Recently I was at a meeting and celebration. Various presenters got up on stage, and great music bands too. One of the presenters, a senior academic, asked the audience the question:
“What is your image of God?“
It was a challenge for us to look honestly within and see what kind of image we had of God, what we believe and feel and think we know about God.
Suddenly my journey with seeking the truth about God throughout my whole life was sitting there with me. Some of the audience got up the courage to stand and speak on microphones about their images of God. I wanted to do that too. But I had so much to share! Where to begin? Share just one bit? But which bit? I felt it would be miserly to share just one bit, but to share it all would take all day and deprive others of the space to speak. What to do? I chose to write this blog.
My Family and my Introduction to School, God and Religion
It began as a young child of six going to school. Once a week all the students were shuffled out of our usual classes and separated into groups according to our religion for ‘Religious Instruction’. It felt weird being split apart from our friends and classmates, and expected to feel some kind of special kinship with strangers who happened to be born as whatever religion their parents followed.
I had been christened Congregational, like my Mum and her Dad before her. I had no idea what that meant, and there were no other kids in that category so I ended up in the ‘odds and ends’ class. We had two very elderly ladies who supervised our class and read the Bible to us. I found it pretty boring and couldn’t wait for the lesson to end. Kids got unruly and distracted, and that didn’t help encourage a studious attitude.
But it raised the question – who or what is this God character?
My family was not religious, in fact, most were quite anti-religious. Mum had loved singing in church as a child and she was probably the most religiously inclined in our family, although it was not overtly expressed until I was in my twenties. Dad had no time for religion. Many people’s only experience of going to church was to attend weddings, and this was so in our case. We were not church-goers, though I vaguely remember being in a church once with relatives, for some reason, being handed a prayer book and expected to join the congregation in singing songs I didn’t know. I recall being most fascinated by the incredible thinness of the book’s pages! Basically there was nothing at home to encourage questions about God.
As an active, curious, imaginative child I had many other things to do: school, taking my younger brother and sister on adventures, collecting bugs and rocks, raising frogs and fish, scientific experiments, reading, art, bikes, pets, games, making stuff… always busy and never bored. We needed no entertainment – our own imaginations and zest for life were more than enough. God and religion were not on the list and there was no pressure or indoctrination. That was great as it meant we were free to make our own discoveries when and if we were ever ready.
We knew someone who’d had a difficult childhood and had become wayward, in lots of trouble, doing terrible things. He was ‘saved’ by the church, and became intensely missionary about Christianity. People considered him to be obsessed, not normal, and they avoided, pitied and rejected him. My mum had compassion and understanding for him though, and I got to see that God and his son Christ were very real for him, a source of great joy and meaning for him. I didn’t experience that myself, but his passion piqued my interest.
Beginning my own Research into God and Religion
I began my researches into religion rather patchily. Sometimes in bed at night I read bits of the New Testament Bible to see if it held any answers about God that I could relate to. I just drifted, reading whatever page I opened to, trying to understand all the strange writing styles and events and characters. It felt like there must be some truth and really interesting stuff in there somewhere, except that I was not finding it. I did find contradictions and more questions than answers though.
God was supposed to be a loving, grey-bearded, kingly and fatherly figure on a throne up in the sky or up on mountains, and yet even on a clear day or night you couldn’t see him up there. I spent a lot of ‘scientific’ time outside looking at the sky day and night and I never saw a guy on a throne. God was sometimes depicted as a huge, terrifying, judgmental hand coming down from the clouds. Attached to what? Surely when there are no clouds and you do something wrong, you should be able to see him attached to his arm and accusing finger? So both images felt wrong and I could not accept them, not to mention that they were quite contradictory to each other.
How could an absolutely loving God also mete out terrible judgments of vengeance and devastation?
Then there was prayer. People did it, and they seemed very earnest about it, so I tried it. I felt silly, talking to someone who did not seem to be there, never gave any sign of having heard me, and in every way imaginable just did not seem to exist.
As I got a bit older and understood more science, another whopping contradiction became apparent. How could God be male when there was only one God? Male without female is like the right shoe without the left: useless and pointless. Thus God must be either gender or both. At least I got that bit sorted out in my mind! But it still didn’t answer what God was, or whether there even was one. I had no image of my own, just other people’s images – all of which I rejected.
Home, Nature and my Neighbourhood – where was God?
But while my quest to understand religion and find out what God is went on, there was something else very real to me that was non-physical and inexplicable.
I grew up in a working class, poorly educated Aussie family. We had little money and lived in Government housing – a family of 5 crammed into half a house. Like many of the households in that neighbourhood there was alcoholism and domestic violence. Constant choking cigarette smoke. Women at home taking tranquilisers and painkillers all day. Abusive behaviour. Self-sacrificing behaviour. I could barely stand it, retreating into myself, and retreating into Nature – the only places where all was harmonious and made sense to me, where I felt truth, where I felt I belonged and could be truly myself and at peace.
And there was another sanctuary, like the inner form of the outer Nature. Deep inside me, in the region of my heart, but somehow not confined by the thickness of my physical body, was a ‘place’, more like a ‘presence’. There was a core of light: an inviolable, unwavering, dependable, powerful, shining flame that could be trusted to always be there and not be tainted, destroyed, weakened or taken away no matter how dark and ugly things got around me, no matter how hurt or angry or afraid I felt; no matter how much I would have despaired of life, I had that core of light inside me. It sustained me through challenges that many of the kids in our neighbourhood did not get through.
In my part of the city I knew of a sixteen-year-old boy who was already a convicted, repeated rapist and car thief and went to jail young. Pre-pubescent kids were involved in pack fights, getting badly injured. Young girls were getting pregnant. One boy not even in his teens was already a drug dealer and was involved in his brother’s death from an overdose. A woman was carted away on a stretcher, dying of an overdose of a painkiller while her young daughters looked on. A father stood over his son with a big leather strap, supervising the boy’s homework, and every break in attention was met with a beating. The boy turned to a life of crime, and ended up suiciding. A trouble-seeking father was beaten to a pulp at a party and sustained permanent brain damage.
When I was 13 or 14 years old, one older boy who’d been vicious and threatening towards me and my siblings, recently home on leave from the Vietnam war, stood proudly in his army uniform talking about the war. He seemed to love the war and I felt that fitted with his cruel character. I asked him: “What do you like most about the war?” His answer: “The killing.” He was serious!
Stories like this were repeated in various forms throughout most of the neighbourhood. At night you could hear the screaming fights of parents and the thumps of physical violence in other homes.
Where was God? Not anywhere around here!
Asking Difficult Questions about God which went Unanswered
Once my Dad befriended a man from the Salvation Army and, enthused by his new friend, took me and my brother to attend their Sunday school. I resented having my Sundays taken away, expected to sit listening to stuff that didn’t make sense. I was rewarded for the quality of my drawings and ability to regurgitate ‘facts’, but that seemed to me to have nothing to do with religion. I was disgusted. I asked difficult questions. They were not answered. I told my father I refused to go to Sunday school any more, and that was the end of that.
Religious missionaries frequently came and knocked on doors – mostly Jehovah’s Witnesses, plus a few Mormons. I asked them difficult questions. If God made only Adam and Eve, and all of humanity came from them, wouldn’t it mean that brothers and sisters had mated incestuously, and the children should be deformed? How could God be male if he was the only one of his kind? How do they know he exists?
If the one and only God wrote the one and only Bible, why are there so many different versions?
If all men are equal, why do religious people act as if they are superior to others and say that they’re the only ones who are right? What about women? If God is love, we are his children, and we are to treat all people as equals, why aren’t we? How can we be made in the image of God when we all look so different?
The door-knockers usually became uncomfortable and left, unable to answer my questions.
As a teenage high school student and young university student I found that science had nothing useful to say about God either. It pretty much conveyed the idea that God was just a comfortable superstitious belief and had no basis in fact or nature.
No answers for me in science, nor in any religions, with all their fighting and denigration of each other.
I did not seriously study the non-Christian religions, but dipped a toe in enough to sense that they were just as equally empty of any real love, equality or divinity. And yet they all seemed to have the same core principles, that no-one was recognising or living. I kept saying that all religions are really one and need to re-unite. But no-one listened; I didn’t feel that they even understood what I was saying. I stopped talking about it.
Finding the Answers for Myself… Growing my own Sense of God
As an adult I thought I must be an atheist, convinced there was no God, or at least an agnostic, undecided about the matter. Intellectually that kind of fitted, except for a constant sense that underneath all that, I was actually religious and knew that God existed in some form, without any ‘evidence’ to prove it to myself or anyone else.
It kept coming back to me: I had to find the answers for myself.
I felt there had to be some connection between the stillness and harmony of Nature, and this enigmatic concept – God. It seemed to me that if there was a God, it was that special something which was in all the awe-inspiring order, beauty and intelligence of Nature, not just a finite figure up in the sky or in some mythical paradise.
And whatever God might be, it had a similar feel to that core of light inside me.
It had a similar feel to the feeling of selfless care and love for others that I felt in my heart, and to the ‘conscience’ that was always there guiding my choices and preventing me from doing wrong. I did not attach the name ‘God’ to my core of light and love or my conscience, as I was still in rejection of all the images of God that existed in society around me. I suppose my own private sense of God was growing and developing, without form, while humanity and its works and beliefs continued to look like a loveless, godless mess.
Enter ‘Evidence’ of God… and the New Age
I didn’t speak about God with other people; it was such a fruitless topic. But one day when I was a 21-year-old university science student (as I’ve shared with a few people and written about before), I was at an end-of-year departmental party. A professor of mathematics said to me: “You can’t study Pure Mathematics for long before you realise there must be a God.” This was an awesome moment! Here was a modern reductionist scientist who’d found satisfactory ‘evidence’ of God in nature.
And as I looked more and more for myself, it was inescapable. We were being taught about the senseless randomness of particle movements, ‘blind, directionless nature’ and purely physical evolution, which might appear accurate on small scales, but did not ‘cut the mustard’ in the big picture for me. And modern science to this day still has no grasp of how the miracles of embryology or consciousness are even possible.
Enter the New Age. Some denied the existence of God, some spoke of God being not male, but a Goddess, some spoke of having conversations with God, some said there were lots of gods and they were all really just archetypes in the human mind, some claimed God was an alien, some that God was a physical man living in a certain country, some said they had seen God and drew pictures of ‘him’ or ‘her’. For me, it all went into the trash can of illusion pretty quickly.
All I had was my enduring non-image of God as possibly being connected with the feelings of light and love and conscience deep inside me, and the essence of all of Nature. It fitted with what Jesus said about the Kingdom of God being inside us, and yet God being everywhere and being all-knowing love and light.
Enter Theosophy, Esoteric Studies, Serge Benhayon and Universal Medicine, God, and Me…
Enter theosophy, esoteric studies, Serge Benhayon and Universal Medicine in 2002. A great leap forward in my understanding of God! Initially I had an academic approach and many interesting revelations from the knowledge imparted in books and presentations. But I still squirmed at the mention of the word ‘God’ and had trouble even saying it because of all the false pictures I had seen in society up to this point.
However, as my choices changed upon the basis of experimenting with the new knowledge, for example quitting drugs, changing my diet, claiming a higher level of awareness and responsibility, etc, my ability to directly sense and experience things that are beyond physical and scientific understanding has grown.
My inner voice of wisdom has grown. My sense of God has grown, and is still growing.
I have not seen a grey-haired man on a throne or a big hand coming from the sky! I have not felt sinful, lesser, guilty or judged by some power above me! But I have felt the indescribable stillness that is the foundation of the harmony, order and intelligence in Nature.
I have felt and seen in another human being the magnitude of love, truth, joy, harmony, stillness, responsibility, care and understanding that are to me defining attributes of God, and felt them grow within me too, from contact with that greatness freely given without expectation or imposition. I have seen the light and love in my core shining in the eyes of another person, and increasing numbers of people, and know without doubt that we are all one, we are all held in the body of God and we all contain the all.
I still don’t have an ‘image’ of God, but I feel I now know something of God, for real. It’s taken 6 decades, and this is still only the beginning!
By Dianne Trussell
Further Reading:
My True and False Experiences of God
The Many Faces of God
Science without Religion is Lame, Religion without Science is Blind
Living religion: a relationship with self, love and God
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The Truth about Universal Medicine 
Dianne reading your blog I got the sense that we have deliberately muddied the waters so to say when it comes to God. We have as you say so many versions of him via the different religions all purporting to have the insider knowledge of him, so many different written versions too. And I wonder if the purpose behind this is so that we do not develop our own sense from within of who God is but rely on the outside to dictate to us and so like a carrot on a stick we are kept in the cycle of seeking.
True religion runs through us all the time and it is up to us all to reconnect to our essences, so we are able to understand our relationships with God. So thank you, Dianne, as what you have shared opens us all to deepen our relationship with God and all that is simple in what is shared when reconnected to the immense Love that is God.
True religion runs through us all the time and it is up to us all to reconnect to our essences, so we are able to understand our relationships with God. So thank you, Dianne, as what you have shared opens us all to deepen our relationship with God and all that is simple in what is shared when reconnected to the immense Love that is God.
Wow Dianne and thank you – there is so much in this blog to learn from and appreciate.
Slowly but surely my image of God has changed – He is becoming an intimate friend, someone I can talk to about anything, who does not judge but holds me and encourages me to just live the innate quality I am.
We all have images of God that totally block us from really knowing God.
To me we have so distorted the word God to fit what ever meaning the many religions wants it to be that it holds no true meaning for me now. Fohart is a word that for me express all that the universe is which to me is an in breath and out breath of a divine being.
Love all of this Dianne your integrity and love shines through in your exploration.
It is becoming apparently true for me, that as long as there are images about who we are and who God is, there will always be a struggle to understand and an inner tension about who we are as humans and who God is.
God is obviously evident in the order of the universe from the orbits of the stars to the blade of grass swinging in the wind – and so he is present in everything and never can he be absent as everything is of him and moves back towards him.
Every particle, big or small, is in that order and movement. We are blessed by it no matter where we go.
We are so used to having pictures of everything in life, even of that which is imageless or beyond imagination so that we can fit it in what we know with a sense of control. When we start opening up to let go of some of those images we may learn that the reality to and experience of such ‘things’ like God, love, eternity or else is much richer than any image could ever deliver or depict.
“You can’t study Pure Mathematics for long before you realise there must be a God.” I also came to this realisation when I re-sat some math classes last year and could see and sense how mathematics is in everything. It is indeed ‘awesome’.
I’m not sure about that statement, I studied pure mathematics, but was not into religion, or God at that age, so maths did not re-connect me with God.
Those ‘difficult questions’ – they are actually great questions. Just because they ask us to consider something outside our belief, a possibility we might not be quite ready to accept, should never invalidate the question or those who ask such questions.
I love listening to my 5 year old daughter talk about God because it comes straight from her heart and not from anything she has heard and been told. She frequently tells us that ‘God is in the air’ and explains that this means he is both inside us and all around us. She even laughs when she pokes out her tongue and says ‘look, he is even on my tongue, can you see him?’ and through her I do.
In truth we do not react to God, we react to the many false pictures of him we are sold from a source of energy that works in opposition to this great love and not from it. For how do you give form to formlessness without projecting onto it, how you wish it to be shaped?
Any image or picture of god is still a picture and can’t capture the vibration of God.
very true, it is felt not an image.
God to me is a vibration, which can be connected with when we connect with our inner-most/essence.
Absolutely Elizabeth, and may I add that our Soul resides in the inner-most/essences of us all equally, and it is up to us all to reconnect to that vibration.
The existence of God is known in the inner heart.
It certainly is Elizabeth, well said.
All we have to is look within, not all the searching outside ourselves.
“I had that core of light inside me.” The light within that forever calls us to be at one with God.
Many years ago I was fortunate to attend a college trip to Rome, Italy. We visited vast and beautiful churches with ginormous paintings on the ceilings, all depicting a similar image of God. He was a muscular man, in his mid 50’s, half covered in long flowing and luxurious materials, and always with a long and abundant white beard. his posture would often be leaning back or stretching forward, his presence was always dominant and everyone around him in the picture would either be in his favour, also painted with beautiful skin tones and flowing robes, or they would be miserable, contorted shapes of people in much darker colours with sallow dull skin. The main message in all of this as far as I can see, is that of no-equality, showing a image of superior and inferior, and that there are those in favour and those who are judged-to-be-less.
This is the big lie perpetuated by the Catholic Church. And millions by accepting this image of god, deny themselves the opportunity to see truth. Our true nature is godly and we are all part of one body of love, no one less or more, all equal.
The Catholic Church probably do a lot to turn people against religion and God then.
To know God is to drop all outer images.
