divine Person. It is a personal experience of an intimate relationship; it is the love of a trusting child for an all-wise, Divine Parent. It is this faithful, trusting, and humble attitude of mind that makes it possible for us to approach God, to know God, and to love God.

Read: What Is Spiritual Faith?

Whenever we speak of contacting God, we are actually contacting the Divine Presence within us, which is our direct connection to the Eternal Personality at the center of all things. And while this Spirit of God is not a person per se, it does fully represent the personality and essence of God—it is of God. While it may be prepersonal in this sense, it exemplifies the perfect personality of God.

The divine spark within us exhibits the nature and attributes of God in every way imaginable to a human mind. It is a living, conscious, and thinking Spirit entity that embodies the divinity of God. It is the cosmic window through which we glimpse the realities of Deity.

God Is Your Divine Parent

Without a doubt, many religious views are unreasonable, but this is not to say that all religious ideas are unreasonable. In all fairness, we could just as easily say that many current views and stereotypes about God and religion are equally unreasonable.

We could begin with the portrayal of God as a divine father, an image primarily emphasized in Christianity but also in line with Judaism and Islam. To those who lobby for a gender-neutral world, such a view of God may appear unreasonable, if not disagreeable. But keep in mind that the concept of God as a spirit father is both an analogy and a metaphor, best understood within a historical and cultural context.

Long before the time of Jesus, male authority dominated almost all societies to the degree that it affected the entire framework of religious and administrative thought. In this long era of male dominance, people envisioned the supreme God as a male disciplinary king—as a lord and master, yet with human frailties and susceptible to unchecked emotions, such as anger or jealousy. God was to be feared and obeyed as though he were a fickle but all-powerful sovereign.

But Jesus of Nazareth was the first religious teacher to widely advocate God as a compassionate Father—a Divine Parent rather than a heartless dictator. Instead of fearing God as king and master, Jesus urged us to love and revere God as the all-loving and all-wise Father of all personalities—a divine Creator.

Above all, this revelation of the divine, parental love of God to the people of that time (and this time) was an improved and more accurate vision of the true character of God. It was not only a declaration of God’s affectionate attitude toward us, but also defined the nature of God’s relationship with us. Thus, Jesus portrayed the heavenly Creator as a loving, wise, and caring parent.

Rather than someone to be slavishly obeyed and feared, Jesus revealed a friendly, loving, and compassionate God—someone to be followed willingly and happily, someone we can love in return. This is the critical analogy—that God loves us with the same deep devotion and unconditional love that all good parents have for their children—not that God is an earthly, paternalistic father figure, but instead that our Creator loves as a perfect father would love.

While Jesus portrayed the love of God in this way, he was well aware that the Eternal Source of All Reality is much more than a loving father or mother. But when it comes to any human understanding of our relationship to God, the notion of divine, parental love is the best analogy.

Even though God loves with a fatherly love, it is not reasonable to assume that the Divine Source is either a man or a woman, male or female, masculine or feminine. The creature is not the Creator and, as the First Cause of all things, God created gender.

God must, therefore, be just as maternal as he is paternal. Nonetheless, terms like God the Father, God the Mother, or sons and daughters of God are powerful family metaphors intended to impart the highest ideals of parental love within a spiritual family.

Essential Concepts of God

When we examine the many works of spiritual authors, mystics, sages, and prophets appearing through the ages, there is some consensus about the inherent attributes of God (as perceived by the human mind). Summarizing all these works is beyond the scope of this writing, but it’s good to make ourselves familiar with as many of these essential spiritual concepts as we can. By contemplating and embracing the higher ideas and ideals of God, we can raise our thoughts to a superconscious level of spiritual insight and God consciousness.

Reach beyond your space-time-limited consciousness to contemplate the supernal nature of God.

• God is the First Cause of all things—the one and only uncaused reality.
• God is primal and infinite reality—without God, there would be no reality.
• God is eternal—always was and always will be.
• God is spirit.
• God is life and the source of all life.
• God is the eternal power upholding the universe.
• God is the source of all force, energy, and light.
• God is divine and the source of all divinity.
• God is the Universal Father at the center of all creation.
• God is the Universal Mother of all creatures.
• God is the First Personality—the creator of all personalities.
• God is love and the source of all love.
• God is truth and the divine source of all truth.
• God is beautiful and the divine source of all beauty.
• God is good and the ultimate source of all goodness.
• God is your friend.
• God is your destiny.

For time-space creatures such as us, it’s almost impossible to imagine things existing outside the movement of time and the boundaries of space. But a useful meditative exercise is to imagine a fictional beginning when only one single entity existed. This is the I AM, the absolute, infinite, eternal, volitional, and intelligent Power behind all creation—the Source of all spirit, all life, all love, and a near infinite universe.

This cosmos of the Infinite I AM is therefore endless, limitless, and all-inclusive—timeless, spaceless, and unqualified.

– The Urantia Book

God Is the Source of All Goodness

The divine goodness of God is an inseparable part of the personality of God. We discover the full extent of this goodness in the spiritual world of our personal religious experiences. Indeed, it is our personal realization of the greatness and goodness of God that compels us to love and trust the Divine Source. And it inspires us to be good to others.

God Is the Source of All Love

Divine love is an intelligent, wise, compassionate, and farseeing love. God loves each of us as an individual child in a vast heavenly family. This love is given to us freely so that we can share it freely with others.

God Is the Source of All Truth

God is absolute truth, and a life in the spirit is an eternal search for this higher truth. Spiritual beings live truthful lives because truth is a divine reality permeating the entire spiritual universe.

How can we know any truth about spirituality, or even religion? In the physical world, scientific facts, reason, and logic are practical ways to assess truth. But when it comes to spiritual truth, experience, judgment, wisdom, and insight provide the best answers.

God Is the Source of All Happiness

There is absolutely nothing negative in God. The more we identify with this joyful, creative energy, the more positive, kind, and cheerful we become—the more Godlike we become.

Negativity is not a spiritual reality. Clear away all negative thoughts about God and the destiny of humanity. All research suggests that life on this planet is constantly improving, even though it still has a long way to go.

See: The Spiritual Power of Thankfulness

Happiness with God is genuine. Pretending to be happy and being overly optimistic are not sincere spiritual attitudes. We acknowledge all things honestly, while maintaining a cheerful faith that, given time and effort, great things will be achieved.

God Is Here Now

God lives in the present moment within all of us, and to commune with this Spirit, we too must live in the present. The notion of an “eternal now” is common to Eastern religions as well as Christianity. Augustine of Hippo, a religious philosopher, envisioned “an ever-present eternity” 1,600 years ago.

Indeed, living spontaneously in the present is a distinguishing feature of God consciousness and, therefore, an essential objective of the God experience. But this works only when we allow ourselves to be directed by the Spirit.

However, too much concentration on an eternal present should not lead us to ignore the lessons of the past or the possibilities of the future. We cannot escape the fact that the eternal now is a consequence of an eternal past as well as the foundation of an eternal future.

Living in the moment means living an unconstrained life in which our thoughts are open to spiritual guidance and free of stereotypes, conventions, and preconceptions. But spontaneity does not mean being impetuous or careless.

It is an interesting fact that our minds are not entirely bound by time. Anyone who has had a premonition or dream of the future will attest to this. In 2015, a YouGov survey of 2,300 participants found that 30 percent of women and 19 percent of men had dreams that anticipated or predicted a future event. This is one more example of the timeless, spiritual nature of human beings.

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