What kind of institution pronounces ‘God is Love’ and routinely acts in unloving ways – the church and most established religions. The problem is most people accept this blatant hypocrisy and false authority without question or challenge.
This hypocrisy, the lies, the wars, everything that was disgusting, turned myself, and I’m sure many other people away from established religions.
I relate a lot to what you say of looking at the different religions out there and finding them full of contradiction and holes. It is refreshing to connect to the feeling within that confirms our connection to God.
There is so much that didn’t make sense to me as well Diane growing up with the Catholic faith, I always felt it strange that women weren’t allowed to be priests or hold high positions in the church, this says a lot about the control and corruption that many religions still abide by, to not treat and respect women as equals.
Yeah that really exposes all the lies, as love is equality and that is a fact, we see it everywhere in nature.
This says it all Vanessa ‘ Love is equality”
Yes, that is another disgusting part of the catholic religion, to hold women as less than their male counterparts.
To have no image of God is something to truly cherish, the moment we try to imagine how God looks like we are gone. It is about building a relationship with the knowing within and keep expanding what that means for the way we choose to live in this beholding love.
There are lots of different images of who or what God or religion is or means that can be both enticing or really off-putting, either way hindering our connection with the truth of those words if we take them as reality rather than connecting from inside of us with what feels true…
The problem is we try to ascribe an image to that which is image-less. From there we get lost in an illusion of our own creation, while God silently lives and breathes within us all.
Having images of God keeps us away from feeling the truth of what God is.
A powerful shift to read – from having pictures of God to actually knowing God within us as we naturally have. Very inspiring to read how relationships can shift and develop.
I understand all you have shared and these images of God are so harmful as they build walls stopping you from being able to really feel God.
This list and images of God seems endless in the Hindu religion, there is a God for this and there is a God for that, so we then would need to pray to several of them at a time!
What you have shared about God is an absolute revelations and would make most ponder on who God really is. This blog evokes that pertinent question – who is God – really?
It is not so much that we need an image of God, but that existing images of God are just that, images which stand in the way to our own feeling of God.
I like how you describe growing your own sense of God – bringing it back to a sense from the whole body rather than a picture or image that we may be holding in our minds eye.
Yes this way to have a relationship with the vastness of our connection to life.
Being open to exploring our relationship with God can be quite transformational. Even just starting to look at why we react, if there’s a reaction to the word ‘God’, can bring greater understanding of our relationship with religion, and what it means to us versus what we’ve been taught. If the word ‘religion’ means building a relationship with myself, my inner knowing, and through that, the bigger picture, i.e. the Universe, or God – not someone telling me what to do, but just a knowing that I am part of something far greater than myself – why would I not want a relationship with myself, with the grandness that we’re all an inevitable part of? It brings a richness and depth to my life that I would not want to live without. Not because I need it to give me anything, but because no external experience or creation can compare to that feeling of knowing, settlement and deep contentment that can only come from within.
Beautifully shared Bryony, the deepth of knowing and experiences from the connection are so physically enjoyable and rich that to live without the connection is cold and harsh in comparison.
“It had a similar feel to the feeling of selfless care and love for others that I felt in my heart, and to the ‘conscience’ that was always there guiding my choices and preventing me from doing wrong.” – Dianne, I can relate to this (as well as the feeling that all religions have a common thread of Truth in them) and the fact that we have this knowingness or conscience that tells us what is the truth or not shows that we are all connected to each other and thus God equally, for there is only one Truth and its source is God, after all.
Stillness is it, no bells or whistles, but a beholding lightness of being – this is God with us and of us.
And this is precisely how evil works – it sells us an image of God and divinity that we either aspire to or reject, either way it does not matter as long as we do not go anywhere near the depth of love and true godliness that lives within us all.
‘Finding the Answers for Myself… Growing my own Sense of God’ – it took me long before I felt entitled to know God by myself and not by what anyone was saying, thinking, believing, preaching, teaching or maybe actually knowing. Not before we know ourselves in a direct, personal and intimate relationship with God we know who we are and who God is. We have to dare to leave behind anything that is not of our own experience and inner truth.
That´s the point, any images we have about God come from outside of us, sometimes fed as descriptions or pictures or just as loose ideas, attributes and characteristics we then associate with what we know from what we can see around us, that is we construct a human-like image. No wonder then that these images disconnect us more from God than they help us to nurture our inherent connection and thus need to be called out and let go of.
I love re-reading this Dianne. There are so many points you write that seem to ‘jump off the page’ towards me. This resonates deeply with me now –
“I feel I now know something of God, for real. It’s taken 6 decades, and this is still only the beginning!”
Many times in my teens and through until my 40’s there were times of despair and isolation, but an inner knowing and sensing of a flame of light burning deep within, that could never be extinguished. `It was this light that always ‘got me through’ those rough patches.
“There was a core of light: an inviolable, unwavering, dependable, powerful, shining flame that could be trusted to always be there and not be tainted, destroyed, weakened or taken away no matter how dark and ugly things got around me, no matter how hurt or angry or afraid I felt; no matter how much I would have despaired of life, I had that core of light inside me.”
So true Elizabeth and ‘Our Father’s House has many mansions’ for us to deepen our connection with.
What if we are all of God and there is an energy that is determined to keep us away from our return to this inner knowing through apre-determining our thoughts and actions, that we think these are our own thoughts and this is who we are. A very sorry state of affairs for the majority of the human race being separated from truth.
“What do you like most about the war?” His answer: “The killing.” He was serious!
There is a part here where you talk about your childhood with your enthusiastic and curious approach to life, and I can see the value in this because besides that fact of God and religion and all that comes with both of those words, at the end of the day, something that unites all of humanity no matter what – is the fact that we all are learning all of the time. So in my view, to be actively engaged with that aspect of this life is a great quality to have.
I too felt uncomfortable with the words God and Religion as there are so many connotations to these words and society has used them in such as way that they have lost their true meaning. These words have been bastardised and so it is for each of us to bring back their true meaning and the more we are able to bring back this meaning then the more we can relate to the words and realise that they are not incarcerating words, but rather very freeing and fulfilling ones indeed!
I still too flinch in certain company with the word God and have a feeling of shame which is so sad really and considering so many people believe in God quite openingly it just shows how much it has been bastardised.
Great Question: how does God look like to you…and the classic image that we are fed is of a friendly Caucasian white bearded man sitting on throne on a cloud up in the skies, or a large serious man with a staff of some kind and eying off the ‘sinners’. No different to the image we have been fed of Jesus being blond and blue eyed. So it is wise to ask – where are these images coming from anyways? And why do we fall for them hook line and sinker when in fact most of them are completely false?
As I grew up, I used to imagine god as being a very kind, white bearded man with a white gown. Today, this image is fading away, I still get a sense that God is caring, but I question what exactly is my connection with God? What is my relationship with God? Great questions to open up to and bring into my everyday.
I’ve always known that God is as real as I am but I have not deeply considered exactly what and who god is as I get the sense that God is so incredible I cannot fully conceive his/her image.
We blame God for this world, when all along it’s us who fight ourselves, who cause the chaos. For in our true nature we know divinity’s ebb and flow – all we need to do is honour that and we will be with God again.
We think we are fighting God or each other but in truth we are only fighting ourselves so that we do not express the sheer godliness and gorgeousness we each in essence are.
I would say that your story is one for many, there might be very different experiences but the essence of the story would be the same. A deep knowing that something is ‘out there’ with a plan for us all but 99% of what is presented does not ring 100% true. It was true for me, and like you I tried various means of connecting to what is ‘out there’, but it was only when I found Universal Medicine, did I truly find God and confirm what I knew deep down but had not been able to connect to as what was being presented as God was not true.
“And whatever God might be, it had a similar feel to that core of light inside me.” To know God is to know who you are.
Imagine that we are searching along the spectrum of atheism to fundamental religion for many lifetimes, when all the time God is known in that quality of stillness and harmony within us all and nature.
There are many images of God, or Gods if take account of the many different religions that there are, this blog has made me realise how we expect God to look a certain way, yet we are looking outside of ourselves for a picture or an image, when in truth God can be felt from within, and once we have that connection from within we realise He equally lives in all of us.
God can be felt within, keep it simple, God lives in all of us.
What if our images of god actually keep us from feeling exactly what God is? What if these images are stopping us from feeling something that is so easily accessible to us?
To see God as someone, something far grander than us is something I used to do, even today I can do that and yet when I am honest I can see that God is an equal grandness to who I truly am which is far more than that which I live. Therefore God is no greater than me, I just choose to be lesser than God.
God never leaves us; we leave God. I always find this a great thing to remember.
What strikes me is that people who are regarded as intelligent become religious in the sense of belonging to an institutionalised religion yet hold an authority which is greater than another. I have felt and sensed this. It stopped me in my tracks. How could this way of being come from God? How could this way of being be religious? And what was the reflection being offered to me to learn from? At that time as I reflect I was also not coming from God as I had placed through my beliefs and ideals this person above me and I was making myself less. This way of behaviour changed as I began to see God for who he truly was and then guess what, instead of being made to feel less I experienced jealousy!
I understand, I have had so many images of God and what / who God is, now I am coming to live and embody a knowing that God is one all within, from within when we speak truth and Love we are of God. We do not need to seek anything outside of our self, I still can resist what this means in full, but I so know it to be true, the sense of Love, Space and Stillness and Settlement in my body cannot be denied.
Not being able to even say the word ‘God’ happens to many, possibly those who have an innate sense that what is presented by institutionalised religions in their many guises and with conflicting imagery is so far removed from what God is, that they don’t even want to use a word that in itself stands for so much misrepresentation if not utter lies and deception.
The word ‘God’ has been so completely bastardised, that many people resist using the word God.
“How could God be male when there was only one God?”- Great observation Dianne, and one that I am sure no Christian theologist could truly answer. Also, your question of; “How can we be made in the image of God when we all look so different?” – This one feels like it has a basis on the fact that the majority of humanity is in a constant drive towards individualism, standing out as being different and looking for acceptance/recognition from others without connecting to their inner divinity, which would be totally cool with simply knowing their similarity with God without a need for outer confirmation.
“There was a core of light: an inviolable, unwavering, dependable, powerful, shining flame that could be trusted to always be there and not be tainted, destroyed, weakened or taken away no matter how dark and ugly things got around me…” – This statement brought tears to my eyes, because as I read it I not only felt deeply how I have known this to be true my whole life, even in the darkest of times, but also that I could feel God’s never-ending love and patience in my return to my Soul and connection to that inner Light.
I love the exploration you describe here Dianne, and it’s honesty and willingness to look and be open. I’ve come to an understanding that I am deeply religious and this is not something I would have considered or even tolerated in another a few years ago … as I’ve come more deeply to understanding and building my relationship with me I’ve come to know that and understand that God exists, and I can feel that that in nature, with another person, in simple things like a big sky … it’s magic.
You confirm that the images of God that it has suited us to create are not real and nor are the dogmas, commandments and religious tenets that prescribe this or that. God is not found outside of us and nor is He captured by scripture or depiction. His magnificence and love are all-encompassing and until we move closer to and reacquaint ourselves with our own grandness, we cannot even start to do this magnificence justice – but we can all feel it.
God’s ‘ magnificence and love are all-encompassing and until we move closer to and reacquaint ourselves with our own grandness, we cannot even start to do this magnificence justice – but we can all feel it.” Beautiful, and so true.
‘There was a core of light: an inviolable, unwavering, dependable, powerful, shining flame that could be trusted to always be there and not be tainted, destroyed, weakened or taken away no matter how dark and ugly things got around me, no matter how hurt or angry or afraid I felt; no matter how much I would have despaired of life, I had that core of light inside me.’ No pictures, just feeling the connection we all have within our body with the divine, with God. I loved reading your blog and could relate to most of the images you were sharing, thank you Dianne
We have the word ‘God’ and it is a very precious word. Through time it has come to mean the name of a person, an ‘almighty’ person who has so much power and control. But what if the word ‘God’ actually relates to an energy source that all people everywhere can be and are in fact constantly a part of…?
Removing all the images and pictures we may have of God …what a great place to start. God is felt and known from within.
Agreed Victoria, there are so many misconceptions about the word and concept of God and yet when we strip it back we do indeed feel God from within.
Great and deeply insightful account of what most of us have discovered or gone through, in one way or another. The concept of God in popular parlance and the religious versions don’t even come near the stupendousness that is God, especially not when we keep imposing human physical attributes and emotions onto God because we lack connection and true education and instruct.
I too asked awkward questions about God that no one, even vicars, could answer. It wasn’t until I came to some Universal Medicine presentations that my questions were answered in a way that seemed true to me. Understanding more about karma and reincarnation – suddenly so much made sense of the world.
Thank you Dianne for this brilliant blog. I loved re-reading it and getting a sense of the quest you took yourself on to find God. It is great not to have an image of God because whatever image we have is false, as God does not need images but is simply to be felt and experienced.
For me, knowing God is part of the magical relationship we can have with the fact that we belong to something so much grander than we can ever imagine. It’s the magical part of life that doesn’t quite make sense but makes every day incredible.
It’s interesting to consider if our image of God is really ‘our’ image or is it something that we have picked up over the years – a conglomeration of beliefs and ideals or reactions to what others say God is rather than it being something we have freely felt from within ourself…
We are so used to having images for everything instead of living with divine impulse. God can be known, intuited and felt by us while on earth, and most of th images are way off!
A clear check that you have swayed off path is if you have an image of anything.
One will only find God if he looks in place’s where God resides and that is within us all.
Reading, ‘I still don’t have an ‘image’ of God, but I feel I now know something of God, for real.’ I too don’t have an image but do feel I know something of God but realise I’ve not appreciated and fostered this knowing as I could have. What’s got in the way has been this unconscious searching for an image or something that is concrete ‘proof’. There’s been a degree of not trusting what I’ve known but also knowing it 100%. So there’s also been a need, a wanting to prove what I know, a non acceptance that the world is deliberately set up to ignore what is known intuitively and felt, which includes the truth of God. The world ruling that things are only proven using the 5 senses is a set up. Seeing this for what it is, and how people can choose to follow this or not, I can let go of other’s choices and simply deepen my relationship with God and bring this beauty to the world through my expression.
How wonderful it is to discard all those images we have of God and get back to the truth of the matter as we know it to be for ourselves.
I so agree that we can’t have a fixed image about what God is, as soon as we try to ‘fix’ an image of God, we can lose the sense of who he is and what he represents. The opportunities life offers and how I can deepen my relationship with him and the all, which is what he represents.
I love the fact I began to question the false images of God that were being fed to me as a child. It never felt true, but it is interesting how much effort from religion is put into trying to convince you of these lies and false images about God.
I so love that someone like the professor of mathematics you mention, who must have spent years of studying, researching, analysing, a scholar of evidence-based science would say that they need God to be a part of equation to make sense of what they have found.
I used to need a picture of what God looked like – big guy up in the clouds, or the images of the Greek or Nordic gods of the past. As my relationship with Him as matured, its now simply a feeling. A big ness, depth and width inside me that I can either feel flowing through me… or else I’ve disconnected and gone wooden (equally revealing). No picture needed, just feeling.
I love re-reading this blog Dianne and the ever unfolding deep inner sense and knowing you have of God now.
“I have seen the light and love in my core shining in the eyes of another person, and increasing numbers of people, and know without doubt that we are all one, we are all held in the body of God and we all contain the all”.
I love what you share here Dianne and I think there are many things in life that we can attach to fitting into a certain image – like how we should be at a certain age e.g how much money we should be earning, have kids, be married.. or how we should be as parents/ friends/ sisters/ brothers … And by bringing our awareness back to how we feel in our body, our whole being, we can develop a level of connection and honesty with ourself that helps us to recognise when we may be attached to a harming ideal…
Religion is not something we have to be instructed about. It is something we live. We need no instruction. Religious ‘instruction’ is only a way of making sure you get reduced in your potential and be prepared to drop a spherical way and adopt a lineal one that points only in one direction. As a result, your ability to live religiously and to deepen your awareness about it suffers. When you expect everything happening in and from one direction, you close the possibility of something happening from a different place. You stop developing your awareness and with that you do not get closer to God.
I very much appreciate how you expose the illusion of needing instruction in a relationship that is unique and deeply personal to each and every one of us. Embarking on this journey, no longer looking to another to guide for only you can navigate, feels like growing up.
Thanks Dianne, great to read this again and of your journey observing life and finding your own answers. This is a great line about that source of light we have within “There was a core of light: an inviolable, unwavering, dependable, powerful, shining flame that could be trusted to always be there and not be tainted, destroyed, weakened or taken away no matter how dark and ugly things got around me…”. There is an enormous strength that develops from knowing and staying in connection to this core of light within, and how amazing that the Gentle Breath Meditation can support people to again find this within themselves.
What an excellent question to be asking humanity… What pictures do we have of something that is within everything and is purely love… Most definitely time to be letting go of some pictures.
God can’t but be felt… no images needed
I did not get sold on religion and the church because if this is truly about love then there would not be the obsession to “convert” people which is an imposition and a looking down on people seeing them as sinners and wrong and somehow less than. If God is Love, then shouldn’t there be an acceptance of people no matter what they have chosen? How would punishment from the outside ever convert someone when they feel a gaping hole inside of them? Even if they want to change, this deep dark hole makes it almost impossible to feel complete. This realisation confirms that we have to mend our own gaping hole before love can be truly shared to others and if this is not the foundation of a religion then it has no weight in what it teaches.
There is a sense of God that does not require any images, pictures or institutionalised religions for confirmation. It is just there, a deep inner knowing that is complete in itself.
I could never picture God… Always far too big for my imagination to comprehend.
To me God is an energy or vibration and the more settlement I have in my body the more stillness I feel and in that deep stillness I feel God. It is a feeling of expansion in my body, a sense of wellbeing and my body feels so complete that it needs nothing. Just to be and it is so familiar to me. I remember this feeling as a baby. I can remember being in my cot left alone but it didn’t matter because I was with myself and this energy that was all around me and within me. I have struggled to regain that same sense of oneness in my body and it has taken nearly a whole lifetime to come back to those same feelings I had as a child.
It was very generous of you to share your childhood and adulthood experiences with us and the fact that you have no images of God sounds like it could be a good thing. I am still not sure what I make of the whole “god” thing. I certainly can relate to the magic of god and I feel I have felt the presence of God but as far as an image goes, I have none, it’s more of a feeling.
Thank you Diane for sharing super interesting.
Quite simply as the connection to ourselves and to our inner voice grows so too does our relationship with God.
I realised reading this blog how complicated we have been sold the images and beliefs around God, and how this complication keeps many of us from knowing the true simplicity of God.
In my religious upbringing it was kind of presented in a way that God was something mighty and above and totally inaccessible to the average person and that the higher up in the church you were, the greater access you had to God. It never fully sat right with me as I felt God was someone you could access and held all equally- that there was no pecking order- this is now a truth that I have come back too.
Is it possible we all know ” God ” intimately and therefore do not require any image of what is intimately known. The chasing of an image or what ever ,is a way of avoiding the intimacy with ” God ” that we all know. Even the word ” God ” is a image.
One thing to be sure Danne if one does have an image of God that they are on the wrong track as any image at all has my alarm bells ringing and the words ‘false god’ come to mind.
Dianne, your sharing of your journey and exploration of God exposes the craziness of how we live in the world and how in fact how we live what we understand to be God and religion misses the point, and how we’ve gone into divisive groups and sects in our pursuit of religion and God – it exposes how we live far from the love we are from and the love we naturally are. In truth God is simple, all around us and within in and accessible to us all, and as we let go our ideas and images of what God is we allow the space for us to develop a relationship with ourselves and God.
What a vivid and full description of a childhood journey to adult… I read this like I was watching a movie… brilliant Diane, thank you for sharing … I got goosebumps reading this paragraph… “…there was another sanctuary, like the inner form of the outer Nature. Deep inside me, in the region of my heart, but somehow not confined by the thickness of my physical body, was a ‘place’, more like a ‘presence’………”
Yes light, energy, feeling, no words…”And whatever God might be, it had a similar feel to that core of light inside me”, God cannot be caught, imprisoned, tarnished and nailed down; God is within and part of all of us and the universe.
We could see not having an ‘image of God’ as a failure in our lifelong search for meaning. But as you beautifully show Dianne perhaps this is much closer to the truth, than we think. For surely what I have seen is that God is in every moment and every life event, supporting and showing me which way to go. In fact, it is less like ‘messages from God’ that we receive, than the constant communication of everything, all of the time. In this situation who needs images to understand, God is the best friend you can ever find?
A brilliant blog about one very specific subject – God. But where else in our lives do ‘pictures’ hide the actual truth from us? Well, in truth – pretty much EVERYWHERE. And these pictures are pure poison to us. They not only stop us from seeing the bigger picture but also we kill ourselves in pursuit of them. It’s insane. Keeping the picture metaphor going, you could say it’s akin to working ourselves to the bone, to save up every penny that we have to then go and spend it all on a painting that is a fake. If we knew it was a fake we wouldn’t do it – of course we wouldn’t. Yet, my feeling is that many of us are much more aware than we pretend to be about the fact that much of what we chase in our lives, or aspire to, we absolutely know within ourselves isn’t the real deal. So why do we do it? Like i said we wouldn’t buy the fake painting. Is it possible that it is easier to go with the flow rather than stand up for what we know to be the truth? Is it possible that most of humanity is involved in the most gigantic case of The Emperor’s Clothes? Thankfully Serge Benhayon and a growing number of others have the same wisdom and courage as the boy in that story, to say what they see, feel and know. And thus the shroud of ignorance is lifting from us all.
There is here a huge transformation that wholly deserves to be appreciated because in this writing we have before us the transformative movement of a person’s relationship with God from being one of images to an actual relationship that is intimate and personal, loving and essentially divine. This is so tremendous given all of the pressures we all experience from a young age to separate God out in to the images we are given of him. So it takes a huge dedication and commitment to break free of this and in fact choose to be open to and to explore what God truly is.
I have read this comment and an earlier one that you wrote on the same blog. The pair work beautifully together as an inspiration for all of us to deepen our relationship with God. Most of us probably put a huge amount of effort over the years into some of the primary relationships in our lives; husband, wives, children…and then also even pets. What if we were to invest even a fraction of that time, commitment and dedication into the most important relationship that we will ever have – that which is with God.
Wanting evidence of God is kind of like a child wanting to prove it has a mother! The evidence is all around and inside us anyway, indisputable wonder, magic, order, beauty and love. And when humans create environments that are absent of these qualities it is because of their choice to be separate to God, thank God 🙂 we have nature.
Absolutely, Katie! Indictment is that for so long we as a humanity have allowed ourselves to fall for it…
Very sensible and scientific, Doug! A good point too.
The arrogance with which we try to ‘earth’ God and conform him into an image that is similar to us. Perhaps it would be wise spending more energy looking in the other direction – how we might evolve ourselves into line with God – for as you say Doug, we are his children.
True, Katie. And it just occurred to me: how do we feel when another person judges us by some issue going on inside them, or some picture someone else has made us out to be? How does it feel to be seen as some ‘image’ instead of who we really are? We all know that experience of standing right in front of someone, supposedly communicating with them, and you just know, you can feel, that they are seeing you only through some illusory veil or other? Seeing what they want to see, instead of you yourself? It feels terrible, like the real you doesn’t exist and has been covered up or locked out. You feel like waving your hand in front of their face and saying: ‘Hey, this is me here!” Well what must it be like for God to have billions of people looking at him through their own veils of belief and illusion? Some denying seeing him there; others seeing ridiculous constructs…. But he is ultimate love, Love that observes all of this behaviour with nothing but love….
This situation we find ourselves in here reminds me of one of those sketches where the character has their glasses placed on their head, then ransacks their house to find them, looking everywhere. For how do you represent a omnipresent, all knowing, ever present thing, the whole universe, in everything? There is no picture that can encapsulate all of this – but conversely God is in it all to the last cell. And so we can see as you illustrate Dianne, that by making life about borders, objects, barriers, and containers, we get tricked into a space where we think God does not even exist. The irony is its the definitions and blocks we have subscribed to that aren’t even true. Everything is one and part of the whole.
It is interesting how our sight is so important to us, there is a saying “seeing is believing” But what if there were also a saying that “clear sensing is knowing.” In order to be clear we need to declutter our minds from all that they have taken on over the years, all the information that we have not really discerned as being true or not. In order to keep clear, allowing more love and deep care and deeper levels of honesty and truth in our behaviours and our lives is for me is what makes ‘clearly sensing is knowing’ a reality and a great support.
Good point, Elaine. You could also say that ‘believing is seeing’. If you believe there’s no God you won’t ‘see’ him. If you believe there is a God, you’ll ‘see’ whatever your image of him is that you want to see. It raises the importance of truly feeling/sensing instead of belief and looking outside for answers.
Reading your life growing up I was struck by how much trauma young people can experience depending on their situations around them. We are such sensitive souls, that it must be hard for these young people to stay steady. I know it is always our choices how we react, but this gave me a greater understanding of what some of our children are experiencing. And I loved what you shared about that steady inner-light that can never be extinguished. It is truly Gods gift.
Reflecting on the images that we may hold of God and all that is contained within them is a really useful thing to do – a picture conveys much and it’s amazing to realise what we can be aligning with as we un-pick whatever pictures we may be holding onto.
I also considered myself an atheist throughout much of my earlier life, growing up with a father who was adamantly so. This changed very rapidly however once I met Serge Benhayon and experienced Sacred Esoteric Healing… by first introduction to the multidimensionality of myself and life. I realise looking back that I wasn’t atheist at all, I just knew He did not exist in any of the popular images, doctrines or followings I had come across to that point. He was in fact first felt within me… and is known from this place to this day.
I wonder how many other atheists there are like you, Jenny? If we can’t find something, we tend to think it doesn’t exist. And we don’t trust our inner knowing…. Perhaps a few atheists will take another look when reading your comments!
Is atheism the ultimate form of arrogance?
Yes I agree Dianne, we don’t trust our inner knowing…. in fact if you’d said that to me 20 years ago I wouldn’t have even known what you were talking about. There was no language around or concept I was aware of that introduced the idea that what is known can come from deep within, and not from or via the head and what we have learnt or inputted in some way.
God is felt before his is known, not seen.
Most peoples issue is not with God, but with humanity. Through that they lose connection with the possibility that life could be anything more than the brutality they have witnessed.
I agree Adam. My big issue was with humanity. I felt we should have been called ‘inhumanity’ instead!
We endlessly search high and low for God, mostly in the wrong places! and only if we listen to our hearts are we able to find God is within and all around us, in every breath and every movement in alignment to the stars.
We have been taught by society that we are pretty stupid and can’t trust the answers inside us. That we have to look to some outside ‘authority’ to verify everything. Time to break out of that prison, and the best break-out is to find God within ourselves, and thence reflected in all nature and in the heart of all humans.
“God was supposed to be a loving, grey-bearded, kingly and fatherly figure on a throne up in the sky or up on mountains, and yet even on a clear day or night you couldn’t see him up there.” Yes this line very much reminded me of my childhood when I could never really comprehend who God was and why we could never see him when we called for his aid. I now see God all around us and within my own body for it is the way in which we move, express and live everyday that shows our religious steps with God and then with everyone else. God is with us always and not a tall, bearded man in a robe but living, breathing within the walls of our heart.
The best way to learn about God is to feel Him inside, or to see him expressed through the thought, words and deeds of another. This is the way to develop a relationship with a living God and not through the dusty pages of a book.
So true, Simon. Once having felt God inside, the books might further confirm some of what we’ve felt, but usually they come loaded with a whole lot of unnecessary and distracting stuff. Stuff that isn’t needed for our pure experience.
For me there was a magic that was missing in my life when I was young, and I turned to the false Gods found in comic books and characters. The choice between a fantasy where magic really existed proved a welcome counterpoint to the fact that the church was used as the Assembly / Attendance list for the day.
When we look out to the world around us that we have created and see the lovelessness being reflected back to us from the many choices people make and how they live their everyday we must never forget that it all comes from the choice that each individual human being makes, not God.
Yay to that! There is a lot of God-blaming in the world. It seems we humans will point the finger to anywhere but ourselves for the source of our woes.
I love how you didn’t put an answer here Dianne but expanded the conversation for us all to see what God is and feels to us individually. For me I get a quality of warmth that is unending and inexhaustible, a never ending yes to truth and life, less a person more an energy source. All I need to do I can see is live in a way that taps into this outlet instead of the negative reductive, separatist flavour that we can settle for.
Wow Dianne, I applaud you for your endless searching and the fact you seemed to hold onto some semblance of what was true despite all that was around you.
Sheer determination! And that inner light has always been undeniable…
Yes well very commendable… I can look back and see that inner light was always apparent but I had little aware connection to it and made few choices that were truly regarding of it.
Love this sharing Dianne, your detail on your explorations with God is just gorgeous. God is that in us, that inner essence and so much of what we are shown as God is just not real or true and many of us feel this, and know this. We innately know God, and if we are left to be with this, we can express this in all we do.
To me you encapsulate who God is in these words that you shared with us all. “We are all one we are held in the body of God and we all contain the all”.
It’s interesting how images can take us away from feeling the truth of what is there. While we are seeing something in our head we are not feeling with our body.
It is inspiring to see and feel the qualities of God in another person and develop those qualities in ourselves. God is not out there, he is within us all.
It’s funny upon reading this blog this evening I am taken back to when I was quite young and seeing images on tv or in movies of people kneeling by their bedsides and praying to God when they needed help or a question answered. I always found this to be quite odd and never truly comprehended why we needed to kneel by our bed’s to have someone help us in our time of need. Even a a young girl I could never grasp this concept. It’s great to now know that the true essence of God has been within me all this time and that anytime support is needed all that is needed is to connect to our own quality of movement and masterful wisdom is shared.
I love how you say that as your inner voice of wisdom has grown so has your sense of God – it’s like with the deepening of that inner connection it is a deepening of the connection with God too.
Absolutely compelling and brilliant. I loved reading this. Thank you Dianne.
A truly fabulous piece of writing Dianne. Your description of an inner light yet not relating that to God feels so familiar. It is not until now, reading your blog, that I have equated the two and with that has come a deepening connection and awareness of God. Thank you.
Dead giveway already in the question asking “what is your image” as you only have an image when you don’t “know”. The truth is we ALL know God when we connect to our inner heart. Not always so easy in a world that tells us to look outside and feeds us with a massive smorgasbord of images and lies – lies that we actually invite or ask for by not choosing and connecting to our inner knowing.
I can totally relate to my own sense of God expanding with-in me and this due to the simple choice to appreciate that I am equal to the divine essence of God with-in. Allowing myself to hold this for myself as a truth is a gift I’m accepting without question for my mind but an openness from my heart and body.
I kept getting turned off orthodox religions because no one seemed to practice what they preached. There was so much hypocrisy within the church I felt there were more ‘christian’ people outside it than in it. When I came to attend the Universal Medicine and The Way of The Livingness presentations my body immediately said yes, and over the years I saw a Serge Benhayon as a man who consistently walked his talk. Here was a true religion, at last.
Yes that hypocrisy in religions was a sign that the truth was not there…
If we could just pause and stop our life like a video or film, and zoom out to see it all, what would we find? I feel for me it would be like seeing an incredibly detailed and rich tapestry, with the most amazing threads of meaning and connection woven in. But when I come back to watching how I live, would it have the same quality of grandness? Or would it be small, petty and argumentative? I feel my current reality is more of the latter. So whilst God is in everything, every act and thing that we do – I feel it’s incredibly clear from what you share Diane that there is so much more Love and glory for us to live. When we choose this, to be bigger, that’s when we truly know God.
I find your depiction of the two views, Joseph, a great image. It says so much about how we get lost and caught up in the detail of life and by doing so we miss out on the glory and beauty of the tapestry that truly is in life.
What a story and thank you for sharing Dianne. Not an image but a feeling of God, a sense and knowing of belonging to the all.
I too no longer have an image of God, but see God in people, in their eyes, in actions of love and care and in nature, amongst other things. Stillness, love, joy, harmony and truth – these feel to be true qualities of God.
Your story here Dianne is a fitting testimony to the many roads we can go down pursuing God. Like a relative with ‘missing person’ flyer, we search high and low till we get lost. What a trick this all is when as far I understand God is in everything, and in every one of us. The only way we can avoid and loose sight of God is to get these blinkers on and go running off. Your words here are a clear reminder to me to stop and connect to the fact that everything is open, available and present with me, and not hidden, cut off or any way removed.
I too was recently questioning how would I describe God and what He means to me and put together Unimedpedia God here: http://www.unimedliving.com/unimedpedia/word-index/unimedpedia-god.html which delivers a wonderful selection of short audio and quotes that present God from many exquisite angles.
How priceless it is to NOT have an image of God and to experience and discover God through us.
It is interesting how we can be drawn into the complication the world brings, a mere distraction as you have proven Diane for the divinity within never dulls and never stops calling us back.
Simply awesome blog – beautiful to feel how the enduring connection to feeling light and love within has been constant and a guide back to the truth.
There is no doubt within me that we all know God but we do have to dig deep and ask questions. On reflection I knew that institutionalised religion was not true and not for me but chose to ignore my feelings in order to please others and get some form of recognition and identification. My search took me to explore the new age which didn’t feel true either as it was not grounded for me… I could not feel God that I knew God to be when I was a child. Enter Serge Benhayon where I instantly felt God. I was not fully aware at the time of the reason as to why I felt such a strong pull to attending Universal Medicine but over time my connection to God and religion has grown enormously and I have reached a point where I am content in my connection to God and I do not have to preach or try to convert others to remembering God in the way I am.
Dianne, I love this, how you charted your journey with your relationship with God and at each stage explored and learned from your own experience and what felt true to you, with no image just a willingness to consider and look. This is how we build our relationship with God and everyone.
The images of God that are presented in our societies are in fact ways of holding us away from him. The images show a part of the truth but when you want to look deeper, they fail and leave you in the devastation of yet another illusion been broken. These images do create patterns in us to continuously seek for other images of God but which will be finally discarded in the same way as we do with all of them. We can only stop this ill way of looking for God by going inside of us instead. There we will find, in our inner heart, a connection with God and all of the universe, the connection that has always been there, waiting for us to return to.
I can so relate to what you have shared Dianne after having been part of the Catholic religion when I was younger and being feed many false images that were created to control people and to fear God. Thanks to The Way of The Livingness my connection with God has been restored without any false images and just the purity, deep love and magnificence that God truly is.
I’m thoroughly enjoying the many articles here on Religion. It is such a joy to hear the authors claim that connection to God that is real, lived and has been known for such a long time.
Sure Rosanna, it is a blessing to read that God is always with us, through our inner heart. There is no need to do anything, being a member of a religion institution to follow any sort of belief, but only to connect to that inner core, where our connection with God resides and to let our lives being impulsed from there. It is actually a simple choice, that cannot be made by the mind but only by our inner hearts.
It is so it is so inspiring to read your words again. I could literally feel your enthusiasm and dedication jumping off the page! You have an amazing skill for research and expression that I feel reinforces my knowing of God too. Great read for all!
“My inner voice of wisdom has grown.” I work in healthcare and there is a lot of talk about patient centred care which I support. And for this concept to really take off, we need more confirmation of our inner voice of wisdom as this voice shares much with us but we have forgotten how to listen to it and then trust what it shares. It is refreshing to read someone whose voice has grown and they are listening to it more and more. Because once we do that, we know much more about what is going on for our bodies, and can speak with authority on that to our healthcare providers.
Images of just about everything have completely messed us around. And Images of God are in this category. God is, life is, love is, wisdom is and all images of things, of the way they should be, of the way we ‘think’ they are misleading. The sense of sight can be very misleading in the case of knowing truth. We must feel it in our heart to know the truth of anything and not go by images.
Thank you Dianne for sharing your investigations of God. From very young I never doubted God but wrestled with the looking for the who, where, why and it was always looking for something outside of me, bigger and unreachable. With the teachings of Universal Medicine I have learned to feel within me and can feel within my inner-heart the constant loving presence of God.
This blog gives everyone a great opportunity to explore what images of God we may be carrying and how this can be influencing our daily lives, which is worth exploring, because surely one’s relationship with the Co-Creator of our universe is perhaps the most important and significant relationship we can have throughout life?
Thank you Dianne for a great article, I have had many images of God throughout my life, always very conflicting, now as I connect to my inner knowing I feel the presence of God within and all around me, in the beauty and stillness of nature in the smile of a stranger in the innocent joy of a child, the more we open to our own love the more we see God everywhere.
I could relate to so much of what you have written here Dianne, I was never interested in science so I knew nothing about energy but whenever the conversation got deeper about the meaning of life I would say that I felt God was not a person, he was an energy that oversaw the world and that I felt there was such a thing as re-incarnation and we came back to learn things, but there was one thing that I could not really understand until coming to Universal Medicine, was why do children and babies get cancer or sickness when they have not yet lived a life to accumulate an illness, and if God was truly all knowing would he let this happen. I also never truly related to God in nature even though as a child I enjoyed being out in it but I did not really appreciate nature and all it had to offer.
It was once shared that God is in the detail. Simple.
What a joy to live in the knowing that we are one with God and never are we less, greater and not held in his embrace.
When I was 8 I was asked by my Religious Education teacher to draw my image of God. I drew God as a huge circle around the earth, holding the earth in one hand in his embrace, which when you read esoteric philosophy is not far off the mark – that God holds all in his Atmic embrace, even if we should choose to ignore his spherical presence.
Great drawing, Adam! You were onto it….
Throughout my life I rejected all the images of who God is from the various religions I came across. None of the religious teachings and images presented to me as I was growing up made any sense, so I turned away from them. I felt strongly that all religions are one and couldn’t understand why people were fighting for their version of God against another religion. I felt that God is love and that we are all equals and all the religions I came across did not reflect this truth except The Way of The Livingness. To me this religion is the one that will unite all religions and humanity as one because the core of its teachings is about love, truth, equality, void of separation and images of God. The key understanding for me is to live love and truth, and we will see God in everyone, everything and everywhere.
The Way of the Livingness is the first and only religion that matches my inner feelings for God and Religion in the most fundamental way. Oneness.
Unimedpedia God has just been published – http://www.unimedliving.com/unimedpedia/word-index/unimedpedia-god.html – very highly recommended full of the most wonderful quotes and audio about God.
Thanks Nicola for that great resource….
As I’ve developed a relationship with God, I’ve noticed that far from being the authoritarian figure I’d originally thought, He has a much more everyday persona and can be found in the most mundane of places while at the same time co-existing in the grandness of the Universe.
I love what you have shared here Simon as this is a huge concept to breakdown. We can’t have one without the other so if we ever isolate the microcosmic and macrocosmic aspect we miss the endless truth that is available.
As recently as a few hours ago I can say that I’ve still been a little removed from truly appreciating and accepting that I’m a son of God. After a very loving chat with a dear friend I’m going to choose claiming this truth and embracing it with all the joy and delight I am.
All my life I would look around at the construct of the world, the life we were all living, the things that excited us, that we felt were important, that we admired…and I would say “is this really it, all there is to life”. I would look at the amazingness of nature or the complexity of the human body and say…”really? all this effort, all this incredibleness….just for this life?” So, I always knew there was something more, something deeper, higher, grander – whatever you want to call it. And then I met Serge Benhayon and started listening to what he had to say and I begun to see, know and feel what God really is. I now look at life totally differently. My vision is no longer capped by what I can see, my feeling is no longer capped by what I can touch, my wonderment is no longer capped by what we have created – the whole game has got a zillion times bigger and grander and I now am beginning to see what it is all about. Baby steps and a long way to go – but never again will I have the sense of dissatisfaction and incompletion when I observe the world. Thanks Serge for re-introducing me to God.
Never too late, hey Otto?
And never do we stop learning.
God is the smile of my youngest son – especially when I’m having an intense time. It smashes through everything, any indulgence or self-doubt that I may be messing bout with. Pure God delivered direct.
“On the side of truth I have been regularly blown away by the questions Serge Benhayon has presented at courses and events. He regularly poses very simple questions that simply by the asking free up my thinking and expand my vision.” By exploring some of the questions posed by Serge Benhayon have lead me to make different choices and to lead a very different life to the one I was living before meeting him ten years ago. A life in which “My inner voice of wisdom has grown. My sense of God has grown, and is still growing” and for that I feel deeply blessed by that fact.
Having been brought up in the Catholic Faith that provides plenty of false images of God, I abandoned religion for 30 years until I met Serge Benhayon who presented God as a fact of life for all of us, not just some image or a bearded man up in the clouds. It has taken me several years to integrate this in my daily life, but I truly appreciate the clarity of his presentations and the way we are encouraged, without dogma, to feel and experience God for ourselves, reflected in everything and everyone around us.
How Serge Benhayon presents God makes such common sense and brings lucidity to the chaos of how humanity in general is living.
I agree, Carmel, same experience of Serge Benhayon. At last someone who presents without any dogma, guilt-peddling, pictures or the usual ‘religious’ inequality. Very refreshing and freeing!
Letting go of any pictures we are holding about God, not only frees us up from the impositions from the many religions which claim they are one but also allows us the space to get to know ourselves by who we truly are and how we all are the Sons of God and are connected to the all.
I too found no way did school teachers have the answers for the questions that came to me as a child. I remember asking how come people born before Christ could not enter Heaven as they were not baptised? I remember thinking those people mattered too, and it wasn’t ok to leave them outside heaven over a missed sacrament. The religious instructors didn’t really have an answer. This spoke very loudly to me. There had to be more than just what their religious teaching offered us.
That’s for sure, Felicity. What we were shown was all about separation and leaving people out. Whereas God is about oneness and including everyone. How did we get so ridiculous?!
With the global population being approximately 7.4billion, this gives indication that there are probably many a number of images of God, so one, we can see why there could be a religious tension of whose image of God is more true than another and second, it may also indicate the very many different ways of describing perhaps the same one essence of love…
So true Johanne, I feel it is the many images of God that is leading us further away from God.
Yes…. in my own global travels, I encountered many signs of people’s views of God. From costumed dancers in Japan, to brightly coloured Hindu statues, ascetic Buddhist caves and mosaic Moslem temples in India, to gold-clad singing Christian cowboy bands in out-west USA, bleeding-hearted Christ paintings in Ireland, chanting Goddess circles at earth festivals… but where I found God there was… yes, in all the human hearts. In the love, brotherhood, care and openness to others. In that, all humans are the same. Connecting to that, there is only one religion, one essence of love as you say here Johanne.
Wow Dianne, it was a privilege to read your story. Yes it has also taken me 6 decades in search of truth and God and I still have no image of what God looks like but what I do have is greater understanding of stillness, love, harmony, joy and truth and now know to look within instead of searching outside of myself. The more connected I am the more I understand that we are all one.
I agree Jane – I had the same feeling when I was reading Dianne’s discovery of God from within and not being put-off by the amount of mis-representations available. There is something so incredibly powerful in the truth of God, other wise why would there be so many ways to put people off or direct away from the real truth that God is with-in?
Dianne I really appreciate the wonder you approach God with. You are a true natural connected being to all the amazing, remarkable and magical aspects of the universe. A natural scientists who considers the all from your own understanding and truth. A delight to read and share your unfolding inspiration to know God from with in and not judge the book by its cover.
The title “Images of God” is interesting to ponder on, as, growing up, i had never been asked what my image of God was, and if I did, all I would probably think of and associate God with the image of a man with a beard and long hair (Jesus), like what you may see in a book in a school Religious Education class. But these days, when I look at nature, the movement of weather, and recognise that there is an order and movement in our whole universe with planets, solar systems, stars, galaxies in infinite distant to our planet … completely not made-made… it’s fair to realise that our image of God is everywhere around us all the time, right under our nose…
I often used to feel God within myself when I was in nature, I loved the harmony and joy that I felt, but at the time did not know that God lived eternally with in me, how can God be contained by an image when he is within every part of our bodies, the world and the universe around us?
I have always known there is God and although I had given up on many things in life, like Dianne I never gave up on finding truth, the truth of God. It wasn’t until I met Serge Benhayon and Universal Medicine who confirmed to me who God was by an expansive, all encompassing and inclusive of everything feeling in my body.
That place within me that speaks to me in a language that can only be described as universal and with a love that confirms every cell in my body is God.
The many images of God that I have grown up with have always related to something outside of me and something I had to work to gain approval of and to be proven worthy. I am now just starting to claim this amazing light that is within me and in every other ‘Being’ on the planet and in that I can feel the beginnings of an understanding of the love that is God. Many paths and images have served as nothing but a distraction and have separated people instead of connecting them in brotherhood. This blog has exposed many of these untruths and confirmed that God is much closer than we think – God is within.
God for me has always been felt in the expansive open ginormousness of the universe and all the stars. Surely if God is who he has been said to be in so many different ways, there would also have to be a link with God and the Universe but this is not always seen in religious teachings, especially if God is supposed to only have one son!
When we actually take the time to look at, highlight or call out these images we hold onto so often I have found these images crumble quickly.
They make no sense and yet we focus on them as if they are everything. I loved reading your journey over time testing these images against an inner knowing, the part of us that can feel and see through anything. Thank you Dianne.
“You can’t study Pure Mathematics for long before you realise there must be a God.” This is true for many things. For example, when I studied anatomy and physiology I felt such a sense of awe and wonder at the divine intelligence that makes the body systems all work so harmoniously. Being under the night sky way out at sea there is a palpable sense of a nameless vast power that holds this universe together. Once we allow ourselves to feel and connect then there is no doubt that God is with us.
Having an image of what anything should be like restricts our vision so that we are locked into an interpretation which is a biased view of something. If on the other hand we have no preconceived idea we are more likely to be open to feeling the truth of something.
I love how you kept questioning whether there was a God all the way through your life Dianne and did not give up, you were always willing to look at the next thing that was presented to you with a light hearted openness. I think I was more dismissive growing up. I knew there was a God but everything around me didn’t feel true, so I was basically waiting to see that if there was a God, he would in some way show himself to me. I don’t think I had an image of God, I didn’t buy into the man in the white fluffy clouds, I just knew he was there but what I found hard to accept when I came to Universal Medicine was that God is inside of me and I don’t need to go anywhere to find him, all I had to do was live in a way that allows that connection.
As I develop an ongoing relationship with God I have found that I am understanding who I am in much more detail. I now know why I have always gone to a deep stillness that is now even more profound and why harmony has been a foundation of what I have always delivered. Truth has always been at the forefront of what I shared even though at times I was extremely deceitful and dishonest. And I was at least happy in my endeavours. This only leaves light and love, which along with harmony, stillness, joy and truth are the attributes that have been the foundations of the teachings of what Serge Benhayon presents about God! So somehow I was always naturally held by what is the way back to God to the best of my ability and most of the time I was extremely lost on my path of return. Thanks to the teachings from Serge Benhayon I now have a true interpretation of God.
“But I have felt the indescribable stillness that is the foundation of the harmony, order and intelligence in Nature.”…I wish this was taught in religious education in schools. The world would be a much different place.
Knowing, connecting to the Love that we are is my way to God. For me, at this point in my development God is a sensing and a knowing and not an image. But there is absolutely certainty of God and his being.
Traditional images of God have certainly led us down a path that takes us away from God. I love what you have expressed here Dianne, for me it epitomises our ever expanding understanding of God;
“My inner voice of wisdom has grown. My sense of God has grown, and is still growing”.
The chances of us being here on earth, the perfection of nature, the changing of seasons the perfect environment for life on this planet just happening chance? I can’t see it or feel it somehow but what ever our image of God is or was, it’s great to know he is in everything and we are in him whether we care to believe it or not.
Since I have been inspired by Universal Medicine and supported to connect with and deepen my relationship with my body, my life, people, God and the Universe, my relationship with and awareness of every area keeps expanding and evolving. Every time I have a conversation or read something about these topics this expansion is very clear. Being sold images of God is hugely trapping and limiting and does a huge disservice to humanity.
I remember when I was first introduced to God, it turned my mind into a pretzel. I couldn’t understand why God was referred to as “he” but he was not a person and he was everywhere. My family was not religious, but I always had a very deep connection to the fact that there was something more to life than just the everyday mundane life before me. It was not until I came across Universal Medicine that I truly began to not only understand what it was that I knew already so deep inside, but that I began to truly embrace the relationship with God that I have.
It is wonderful to reflect further on my own experience of God, inspired by this great blog Dianne. To me there is nowhere where God isn’t, and I feel held in his love at all times. I could not always have said this, but that was due to my disconnection to myself and what was there all of the time.
How our created images can lead us astray…
God is the deeply beholding feeling inside of me, the warmth of a light that I can always choose to connect with and remember who I am, and always choose to express forth and receive back from nature and sometimes from people. God is not limited to an image or a gender as physical form limits the stupendousness that I feel when this name is expressed. There is a relationship felt with the speaking of this name, a relationship that feels equal, always beholding but without the slightest pulling, pushing or carrying. God is the most amazing relationship ever to be experienced, and it is what is embodied within to bring forth and live.
Dianne it’s great to read your experience of the images of God, and your own feelings sensing that it was all around you and within you, just goes to show we are naturally at one with God, no matter what we call it.
When we let go of images of how God is or is meant to be, we can feel that God is there always if we but choose to hold that connection. – then there is no question of believing or not believing because it is just known. and this we all know equally.
As I have developed my relationship with God I have been able to say and write his name with more and more ease and naturalness. I do however have a slight twinge still with him being a he. I know this is nothing to do with the truth of God being he, but to do with my ongoing development of my acceptance of and appreciation of myself as a woman, alongside men, with our innate qualities as vital and equal as each others.
I have also found that images of God can be misleading.
My image of god in now a ‘feeling’ living inside my body.
What are the sayings about that we have with God in them, “Oh my God”, “For God’s sake”, “For the love of God”, “Jesus Christ” etc. Where did these originate from? I don’t understand why we use these and how automatic and almost ingrained they are in our culture. People usually use these when they are upset or really frustrated. What is interesting for me is that when things went wrong or the pressure was on it was God I looked to. It is similar with these sayings is that they are used again when you are under pressure or looking for something or someone to help you. More confirms what we are taught that God is something outside of you that will ‘save’ you when you are in trouble. I have heard even people that don’t believe in God use these sayings, I was one of them. Funny to see the memory we have of God, the deep memory of God is in us, why? Is it possible it’s because that is where God resides, within us? So next time you look to the heavens for help maybe all you need do is stop, breathe and look within.
I had many images of God when I was a child, the typical old man on a throne with a long white beard was one of them. This puzzled because I was told that God is everywhere, omnipresent in fact, but I didn’t really understand how an old man could be everywhere, a bit like Santa Claus, how could he do all the chimneys in the world in one night! Now I know the truth, thanks to Universal Medicine, that God is not an old man sitting on a throne, but he IS EVERYWHERE, we are living in his body of light (energy) and God resides in us too, in our inner heart, so thank you Universal Medicine for making it so clear to me. I am a Son of God, one of billions, and God was inside of me and all around me at the same time, because it all made sense when I realised we were made up of particles and there is no separation from one another. How cool is that?
I have felt like this about nature “And whatever God might be, it had a similar feel to that core of light inside me.” It resonated inside me and there was steadiness and stillness in me around nature. I know now that I looked outside for a long time, that nature was separate, or better than me, I could be equal with it, but that stillness inside has become more profound and I know now that nature is a reflection for me to feel, that stillness, and know that I now can offer nature this reflection also.
The images we are taught about God sending his only son to die for everyone, as told in the christian religion, always jared with me. It did not make any sense to me yet presented an image of God that was judgemental whereas the truth is the complete opposite. If we allow the images of God we hold to still be part of our lives what I’ve discovered is that actually limits our ability to connect with God.
The images we create interfere with what we already feel and know.
Thank you Dianne. Our relationship with God is built upon the relationship we have with ourselves and the relationship we have with evolution. I have always had a sense of God but the more I get to know myself the stronger my relationship with God and my own divinity becomes.
So true Leonne, I have found the same thing that the greater the relationship I have with myself, the more I know God.
‘the Kingdom of God is inside ‘ No image, ideal or outer belief… the living stillness within is where we breath God’s breath.
Old man with a white beard and a staff, so the image goes. Why on earth would a divine being make themselves appear old, when the rest of humanity seems to be perpetually enamoured with staying young? But seriously, there are many aspects of the image we have around God that have less to do with how we imagine he looks, and much more to do with his nature – and it is these images that corrupt our understanding of divinity much more than the ones associated with how he looks. The image of a vengeful, judgemental, all mighty and even benevolent God is one that is way more insidious than that of a white man with a stick.
Absolutely, and then our interpretation that we are meant to live in fear of God – this was one of the clinchers for me as a child in terms of understanding that we were not living the truth.
‘How could an absolutely loving God also mete out terrible judgments of vengeance and devastation?’ Good question Dianne, and a very obvious one, so how come people in their religions have never asked this question? To me, it shows how the consciousness behind them will not allow one to see basic humane-ness and common sense.
Wow what a corker of a post Diane, completely enjoyed reading your story. Loved this line here : “I have seen the light and love in my core shining in the eyes of another person, and increasing numbers of people, and know without doubt that we are all one…” – what we see in another, we see ourselves shining back…the magnificence of reflection, which is the magnificence of God and what He is to me.
It occured to me recently just how much of societal behaviour may stem from such adopted religious images and indoctrinations, however false – the quest to be good, to do good, to be seen as good in the eyes of God, the notion of judgement and shame, persecution, dominion and disempowerment, of punishment, righteousness and even war, divides and separation, cast in or out, membership, rule, commandments and guilt for a beginning. Our religions to date have not delivered us Truth, Love, Brotherhood, Unity, Equalness and open inquiry, transparency and empowerment. The Way of The Livingness exposes these religions for their false foundations for they are swiftly exposed by the activity of True Love and True connection with God.
I spent some time in church yesterday at a funeral and God was there, but he did not stop at the door or at the edge of the church grounds. My feeling was that he was in the people, the air, all aspects of nature, in fact everywhere and our choice to respond to his presence or not, is just that, a choice. My relationship with God changes all the time, he doesn’t, it is simply the level of awareness and surrender I allow that does.
“adventures, collecting bugs and rocks, raising frogs and fish, scientific experiments, reading, art, bikes, pets, games, making stuff… ” This felt like true God and religion to me.
I’ve traded an image of God (big bloke on a chair with a white beard) for a feeling for God. Quite the difference and that feeling is incomparable.
This image of God sitting up on a cloud shaped like a big armchair, with a big white beard (that merges into the cloud/armchair that he sits on) is a classic one! My question is – where does it come from? And how is it that we are all fooled into thinking of the same image when in fact it is such a fallacy and yet no one has drawn this as a picture and nor has anyone spoken of it, and yet it is so prevalent!!?? Where are these images coming from and why do we swallow them hook line and sinker? Something to ponder on, and perhaps laugh at next time around instead of swallowing them!
God for me is in numbers, he is in the sky, the trees, they way birds fly, the sparkle in my eyes, he is in other people, the conversation we have, he is everywhere, even in the supermarket aisles.
The more I discard and say no to that which is not of truth, the deeper my connection with my body is which allows me to crack through the mental illusions of life and surrender to that which is divine, to know God.
It was a great realisation for me when I realised that we all held onto some quite different images of god and what God means to us. There is an individuality to much of what we think of what God represents, which strikes me as odd given that no matter what your religious beliefs, there is a nearly universal understanding that there is a presence, or a being which unifies us all. How does that all encompassing unifying presence match with 6 billion different ideas of God?
It is amazing how many differing images we have of God – mostly at least in my case they were something far grander than I could ever be. They were some mythical figure that sat on a cloud looking over us like little pawns. Someone who could click his fingers and part the seas. Yes he is other worldly but these images for me created a separation, something I would or could never be. I also had the image I could do anything and get Gods forgiveness – void of any and all responsibility. I have learnt that true love involves consequences if you choose lesser not as a punishment but rather offering a correction amd a lesson.
An interesting read- as I read this I had my own unfolding about my version of God and my relationship to God. It is not something I think about much but something I do feel when I am connected to nature.
My relationship with God is changing not because of any image or picture but because there is a knowing that is deepening within.
I love it that people felt uncomfortable around you, often we can feel uncomfortable when truth is presented to us.
Your blog Dianne has made me remember quite clearly at age 28, when I decided to stop ‘bandying about the truth’ by naming God with everything BUT the actual name ‘God’, as I realised that my own use of the word had been tarnished by what I would now call false notions and expressions of religion. Indeed, there is much for us to heal in regards to seeing the truth of this – the extent of harm (including genocide) done in the name of God, for example, that could never, ever be representational of His Love whatsoever. All of this needs to be seen for what it is – a bastardisation of God and religion, and what it is to live a truly religious way.
Such words as ‘God’ and ‘religion’ deserve our reclaiming, from the enormity of disrespect with which they have been abused.
This is an amazing account of the plethora of what we are ‘sold’ to be God, or represent His name, and the struggle most have – given the false representations – in reconciling the possibility of there being a ‘God’ when we have so much harm in this world.
Particularly poignant, and something I resonate deeply with also Dianne, is the knowing that “I had that core of light inside me.” Though no-one around me ever spoke of this (until I met Serge Benhayon in 2001), I also knew it to be true – this was God immanent, the seat of my divinity, here within. It took me time also in my life to claim and actually name this knowing that was so natural and so innate, as being the truth of God in my life and a relationship that has never, and could never leave me.
I love what you have expressed here Dianne, so confirming of feeling God within;
“There was a core of light: an inviolable, unwavering, dependable, powerful, shining flame that could be trusted to always be there…; an inner form of outer Nature”
God just cannot be represented in an image and us being from God, life on earth is to undo all the images that we have taken up as being a human being. God is known and is constantly felt within me and it is this embodiment that truly expresses God.
So many images about God debunked right here. Let’s face it most images we have of God are things outside of ourselves. It is rare that we are given an opportunity to stop and consider the images we have of God, but once again thanks to Universal Medicine pretty much all of life at some point gets turned upside down and this time we got to look at our images of God and how we may have come about having them in the first place.
I have no understanding of Pure Mathematics, yet there is a sense of a grand order and flow knowing that numbers and mathematics are a supportive, whole and solid foundation of that which is true and that numbers in cycles (days of the week, the year etc) are there to support us to evolve back to the truth of who we are. There is a confirmation felt deep in my body that we cannot be anything other than part of God and the Universal rhythms and cycles.
“A professor of mathematics said to me: “You can’t study Pure Mathematics for long before you realise there must be a God.” This was an awesome moment! Here was a modern reductionist scientist who’d found satisfactory ‘evidence’ of God in nature.”
Your blog has reminded me of sitting in religious class when I was a child and listening to the local priest tell us stories from the bible and his interpretations of them and whilst I found some of the stories interesting and entertaining, and I could feel the truth in some of it, most of it did not add up to me, and I can remember asking lots of awkward obvious questions (like only a child can) that the priest could not answer. As I seemed to be the only one questioning things and was told that I was incorrect, I assumed this to be the case and shut down my inner knowing of truth for probably another 20 years after that! When I heard Serge Benhayon talk about our inner connection with our soul and God, our equality with God, and our inner truth and wisdom that we can access at any time in our inner most, I suddenly realised that I did not have to rely on anyone else outside of me for the answers I was looking for, as it was all residing inside of me.
The relationship with myself that has endured over the years, is very simply knowing I am part of an infinite non physical All, having felt and experienced a deeper connection and Divine intelligence that always is there. This Wisdom I have known and appreciated to be the presence of God. I have heard many times that God is Love but it wasn’t until I came to Universal Medicine that I realised I was that Love also, and that was the key to returning and living with a deeper relationship, firstly with myself, and then in connection with all and thus with God.
So much effort goes into religions to tell us who we have to think God is, which is crazy when as a child we naturally just know God to the very core of our being..
When I heard the term ‘God within’ the first time and still today I recognise myself coming up with an image to imagine what that actually means; not that I am expecting to see God as a person inside me but nevertheless there is the tendency to try understanding everything visually and in doing so all kinds of pictures come to mind that have been collected along the way. These pictures need to be let go of to come back to a genuine connection with God and so the biblical verse “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.” Makes some sense but not even Christianity has made a living part of its faith.
‘ A professor of mathematics said to me: “You can’t study Pure Mathematics for long before you realise there must be a God.” This was an awesome moment! Here was a modern reductionist scientist who’d found satisfactory ‘evidence’ of God in nature.’ Love it Dianne, the magic of God.
‘However, as my choices changed upon the basis of experimenting with the new knowledge, for example quitting drugs, changing my diet, claiming a higher level of awareness and responsibility, etc, my ability to directly sense and experience things that are beyond physical and scientific understanding has grown.’ These choices can really be described as developing a religious way – that is, developing a clearer, deeper relationship with yourself and therefore with God.
The whole image of God has been created in a way to prevent us from pondering on the fact of our own divinity, and indeed our own responsibility with regards to life. Interestingly, if you look at the two religious extremes – that of atheism, and that of a benovolent and judgemental overarching Christian God – both paint a scenario that does not engender any sense of responsibility with regards to life in all its forms. If I am to die and disappear, for what reason would I care what happens to my fellow human being, or the earth, or the universe for that matter. Similarly, if my sins are to be forgiven, or if I am but the lowly plaything of a great God, then for what reason would I think that my voice would matter one way or another in the scheme of things. After all, if I am but a child of God, and my only responsibility is to be good and kind, then I do not have to worry too much about anything else.
The truth is both of these teachings do not encourage us to look at the greater picture, nor do they engender a greater call to responsibility in the way we interact with life, but instead diminish our sense of connection with what our part is with regards to the greater whole.
When I was young I had an image of god as well as a sense of god. Over time, this image has changed and then sense, or knowing of who god is has deepened. Now there is no picture of god, just a deep knowing and connection to the presence of god.
Like looking for beauty, it is illusionary to look for God outside ourselves.
I love this blog – an innocent exploration of God and who this ‘character’ may be…to arrive full circle at a deeper knowing of all that God is which remains with us, as with you, the whole time.
As I reflect on my life I too can relate to what Dianne describes as a ‘core of light’ within me. No matter what the challenges I was being faced with (mainly health and my wellbeing) there was a deep knowing inside me that I would be ok and it wasn’t because I thought I was different or special. The feeling was subtle yet strong and I felt I could trust it.
Your beautiful feeling and inner knowing of God Dianne shines out here in this very honest sharing of your images of God and journey through life to finally meeting Serge Benhayon hence; “I have felt and seen in another human being the magnitude of love, truth, joy, harmony, stillness, responsibility, care and understanding that are to me defining attributes of God, and felt them grow within me too, from contact with that greatness freely given without expectation or imposition. I have seen the light and love in my core shining in the eyes of another person, and increasing numbers of people, and know without doubt that we are all one, we are all held in the body of God and we all contain the all.”
Dianne I love how you had a feeling for God before you knew a name for that feeling. Images we absorb or that are given can take us away from claiming that inner knowing.
It is a popular quote that “God created man in his own image’. But throughout the years I have had the distinct impression that it is man that has created his own image of God and that has been gauged on the lowest expressions man is capable of: judgmental, vindictive, misogynistic, playing favourites, punishing… you name it! This to me is equivalent to the modern day cyber abuse and press abuse, smearing God’s character by the various self appointed religious assemblies throughout the ages.
I spoke to someone about God yesterday and the fact there seems to be so many Gods and yet we don’t even appreciate the similarities. We will still claim a difference or a ‘better than’ and regardless why don’t we simply appreciate the fact that most of us are seeing God. I believe we all have pieces to the puzzle and no one is greater than the others but yet they are all needed to have the complete picture. Let’s keep bringing understanding to each other when it comes to any issue and listen to what we are saying. The moment we jump to something or discount completely what another has done or said we are already shutting down a part of us. This isn’t a part of what God is, as we all know God is everything and so that very much includes everyone.
So many images, ideals and beliefs about something that to me has begun to feel very normal, even day to day, because it is where I see his magic.
“And there was another sanctuary, like the inner form of the outer Nature. Deep inside me, in the region of my heart, but somehow not confined by the thickness of my physical body, was a ‘place’, more like a ‘presence’.” The fact that you always knew that you had this connection to God within you Dianne, despite all the outer messages that you were being given, and what was going on around you as you were growing up, goes to show how much you trusted in yourself from an early age. To have such strength, in someone so young in such an adverse environment, is very inspiring for anyone who may doubt what they know to be true within themselves, whatever age they are.
It’s amazing the number of different images that can be attached to one word – as endless as our imagination. I love how you questioned the inconsistencies in the images that were presented to you Dianne and most of all honoured the feeling that you had of what God is.
I like how you have felt these qualities in another human being and how for you they are defining attributes of God, “the magnitude of love, truth, joy, harmony, stillness, responsibility, care and understanding that are to me defining attributes of God”.
Dianne, I loved reading this article, I can feel how there is a lot of bitterness about ‘God’, because we have been told from young by certain religions that God is a man with a grey beard that lives in the sky and often this does not make sense and so I can feel how many people have given up on God, I did when I was younger and became very anti-God, since coming to the work of Universal Medicine, I have felt the truth about God and that he is inside every one of us, in nature and not a man that sits on a throne in the sky – the image we are sold that God is outside of us is so wrong and harmful.
Equal to the images of God that many of us are keen to unravel from our minds, is the image of the universe that we have been fed and perhaps accepted as the truth, when in fact I get the sense there is far more to it than we realise or are willing to see.
I remember looking up into the heavens and wondering where God was too. Was ‘He’ looking down on us from his throne making judgements, dispensing punishment or just showering us with love…. when I was a child I had no idea where to find God, or indeed where to look, little did I know that God was not only everywhere, living in every particle of the Universe, but right inside of me too, so nowhere to look except within every cell of my body.
God has become a feeling that is felt from my body, one that confirms a beautiful rhythm and flow in life.
It’s interesting to contemplate how we often keep trying to connect with God despite the obstacles we meet. I remember asking my parents to take me to Sunday School when I was small (they were not church attendees) and although I did not find there what I felt inside I like that I gave it a go. And so it was, I kept looking for God in various ways until I came across Universal Medicine and realised I didn’t have to look very far at all.
As I re-read your blog Dianne I could feel the ever-present and expansive presence of God, just being, just holding, while all of us on earth scratch around like chickens looking for tiny pieces of grain in our search for understanding life and God. The delay is extraordinary.
It appears that our development is the unfoldment back to everything that God is and thus who we are but have contracted away from; in that sense it is a re-discovery of what we know and never can really lose. It is this inner knowing at times just felt as an unrest that doesn´t allow us to stray too far or too long although we have stretched it immensely, but then, the stronger the stretch the stronger the pull back.
My relationship with God is developing all the time, not because he is changing (his unwavering consistency is untarnishable) but because I am simply opening up, letting go and surrendering to the fathomless wisdom and support that he is, in every aspect of life.
Beautiful Matilda to feel the expansion in your developing relationship with God. My relationship with God is changing too as I commit more deeply to myself and all areas of my life.
There can be an arrogance in those who think they have found the answers, a superiority which stops us all being equal and keeps us separate, ‘If all men are equal, why do religious people act as if they are superior to others and say that they’re the only ones who are right?’ This is throughout all society and feels horrible as it stops true brotherhood.
How lost is society when there is no true reflection of God available but only bastardised interpretations that in fact make no sense while God is not an image or character outside but resides in all of us equally.
You can’t study Pure Mathematics for long before you realise there must be a God.”… this is such a revealing statement isn’t it!… and I love the fact that in all the sciences, quantum physics et al, as one goes deeper and deeper one inescapably is left with the feeling that there is a interconnected oneness that reconnects us to contemplation of the Divine.
As long as we walk around distracted from the fact that we are one, and part of a magnificent grandness, we inevitably will create little snippets and pictures of what God might be. But these are just idle fantasies, made up inventions, which like graffiti on a beautiful tree, just obscure what is underneath. For this God is so all encompassing, we are able to depart from reality and come up with illusions, but the true beauty is in each one and every misguided move we make we are all held and eternally guided to return to the truth, to return to unity, to return to the fact that God is in everything, and in you and me.
“I have felt the indescribable stillness that is the foundation of the harmony, order and intelligence in Nature” Coming to know God is coming to know ourselves. For without connection to, feeling and knowing the stillness within us, we can not know it outside and around us.
With all the ‘difficult questions’ unanswered it is of importance to note that you anyway knew that all the religions you investigated as well as the scientific approaches in this regard were ‘equally empty of any real love, equality or divinity’, but how is it that you knew with absoluteness that love, equality and divinity would need to be the prerequisites of any true religious way and obviously knew to recognise the absence of those qualities? We know, we simply know deep inside; that´s why we cannot rest before we find that true religious way as only then the inner unrest is met by what it seeks.
God is our ultimate role model. The all-wise, all-knowing, all-loving being who considers all as equals and who’s every breath is for the all. If we aligned to the love that he is we would all know what is needed on behalf of everyone, we would all treat each other as equals, and we would be breathing as one.
I don’t think I have ever had an image of God that I can pin point. If he is in all things then he cannot have a fixed image. More so he can be felt.
I really like this Rebecca, ‘he cannot have a fixed image’, as soon as I try to ‘fix’ an image of God I lose the sense of him and the opportunities life offers to deepen my relationship with him.
Hello Dianne and someone once told me God is in the detail. With your blog and what is around me at the moment I had always thought God was just one thing and therefore I saw him in a certain way. Then I heard God was everywhere and everything and that to gave me a picture of what it looked like, especially growing up. Now more and more I am open to seeing God in the detail. In other words God is an energy a feeling that can be seen and felt everywhere if you allow it. It’s not that you see the best of every situation but more you actually ‘see’ the situation for what is truly there. Looking at God in the detail has allowed my vision to change and broaden and it’s like I use to look out but now I am ready to allow things to come to me, I receive them. How I am with God has changed immensely and it would seem this will continue.
Speaking of God is not a popular or cool thing in society, and yet now knowing God through my own development, how can I help but speak.
‘… we are all held in the body of God and we all contain the all.’ These words expand my being as I connect with their truth Dianne.
Nature for sure provides a sense of the divine for us, the rhythm, the order, the harmony. To find and know the place of divinity inside of us is gold.
When considering an image for absolutely anything, all I get is the limitation of my mental perception. My image of a flower, my image of a dog, my image of a friend, a partner, a great day…. whatever I come up with is always always lacking and never ever captures the whole of my experience. How can we apply images to God? Yet so many religions claim to have an authority on the ‘right’ image! It is the most ridiculous thing.
Yesterday I watched Serge Benhayon TV as he was explaining the symbolism in relationships. He had a picture of the stars up to illustrate the oneness in the universe. What was really gorgeous about this for me was to feel the emanation of not just the stars in their constellation with each other, but the space between them which was incredibly powerful in its emanation. If there was any image of God in my head then this would surely be it, because accompanying this image is a beholding, still but incredibly powerful essence that is simply too beautiful for words.
We have reduced our world and way of thinking to a very one-dimensional, linear way in order to manipulate life OUR way. And so our knowing and understanding of God has been similarly reduced and confined – which ultimately does not and cannot make sense. As you say Dianne: ‘As I got a bit older and understood more science, another whopping contradiction became apparent. How could God be male when there was only one God? Male without female is like the right shoe without the left: useless and pointless.’ How very convenient in our linear way of manipulating that the true femaleness was left out of our image of God!
It is amazing how we have soo many different images of God, of how we think life should be etc.. yet what if there was soo much more and these images simply set us up to fail as they are either unreachable or far from the splendour life can be – so we either give up or settle for less.
The image of God has to be manipulated, bastardised and reduced for any of the organised religions to maintain their identity, purpose and power base. Otherwise what they ‘own’ or represent is no different from the others..therefore they have no foundation and cease to exist. Analysing those organisations through this prism can reveal a great deal.
For so many people just the word God, causes immediate shut down. It did for me and it is only through listening to Serge Benhayon’s open, scientific, philosophical and utterly unimposing offerings on the subject that I was able to open my mind and body to the conversation….that is the first big hurdle…and one that many can’t cross over. What happens after you cross that hurdle is each of our own journey.
I am fascinated that you had so much interest in God and religion when you were young I had no interest what so ever even though I was forced to go to mass every Sunday. I knew it was a load of rubbish but did not take any interest in exploring deeper, I love your continual enquiry and search for the truth.
To really get aware of all the pictures and ideas we have taken on about God is quite a job, no wonder that we are mostly disconnected from any natural inherent relation we otherwise might have within. Interesting enough is to recognise that most pictures are painting a heavenly creature in separation to or outside of us, like another person we are separated from due to the physical margin of our bodies. It is like trying to capture a divine being that in its beingness clearly must be beyond the physical realm with our five senses. Introducing the world of energy and different realms Universal Medicine and the Ageless Wisdom has expanded our awareness beyond the human limitation, reconnecting us to a greater, energetic awareness we all have that naturally enables us to know ourselves and God as being of the same divinity.
“Basically there was nothing at home to encourage questions about God.”
Dianne I remember doubting myself the whole time….whenever I was in the company of so called Godly people like priests, nuns, etc I felt slightly intimidated. I had come to assume that they were holier than me, yet as I observed them and I felt nothing different in them, I didn’t feel pulled or inspired by them or what they presented. Their words seemed flat, un-lived, regurgitated, yet instead of trusting that what I felt was true, I would instead turn this into doubt about my ability to understand religion, perhaps I just wasn’t clever enough, or perhaps I had to spend hours in church and service before I got to feel what it was all about?
This is a great question- ‘If all men are equal, why do religious people act as if they are superior to others and say that they’re the only ones who are right? What about women?’ This is something that I have pondered on for a lot of my life and is one of the key things that put me off religion for a long time. I no longer have an image of God but I do feel his presence in my life and it requires no church, building, or holy person.
If we were open to recognising the ‘core of light’ in everyone, the separation through different religions would cease to be as it would be so obvious that we are truly all one and the same and from the same source. Our bodies can easily feel the essence of another, but we have shut our bodies down and allowed the mind and all its creations to warp the simple truth.
“How could an absolutely loving God also mete out terrible judgments of vengeance and devastation?” This used to baffle me as a child and I also used to ask awkward questions of the Sunday School teacher. Looking back I see that though I had a genuine desire to know I was challenging her beliefs in a hard mental way which was not very loving. Yet I had a deep knowing of God particularly when I walked in nature or was on my own but I would disconnect from this when I was with people. Now I can also see God in people and I know we are all equal Sons of God – a statement that would have made me squirm as a young woman because of the misinterpretation of these words in religious institutions.
A very amazing blog bringing to light our many images of God showing our separation to him. Through meeting Serge Benhayon and Universal Medicine I have realised I have always known God inside and he was simply waiting for me to build a deeper relationship and communication with him, the Universe and all of us as one.
My first introduction to God was when I was a child and I was forced to go to church. From this experience I decided that God was not for me. What the church was telling me made no sense. When I grew up I began to notice how important this concept of God was to our world. But it all was very confusing still. Thank you Serge Benhayon and Universal Medicine for presenting something that makes sense on the important subject of God.
Growing up I was often told there is no God and when we die we die, end of. I didn’t believe in the image of a grey haired man sitting in the clouds either. Being told there was no God I felt the vastness of space and felt scared and alone so I set off on my search for comfort – anything to fill and distract from the emptiness I felt inside. Anything that gave me reprieve from what felt like the vastness of empty space I grasped with both hands, hooked on the relief of not feeling it. Now I’m reconnecting more and more with space and the love we are held in I have no need to distract myself away from God’s love.
As a child I could not relate to the whole church thing but I had a deep love for Jesus when I was around 8 or 9 years old that somehow was not connected to the teachings of catholicism and even survived my not so pleasant experiences with ‘church people’. Today I know that something in me knew about God, Jesus… independent from my religious education as a child, already then I recognized the discrepancies between what was preached and actually lived by the same so-called religious people and the inkling of God being just around the corner never left me. But to really re-connect the presentations of Universal Medicine were key as they swept out of the way the impositions that have tainted the simplicity of my inner knowing.
It is interesting the way kids are separated at school for religious education. My son chooses a different one each to learn about. He is fascinated by them all and wants to know what other people believe. I support him in doing this as he is getting an education about what people in the world choose to believe. It makes more sense to me to have this approach. If you are of the religion it is most likely you will know about it, but how will you ever learn of the others?
I love this blog Dianne it is the journey of so many people and it is a journey I am so glad I made, and are continuing to make.
Whats amazing here is that even if people don’t “believe” in God they still have an image of what “god” looks like. It shows that the major religions have been very influential around our perception of God and unfortunately this means the reality of God can often get overlooked. When we are faced with divinity if it does not match up to what we think that should look like, how God “should” behave we are blind to it.
My introduction to God at an early age was in a scary, cold, old, creaky wooden church and I remember hearing about this jealous, angry God who punishes sinners and sends them to the fires of hell for eternity. Enough to make me contract at a very young age.
It’s interesting that when we do not find God in ‘Religion’, our reaction is to assume we must be atheist…’As an adult I thought I must be an atheist, convinced there was no God, or at least an agnostic, undecided about the matter.’
‘Religion’ (in terms of the bastardised form we see everywhere today) has a lot to answer for in terms of the relationship with God we hold as a whole.
Your blog has stayed with me this past few days Dianne and I realise that for as long as we hold God as an image, it is impossible to have a real relationship with Him.
Reading through our delicious blog again Dianne, I am reminded of early childhood experiences of the ‘religious realm’. I had a ‘Golden Book’ of ‘Angels’ and I can remember being quite repulsed by it and the tone of it. It had little prayers in it. The pictures of the angels did not resonate with me, and the whole area felt quite ‘tacky’ to me. Now I fully understand why this was the case, because it bore very little resemblance energetically or even visually to that realm as I now know it to be.
I love the fact that it’s about finding the answers for ourselves to everything in life, nay just God. We can ask others, email, google, text or phone, but the truth is we already do know the answers to everything. It’s about asking ourselves, listen to and trusting ourselves.
There is a “core light” within us all, and this is undeniable fact no matter what the circumstances or images of God we might have we can always connect to this light of God deep within our hearts.
“You can’t study Pure Mathematics for long before you realise there must be a God.” I feel the same way about science. There is so much magic, order and symmetry in biology, chemistry and physics.
In my experience, a lot of teaching from religions promotes a separation of humans from God. I was taught via Catholicism that we give our fate over to God, the all encompassing mighty being. If we understood more deeply that we are not separate and the responsibility lies directly with every choice we make the way we live our lives may change – as mine has.
‘If the one and only God wrote the one and only Bible, why are there so many different versions?’Great question Dianne. I’ll have a go at answering that. The many differing versions are a reflection of the many differing individual interpretations of the one truth that we all share – that we are Sons of God, that we are all one, that we are made of the substance of love, and that through true expression we will evolve our race. The differing versions are the differing wayward paths that we, not connected to and living the one unified truth, have created to keep ourselves separated
I love your answer here Lyndy. Yes indeed, “all the ways we have created to keep ourselves separated”, instead of trusting our deep knowing that “we are the Sons of God.”
I can totally relate to your experience as a child past a certain age when nothing that was said about God made any sense at all; like you, I turned away and actually became an atheist as I did not have the experience of meeting an enlightened scientist or someone I could respect, possibly even trust to tell me otherwise.
When Dianne Trussell talks about her journey through life with all the images of God that she has found available, even though my journey has been very different, there is still something very relatable about this journey, which perhaps many more people will feel as well – that deep inner sense that even though this is what we are being told is the truth of God, it may not sit just right with a part of us that may not yet have a voice, but can be felt all the same.
‘A professor of mathematics said to me: “You can’t study Pure Mathematics for long before you realise there must be a God.’ How true. When we study anything in relation to the Earth and its place in the Universe, the sense of wonderment and the touching upon something much more amazing than our everyday minds is clearly evident. Many great scientists, including Einstein, deeply comprehended the presence of God in this extraordinary creation that is the Universe.
Isn’t it odd that religion, the way it is currently practiced in our world, can be and is so devisive, when the true meaning of religion itself is to re-link and re-unite?
Hello Dianne and I have been in this situation as well, “Some of the audience got up the courage to stand and speak on microphones about their images of God. I wanted to do that too. But I had so much to share! Where to begin? Share just one bit? But which bit? I felt it would be miserly to share just one bit, but to share it all would take all day and deprive others of the space to speak. What to do? I chose to write this blog. ” You feel to share but don’t know where to start or how to start and so you end up not sharing at all. It’s great you have supported yourself and written about it and as with many things we should try and have the whole thing set in our minds before we share. At times this is part of the relationship, part of the sharing to just share the first part. It’s great to open ourselves up in this way and not wait for ‘perfection’ but trust we are feeling something and express that feeling. As I’ve said it’s great to share the blog and this may support the next time you have a microphone on offer. Thank you.
When we look at the bad things in the world it is often said that if there were a god then he wouldn’t allow it, but if we look on god as being within us, it is down to our choices and how much we accept that god is a part of who we are. When we accept that god is within us, that universal oneness is within us, it makes acting in disharmony to this is much less likely to be chosen, for we come to know that god is not looking down upon us, but is in everything we experience.
As children I feel we have a sense and knowing of God but through religious studies at school, experiences with religion and the church such as Sunday school, many of us walked away or shunned God because of the way he/she was portrayed, which didn’t fit with what we felt inside.
I was always wondering why people seemed to have to go to church to find God. Now I know that is not the case, God is equally in all of us no matter where we are physically located.
I feel, I turned my back on God and everything religious for it was always presented as something that was outside of me and something I must carry around and it felt like the cross Jesus was dragging to be crucified on. I also don’t have an image of God but feel that he does live within everyone, it is the light that burns brightly within!
Dianne, you say you “still don’t have an ‘image’of God”– that feels like a bonus because it’s the images that get in the way of truly knowing God. You say your knowing of God is “still only the beginning” – I wonder if we ever could know God as a finite thing, for perhaps he is expanding with the universe. I wonder if we ever could know God as something outside ourselves – for perhaps we are in God and God is in us.
What I find interesting is how at such a young age we introduce separation, it can be with anything for example race, colour, religion, grades, class as in working class, upper class or intelligence.
It’s interesting that, despite so many elements conspiring to keep us away from a relationship with God, humanity as a whole – even in the cynical west – still continues to find a way to keep talking about God. This alone tells me there’s ‘something to it’. Deep down, many of us know God as a truth, even if we don’t find that truth reflected in the majority of our religions.
Dianne – You offer a very solid level of proof from your own lived experience from making some changes in your daily life – true Science in action and a return to true connection with God.
“However, as my choices changed upon the basis of experimenting with the new knowledge, for example quitting drugs, changing my diet, claiming a higher level of awareness and responsibility, etc, my ability to directly sense and experience things that are beyond physical and scientific understanding has grown”.
Science and God in the same article – at last we are getting there. Thank you, Dianne.
The Question what is our image of God is very confronting for it exposes all the images we have and the falseness of this and leaves us with pictures and religious beliefs . This all takes us away from our true and very real knowing of God inside us and part of our lives and all we are as our sacredness and essence of love.
Yes, one of the core issues with much religion is how much it demands us to accept statements that are obviously untrue, as to be true.
The opposite of being hard on myself is to understand myself. I’ve never been very good at giving myself permission to make ‘so called’ mistakes. So I might choose (!!) to judge myself, but God never does. I find that quite hard to admit, but he doesn’t. Part of the hardness is that I don’t deserve such a loving father, a being that is there for me when I’m not there for myself. I used to think that this was putting my faith into something imaginary, like a fairy-tale. How wrong have I been? Without judgement;-). And in doing so, learning to understand myself better in order to learn and grow (evolve).
A great read Dianne. I can relate to the questions you had about religion growing up as I saw many contradictions in how people who were religious lived, and couldn’t see anything loving in some of the behaviours. And the Adam and Eve thing. I didn’t ever ask, but used to think, how could we have come from Adam and Eve? How could our population be such as it is from 2 people? And the big one…the offspring of Adam and Eve would have had incestuous relationships. So it didn’t ever make any sense to me or feel true and I shunned God and religion until recent years.
Not only did and do I have images of god and religion, but all aspects of life. It has been so important and revealing for me to explore all the images I have, look at the foundations of these images and debase the falsity of trying to make the world fit into these images rather than accepting the world as it is.
It is the images of God that have kept us away from finding God, but if we connect to the God within then we will truly know God. My image of God when I was a child was typically an old man in a white gown, with a long white beard, no wonder I was confused. It wasn’t until I found Universal Medicine that I came to understand that God is a Soul, just like us, only bigger, grander and far more magnificent than we can ever imagine. Makes is all so clear and takes the mystery out of what God IS or looks like doesn’t it.
I love the way you were not content with accepting any version of God from others Dianne, but continued to pursue your investigations and explore all possibilities for yourself. and question everything, while this deep knowing inside you was growing all the time. This is truly living from our innermost heart where God is!
Just recently I have been experiencing this feeling, where I realise the beauty of the person I am with and that they are an equal part of something universal and grand. Then I get an incredible warmth that flows in my body, across my chest like I joined the dots up of life. Your words here Dianne are helping me see, that this place of connection, when I feel God in me, is quite simply my natural way to be.
“God was sometimes depicted as a huge, terrifying, judgmental hand coming down from the clouds.” What a way to keep us in line, and it has.
We try and put an image to God so we can control the way we live human life, but if we truly were in connection with God, we would live in harmony, order, and this would be natural and not hard at all.
There are no images in truth and no truth in images.
When I thought about God or religion when I was younger I had a similar experience to you Dianne, in that it was dull and that exploring outside in nature or being creative somewhere was far more appealing. RE (religious education) was no better than my experience of going to church (I can only remember going once or twice maybe) as it was dull and boring, so I’d created an interpretation that God was incredibly serious and things done religiously were serious. What’s so beautiful is that my experience now is quite the opposite, God is playful and has the most awesome sense of humour.
“I have felt and seen in another human being the magnitude of love, truth, joy, harmony, stillness, responsibility, care and understanding that are to me defining attributes of God, and felt them grow within me too, from contact with that greatness freely given without expectation or imposition.” And hence the image of God is reflected back to us through the qualities we feel and see in each other. When we met someone who has re-established a strong and undying connection with God within they re-ignite in us a strong knowing of our own connection and then the choice to nurture this internal alignment is laid before us.
‘What is your image of God?” – Love.
It’s interesting to feel how I still think or see God as something outside myself. What does this create? An image of striving, always to be doing something ‘better’ – to achieve. Like the Catholic Church consciousness. Instead of feeling the fact I reflect God, God that’s inside of me.
Beautiful Dianne thank you for your very real sharing and journey with God. The moment I met Serge Benhayon and listened to him my heart and my whole body opened up and I knew I was with God inside me and where I was from. This made sense of everything and all that I was presented with before was simply a belief and untrue, and that I was meant to believe in. Now is the truth, love, harmony and a joy that resonated inside my body and allowed the real magic to be felt and the knowing of the reality and truth of energy, God and us all in the oneness of love we simply are.
It’s so great that you have shared this, Dianne. I can relate very much to the confusion and mixed messages about God growing up, since I felt within me that being one with God was the most natural thing in the world but could not see evidence of the joy of that in everyday life around me.
It has always puzzled me that different religions have such varying views of God, all claiming to know and pronounce their truth. Yet there can only be ‘one unified truth’ that is sound energetically. Living in joy, stillness, harmony, love and truth. How many religions have this as their core way of living?
“You can’t study Pure Mathematics for long before you realise there must be a God.” Such a great quote as it is true, if I see the precision and order that is in the universe, mathematics, science, nature and our bodies I cannot deny there is a God.
Yes so true, it’s the same for me as well – “However, as my choices changed upon the basis of experimenting with the new knowledge, for example quitting drugs, changing my diet, claiming a higher level of awareness and responsibility, etc, my ability to directly sense and experience things that are beyond physical and scientific understanding has grown.
My inner voice of wisdom has grown. My sense of God has grown, and is still growing.”
I found that through the work with Serge Benhayon and Universal Medicine as well as other things before I came into contact with Serge, just by clearing the need to smoke, to do drugs, to do alcohol, my life did a complete turnaround inside as well as outside. On the inside I felt more and more able to find a place of stillness that I could connect to when life became difficult or chaotic at times, and on the outside I started to meet others that were on a similar journey, so the sharing of our experiences and the mutual support and connection started to grow and grow. I also had experiences for which I could not find a ‘scientific’ explanation but which only strengthened my sense of God which is still continuing to deepen.
What an awesome blog Dianne, I am so glad you chose to write in such detail as many aspects I can relate to as well. My journey has not been as thorough as yours, however having reached a place of light and harmony and stillness within myself too, I am in no doubt that this is the place we all have within, and through connecting to it we are all becoming part of the whole equally.
Every kid knows that there is more to life than the temporal plane – just listen to some of their questions. I was the same. Questions that came and went over 35 years….until I met Serge Benhayon (I still have zillions of questions – but now have someone who can answer them!!)
The word ‘God’ has been so misused and abused. . . talk about getting bad press . . . nobody has had worst press here on earth than God himself!
Over and over and over and over again, the teachings of Universal Medicine bring everything back to one unified truth. Science, religion, philosophy, self care, responsibility, purpose, love, transparency, commitment, vitality, well-being….the list goes on and on…but no matter which of these specific lenses you are viewing the world through the fact remains that it all comes back to the one unified truth. Whilst I may not have the credentials that you have Dianne and I certainly don’t have the same glorious expression of science, I am, nonetheless, definitely a scientist and so the above (and your blog) appeal to me very directly and are the foundations on which my daily steps are taken.
Whether we believe in God or not, most of us still have some image of God. Some people live for God, others die for God. Why is it that we can spend such a long time debating, fighting, arguing and even having wars over who and what God is? If all that energy was spent getting to truly know ourselves first of all, from a place of love, there would be no need to search for God as we would discover that he is there within and has been all along.
The images we have of God – before Universal Medicine and the presentations by Serge Benhayon nothing of what was said or written about God did make any sense and neither did the ways so called religious people behaved. All I knew was that if God really existed, God better be stupendous and above all the man-made paltry attempts to own, define and explain him. And The Ageless Wisdom has certainly delivered all that and much more.
Another logic I have been introduced to via Universal Medicine (touched upon here) and that seems irrefutable to me is there can only be ‘one unified truth’. This applies to God as much as anything else. We can all have our different versions of God, life, events and so on but at the end of the day, there can only be one true truth. Either something is true or it is not. Universal Medicine is about understanding the root cause or energy at the heart of everything… the truth.
‘“You can’t study Pure Mathematics for long before you realise there must be a God.”’ Although I have never studied Pure Mathematics and have only the vaguest notion of what it entails I feel the truth of this statement and agree. The same majesty and order that is apparent in nature is apparent there. It feels impossible to deny that a divine intelligence, an organising impulse, is at the core of these marvels.
Dianne I can relate so much to your growing up and not understanding or seeing god as real as depicted by religion /scripture at school and how it was presented and played out. To me it didn’t feel right and there were also so many questions that could not be answered, but I could always find the stillness and beauty of god in nature or in the kind, gentle, non judgmental heart of another. My journey of travels led me to many exotic parts of the world for further observations of other religions in other cultures, only to find more confusion and separation of humanity by religion. My understanding or coming back to me and the understanding of god and the fact that we are all true sons of god, a part of god in form through the Ageless Wisdom as presented this time round by Serge Benhayon now makes so much sense. The coming together of science, philosophy, mathematics, nature, matter and non matter the etheric all working together is the magic of god. I have enjoyed your science presentations that explain the magic of god in nature from an atom or particle to a cell in the body all working within a divine or order in cycles. It’s a shame mankind likes to bastardise or claim wrong owner ship of god and religion for many reasons like control and manipulation, personal gain or power as it turns many gentle souls off the word god. It’s really so, so simple, we have the choice to choose to align to the love of god as the energy is there to support us, if we choose to come in from the heady cold or all that is not- love, supporting or harming of our selves and others.
Wow, what a read, so many similarities for me and yet polar opposite as well. The key point for me is where the reflections of God are and how they wait patiently for us to connect with them again. The reflections trigger a memory of that connection inside, the stillness, the harmony, the love, the order, truth and honesty, the equalness. It is a feeling, and it is throughout nature and as I rebuild that connection in me, I now see it in people around me. It is in every single one of us.
God is a subject that is much debated, which is shown in all its ways in this beautiful article, but in the end it all comes down to our own sense, that what is not tainted by our education or what we see in the world. But coming from our inner connection to the whole, we all know there is a source of light and love that supports us, it is only for us to let go of the mental ideals and just feel this light that is within us.
I Love this blog – such an honest account of an experience with God and Religion that we can easily relate to.
It is almost humorous the many conflicting ideas of God that abound within society and the practices to bring ourselves (supposedly) closer to God…when all the while, God is with us and we are all within the body of God, even those who deny God’s existence..
I always knew there was a God, and like you, I knew that I would not find it in any religion. It amuses me and pleases me that today I can say I am part of a religion, one without temples, dogma or rules but one where you are connected and in sermon with nature and people as part of the livingness when connected to your soul. It is most certainly the way I feel God to be, in and around all of us, expanding out to the whole of the Universe.
I love your expression Vanessa, it is straight to the point and just feels awesome to have it wirtten like this, as I feel exactly the same.
I remember when I was at school a classmate was chastised for drawing his own image of God, as a giant bubble. I felt at the time that this would have been quite hurtful for the child because as far as I am concerned, we all live in a bubble of energy, so who knows maybe the little child was nearer the truth than we think, as it is my understanding God that holds us in his atma (body) which kinda looks like a bubble to me 😉
I was at a gathering a while ago and what was interesting was that out of all the people there, I was the only person that hadn’t grown up with religion and yet there was no one who was more certain of God than me.
The fact that many religions can’t answer the difficult questions would suggest the truth of the teachings is not being connected to. It is this disconnection that has put so many people off religion when in truth it is the most natural relationship in the world.
I once broke a door knocking Mormon. For years I would politely send them on their way from my door. But, there was one time I invited two of them in for a chat for I realized I really knew nothing about them or their religion, this was pre-Google and a trip to the library was not going to happen so I felt to ask them some questions. After a month of Thursday evenings asking them questions that made no sense to me, a bit of doubt crept into them and one week only one of the two came by and when asked where the other was I was told he was sent back home for doubting his beliefs. I pretty much followed your path Dianne of trying to understand God and all of the various different flavors of the same thing and in the end left it to, everyone has a choice. I have also taken decades to find what God is, where it has always lived, within us all.
Some people have a very clear sense of God and for others it is more fragile or non-existent. This shows how effective the education of our children has been in allowing that separation to occur. If God is a fact of life, we should all be aware, not in any doubt, accepting the truth of who we really are. The existence of any kind of doubt shows the evil of the bastardisation and the manipulation of our young that takes place world-wide.
My picture of God is pretty solid as if this is the truth. A man with a beard – a character in the human form. There’s little movement possible yet, It feels as if I don’t want to let go of to this picture, rather than exploring if this feels true or not. I’ve got a sense that this conveniently prevents me from going deeper. There’s a lot coming up that I did not want to feel before. So holding on to the image of God is actually another vice to distract myself from the deeper connection I could otherwise feel. And this is for every image we hold on to.
The more I open my eyes to seeing the magic of God the more there is to be seen.
We all do know God yet we allow all the images and outer influences mostly through the various religions to tell us who and what God is. When I truly stop and feel from within then I can feel God everywhere, nature being the medium through which he offers us the most reflection. Since I have got to know me more I am making my re-acquaintance with God and the stupendous beauty and love that is there for us all.
‘It felt weird being split apart from our friends and classmates, and expected to feel some kind of special kinship with strangers who happened to be born as whatever religion their parents followed’. This is a beautiful example of the separation organised religion promotes!
Absolutely gorgeous Dianne, I am sure so many people can relate to your journey! I particularly love this line “A professor of mathematics said to me: “You can’t study Pure Mathematics for long before you realise there must be a God.” that is brilliant and confirms what I feel to know the order of the universe, the light the love is the energy of God.
I love your questions Dianne. I too had so many that at various points in my life I gave up on God. But God never gave up,on me and I kept coming back, exploring and enquiring. Coming to Universal Medicine presentations has brought me back to knowing God and the Hierarchy. We live in Gods body, space, which is all around us and Nature, with its peace and harmony, epitomises this for me.
When I have been asked this question in the past I have not really known how to answer it. God has been present in my life, although not in a way that I could really make sense of for myself as there were so many other factors influencing me that coloured my own understanding. But since attending workshops with Serge Benhayon and Universal Medicine I have come to understand God in a way that makes complete sense. I am learning to build a relationship with God that is very real and practical, because that relationship begins with my connection to myself and then how I express that with others. It takes away all the ideals and beliefs we have around God and keeps it very simple.
Thank you, Dianne. I loved following this exploration over many decades, and the fact that the more you connected to yourself and the core of light inside you, the more you got to feel God in and all around you.
“If the one and only God wrote the one and only Bible, why are there so many different versions?” I love your questions Dianne, they shine a very bright light on all the discrepancies and gaping holes in man’s re-interpretation of God’s immense love. You expose all the manipulations that we invent in order to control people and avoid aligning to what is innate within us. Keep on questioning and keep on sharing, your perceptions are very much needed in our societies today.
Hear hear – so true Rowena and Dianne, yes I love all your questions too and they are so important, as they may help many others to see and feel that man’s interpretation of God will never do. So yes, keep asking and writing – it’s like Rowena said: “…your perceptions are very much needed in our societies today.”
The more I accept and use God as part of my daily expression and relationship with the world, then the less of an ‘image’ I have of what God is.
I could never understand how clouds could hold Heaven, God and all the Angels – surely that was a lot of weight and clouds look so fluffy that they couldn’t possibly hold everyone up there. The innocence of a child trying to make sense of something that is non-sensical – it feels very precious remembering that consideration.
Beautiful read, “we are all held in the body of God and we all contain the all”, this is just so awesome. God is within us and around us, just surrendering to this knowing and connecting to the stillness we can feel this truth within our body.
Dianne, I love to read your sharing, it reminds me of my own journey. I had a strong connection to God as a child through observing the beauty in nature and in the detail in nature. I aksed myself who has ” built ” the human being and why is it designed like this and not differently?
Christianity brought me away from my innerknowing for some years, but today I am able to reconnect to this. The more I get aware that every thing is energy the more I have the feeling to be connected to God and to know God.
I have found again and agin that Truth is simple, it makes sense in my inner most and it is illusion (or not-truth) that is complicated or does not make sense to my whole being.
I also have realized that if I am contorting my own innate common sense to go along with something I ‘believe’ has authority than I am giving up on me and in doing so, on truth it’self.
‘If all men are equal, why do religious people act as if they are superior to others and say that they’re the only ones who are right? What about women? If God is love, we are his children, and we are to treat all people as equals, why aren’t we?’ I asked the very same questions Dianne – to the ministers of religion in our scripture classes at school and to many others. This suggests that we all in fact know that true equality among people is a first priority in our relationship with each other and with God. This true knowing and feeling becomes overlaid with various dogmas, with competitiveness, with feeling less or more, in fact with a whole barrage of falseness, not only from religions but from the many avenues of life. Yet we all know that superiority and inferiority, that right and wrong, do not work and are not true. It is this connection to our true inner ‘conscience’ that we must all get back to and not go with the herd thought.
‘What is your image of God’ is quite a stopper in the sense that we have been fed images from an early age that can conflict with the innate feeling and knowing that there is more to life. And here-in lies the disjoint where this knowing may not fit the images, beliefs many ideologies that surround the word ‘God’.
‘I have seen the light and love in my core shining in the eyes of another person, and increasing numbers of people, and know without doubt that we are all one, we are all held in the body of God and we all contain the all.’ I have too. It’s confirming to the core of my being and I too can now talk about God without flinching, cringing or attaching a picture to the word.
It’s quite an impossible thing to have an image of God. We know him, we feel him, but we do not see him. If our feelings are more powerful than our sight, then it is not necessary to have an image, but simply enough to feel and to know.
Your experience of religion and god as a young child at school is something I relate to – looking back at the fact that the religious beliefs were passed down from generation to generation from very young – there is nothing bad in this, but for me as a child it went against the feeling I had about who and what God was – more a connection I felt than a rule book or ideal and belief.
I chuckled reading your realisation that you could not possibly share ALL the images you have had of God in an instance: “Some of the audience got up the courage to stand and speak on microphones about their images of God. I wanted to do that too. But I had so much to share! Where to begin? Share just one bit? But which bit? I felt it would be miserly to share just one bit, but to share it all would take all day and deprive others of the space to speak.” It is crazy that we have created so many images that keep taking us further and further away from an aspect of our life, which is actually and fundamentally an inner experience, awareness and relationship.
Not only do we have fixed images of who we perceive God to be but we have fixed ideas about who we believe is closer to God and who we believe is barred from his presence. Many would see the Pope for example as closer to God than a murderer but the truth is we are all made equally from a living intelligence that some have chosen to call God, therefore we are all as equally close to God, as we are all made out of the substance of God. However the way that we choose to live our lives does effect how much we actually get to realize this fact as a living truth.
My family is a mixed bag of religions including, Judaism, Catholicism, Dutch reform, Freemason and Atheism. This combination has led to many great debates and a few years of not speaking and ostracism and a lot of hurt and broken hearts. Witnessing this conflict fortunately led me to really questions what I believed in and what I wanted to share with my family. The Way of The Livingness presented so much that I already knew to be true, the only thing it asked of me was to be more myself.
Until reading your post I’d forgotten how peculiar the image of the hand and finger pointing from the clouds was to me as a child. It had such a threatening feel and was and still is such a far cry from any sense I have ever had of God.
‘I still don’t have an ‘image’ of God, but I feel I now know something of God, for real.’ I absolutely could not agree more. The knowing I felt as a child has deepened and I have a far greater sense of God, a sense that was always there that I have now begun to trust.
I feel because there is not many to relate to, to confirm the non-physical, you go seeking. Where I was wrong, like many others, was that the seeking was outside of me, to belong to who and what was around me. The more you do this the more the hurt accumulates clouding and protecting your real feeling. You become stuck in the world until that day comes when you go enough is enough and you ask for the truth. The Internet is where people go ‘searching’ in this era AND right here they will find it.
How spot on was your childhood observation that it was weird being separated from your friends based on the religion we are born into. This is the one of the biggest faults of religions, that it herds us into groups and excludes everyone else. This is not how religion, or our relationship with God is supposed to work! Everyone is included and everyone is equal.
It is quite challenging to examine our image of God. As I contemplated this, I realised how much I had taken on various ideas I had heard throughout my life. I also realised there was a fairytale like quality to my image, an idealized version of who I wanted God to be. It gradually dawned on me that this is very different to who God is in reality and I was missing out on what God truly offers humanity.
Dianne your blog got me considering how, depending on what culture, religion or faith you belong to, you would have a different version and therefore image of God. But if God is God then this would be universal, therefore how can there be many images of God? It shows how so many of us fight for our “image” without considering would that be universal or not?
I love that the light within us is inviolable. And that I just learnt a word – inviolable. You always teach me so much Dianne Trussell. I also love that you are in this world.
I can really relate to feeling God as an energy that surrounds us and lives equally inside all of us and holds us until we reconnect and remember and return to who we truly are through Nature, through science and through the reflection in each others eyes.
Those poor ‘door knockers’ 🙂 The ideology that they aligned to and have founded their existence upon must have been so challenged by your innocent questions. But your questions begged for an all inclusive universal truth and they only had their particular ideology on offer.
To know God we are to accept that everything is energy. And that there are in fact 2 types of energy we choose to align to. One is (!!) is the energy of God, holding us all equally and by not choosing to align to this energy, another energy aligns to us. So much so that we end up being identified with the alignment to the energy we’re not. The absolute beauty of God is that he keeps on being joyous, meeting us in our essence until we choose to let go of the fight ourselves and start to work just like him to support others. The support first and foremost being an energetic quality in which all we meet – directly and indirectly – are held to start making different choices. How gorgeous is life set up? The image I’ve had from God was that I couldn’t do it here on earth, that only from somewhere else I could live my love. Today I understood that this in not true. That I held this belief to not feel the sadness I feel towards the desperateness and sadness that I feel in the world.
I too had an image of God being ” a loving, grey-bearded, kingly and fatherly figure on a throne up in the sky ” But now like you Dianne my understanding and feeling of God is changing and developing. Far from being somewhere out there, God is a part of me on the inside in the connection of stillness and harmony. I too see his imprints all through nature as a constant reminder of what I feel on the inside…love, truth, order, symmetry, magic, wonder, grandness, expansion, joy, cycles, subtlety, naturalness, gentleness and non-imposing-ness, an allowing and being-ness! (I could go on…!)
There is such strength in this journey you have taken. A path and a knowing that you have forged by yourself. I am inspired by how you have never taken any else’s answers or suggestions as absolute fact – always looking to challenge, question and feel for yourself. I can see that this is the path to true wisdom.
Wow Dianne your neighbourhood growing up was quite some place to really question the existence of God. Yet that knowing inside held with you as a foundation whilst you grew – Very strong and undeniable.
I too Dianne see the love and light in me shining in the eyes of others. It’s pure wonder when this is reflected back, and from that feel so incredibly held in the magic of life and the body of God.
I love this image of the young Dianne Trussell, standing at her front door asking absolute and to the point questions of the adults who stood before her. The point that is so clear however, is that in no way is Dianne criticising the people who came knocking, but rather she is bringing to account the energy that has created the thoughts that have generated an entire religious belief system that dominates so many people’s lives. With love and consideration she questions to bring down that which separates people from eachother.
Dianne, I loved reading this, thank you. What God is, is forever growing in me too, no pictures either rather a deep sense and knowing that the stillness within, my breath, everything I choose can be divine and I can connect to this at any time I choose to. Surrender to it and am forever held in it.
It is amazing how many images we carry around with us about how things should or could look. If we are waiting for the image of God that we may have we will be waiting a long time. I know for me the image I had of God sitting on a cloud and coming down to us – is very far fetched yet common and also is giving my power away as essentially it meant I was waiting to be saved. Yet we are here to learn and so can only ‘save’ ourselves.
Reconnecting to our true self and we realise we have always had that connection to God, it is only that it has been obscured in the fog of the world and its craziness, but God remains constant, always beholding, waiting for us to reawaken out of the fog once more.
The less images with which we hold our lives to ransom, the more we will know God.
“How could an absolutely loving God also mete out terrible judgments of vengeance and devastation?” Answer, he doesn’t, we do. God is just made of love nothing but love, there is not one speck of emotion, judgment or vengeance within him. We separated from God’s immensely loving energy and in doing so we have created the judgment, vengeance and devastation, therefore we are responsible for all that has happened to humanity, not God, and it’s up to us to restore true brotherhood again.
You are truly a touch of God on earth, Dianne.
I was brought up as a Catholic, so weekly attendance at church and fish on Fridays was a normal, everyday aspect of life, I never questioned it. I enjoyed the ceremony, the incense, the singing, but I never really got the holy communion bit. The other day I found some photographs of me at my First Holy Communion. In one I am obviously enjoying looking pretty in a lovely white dress with white gloves, and in another I am in church receiving the communion and putting my tongue out at the priest to receive the little white wafer. It is symbolic of the body of Christ, and the priest gets to drink red wine representing the blood of Christ (!), but it doesn’t make sense. How can we embody Christ in that way? For me it was always meaningless and now I am learning a different way – through The Way of The Livingness – that makes much more sense.
Could it be that our images of God are the same as our images of other expected outcomes we have in life? Expectations of what something should be when we allow our mind to make pictures of end products never seems fully to emulate reality. God is like the sun, and it will always just be there, and you can always feel its warmth, who needs images!
I felt the presence of God in the eyes of a small baby: fully present in herself, absolute joy, open and an unconditional acceptance of all of me. This same quality available to all of us when we choose to connect to it.
Your closing sentence is a humdinger of a beauty, Dianne – leaving me open to the totally expansive opportunities that abound – learning and growing endlessly please.
It’s interesting that at school that all the students of the various religions were split up and taught religion separately. This just doesn’t make sense. If God is love, then in true love there is an equalness for all, it is brotherhood, togetherness, not separation. These images, which I too have had many in the past, just don’t match up with what I now know for myself to be true of God. God is space, he is stillness, love, harmony and joy. And these qualities are there for each of us to embrace if we choose to. Then we know that God isn’t outside of ourselves, but he is right there easily accessible and within.
Thank you for sharing this Dianne. I too no longer have an image of god, but I have a strong knowing of what or who god is. I have a relationship with god through this knowing and connection.
Knowing God is knowing who we are within and how our own connection connects with the beauty, stillness and rhythm of life. God connects us all from within.
Even in all my wanderings, as lost as they were at times, there has always been a sense of a greater connection to the Universe and God. I have taken many substances to dull my awareness and have used many activities to distract myself away from what truly matters, however even amongst all of this I have received countless messages that can only be described as communication from God, other dimensions. Over and over again I am being reminded that our connection to God is always there. The more I live in a way that is in harmony with my body, others, nature and the universe the more I am shown. Nothing is greater or more magnificent than this.
Its interesting how the word ‘God’ evokes all kinds of reactions and responses, when in in truth it is the same as ‘love’. Your blog shows just how much we are bombarded from the time we are born by complexity and different ideas about ‘God’, and yet the very existence and feeling of it is right under our nose!
I never actually stopped to consider – “How could God be male when there was only one God?” That just confirms in me I did not think about God, I know there always was and there was more than the physical body. I was aware of the spiritual too. I was however not aware of the difference between the spirit and the soul which was the defining answer/awareness to change my life of contraction to a life of richness in all areas including my body. Thank you Serge Benhayon and Universal Medicine.
God – a word to describe many different ideas and images – but when we have so many expectations of what God could be, do we close ourselves off from seeing what he truly is.
I grew up in a home where the walls were littered with pictures and statues of religious figures and realise that I was energetically hammered by the stories around these. These stories were reinforced though Sunday mass, a catholic school education, pressure to go to confessions to confess my sins, basically married off to a false ‘God’ which fostered being good, nice, polite and seeing myself as the sinner that could never do enough to payback Jesus for saving the world. Somewhere in all this I knew that I was beautiful, loving, and full of Grace and as my search started for something outside of myself to meet this deeply held knowing, I eventually found ‘The Way of The Livingness’ which confirmed the truth that I knew deep within. Thank you Dianne for exposing many of the choices we have made and for celebrating the re-connection to the vast wisdom and precious essence that is you.
Separating kids out into different classes to take religion, points clearly to indoctrination of dogma – otherwise there would a true religious-philosophical-scientific inquiry and discussion with all the children present.
When I was 8 years old I was asked to draw a picture of God. Everyone drew the archetypical old man with a white beard. I drew a simple circle around the planet with two hands, one of which was holding the earth. I may have added a smile and two eyes, but that detail was not as important as the symbology of God holding the earth and en-housing it within him. That was always how I saw God symbolically from a young age. My R.E. teacher was so blown away she asked to keep the drawing.
Esoterically speaking, that image I had is very similar to the image of God as communicated by Serge Benhayon – in the sense that God is holding the creation of the Universe in his beholding light, or atma as it is referred to (which in this case was the symbol of the circle) whilst at the same time holding the earth with his hands, still contained within the circle, yet not part of it. In other words supporting a realm of life that is choosing to live in separation to the divine impulse of God and the Universe, but is still supported to do so under the law of free will by the very same source of life that it refuses to align to – until such time that it does.
In other words, to put it more simply – God holds us in his unending love, knowing that we are in essence from the same love, even though we do not live that way a lot of the time, nor according to its pulse, knowing that eventually by Divine Will we will reawaken to that which we already are.
I love what and how you write Adam,
‘Religious missionaries frequently came and knocked on doors – mostly Jehovah’s Witnesses, plus a few Mormons. I asked them difficult questions’. Something very similar would happen at our place! The Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons would knock on the door and Dad would invite them in for scones and tea and a hilarious discussion would ensue with Dad questioning the ‘literal’ truth of the dimensions of Noah’s Ark etc. In this way, since I had refused to go a third time to dry and tedious Sunday School, I learnt about many of the Biblical stories. I certainly felt that ‘religious’ people seemed a little quirky. Now with the advent of The Way of The Livingness, religion makes absolute sense to me and I have found that truly religious people can be wise and loving.
Great history of concepts of God Dianne, that many will relate to in one way or another. For me a lot of energy was put into denying God in my family and the clear memory was that I was puzzled how something that did not exist was being given so much attention.
It wasn’t until I came across Serge Benhayon and Universal Medicine that I began to truly understand God. Up until that point I had struggled to make sense of who he/she was, and how he/she fitted into my life, the World and the Universe. But what I have come to realise is that I have always known God, I just hadn’t understood how I knew. Thankyou for this brilliant blog Dianne and bringing all the threads together for us all to see that God is with all of us, all of the time.
There is such a contrast between my early ‘religious’ experiences, and what I now know to be God and my connection with Him also, very similar to the way you describe it for yourself Dianne. Growing up in an atheist household it was acceptable by my parents to shirk religion and despite many direct experiences with aspects of it through schooling, nothing ever resonated. The overriding feeling I was left with was that it was empty, devoid of anything warm or embracing, only eliciting fear and as sense of being insignificant and unworthy of such a ‘grand and almighty being’. Such a far cry from the almost indescribable depth of love, beauty, warmth, holding, embrace, acceptance, support, knowing and absolute understanding that is my own inner experience of God today. It makes perfect sense to me now why this was not possible through any of the so-called religious paths I stumbled upon in my earlier years, as not one looked within to reconnect with something inherently present, but always looked outwardly first, from the diminished lesser human being who must make himself or herself worthy in the eyes of this great almighty being somewhere ‘in the heavens’. In the heavens of course was always up – in the sky, and never ‘in’, which is where we actually find Him.
Growing up I succumbed the bearded man image of God, not because I felt it was true necessarily but because it was all that was presented to me as I grew up. Never once was it suggested that we all have the equal spark of God within us and that God is Light, and Love, as I now know him to be.
This ‘core light within’ resonates deeply with me Dianne – many a time throughout life from my early teenage years there was this sense of there always being something ‘more’ that consistently sustained me through my super sensitivity and some very challenging periods of feeling that life felt too difficult to cope with whilst in separation from myself, life and others.
“Deep inside me, in the region of my heart, but somehow not confined by the thickness of my physical body, was a ‘place’, more like a ‘presence’. There was a core of light: an inviolable, unwavering, dependable, powerful, shining flame that could be trusted to always be there and not be tainted, destroyed, weakened or taken away no matter how dark and ugly things got around me, no matter how hurt or angry or afraid I felt; no matter how much I would have despaired of life, I had that core of light inside me”.
I too found as a child all these images of God prescribed by the world perplexing. For a long time I just did not want to know much about something that plainly did not make sense. Then something piqued my interest and I started listening and trying to understand, and I was horrified with the image of a being who was demanding, judgmental, angry, vindictive, a God who sat there counting your faults and if he was displeased banished you into hell, not just for a quick lesson, but for eternity. Frankly I found such a character kind of scary! Thank goodness for Universal Medicine that has reintroduced sense to it all.
Being more interested in the thinness of the prayer book’s pages than what was happening in the service is perfect reflection of the irrelevancy of the church service and it supposed purpose to connect with God – ‘out of the babes’ in this case ‘hands’.
With so much evidence of God all around us, the greatest proof is what we feel inside.
I love that you share that we can’t study maths, observe nature or see the shining light in someone’s eyes and then truthfully deny that God exists.
What is it about us people that we’ve accepted such a heaviness around God. Where he’s absolute joy, laughter, togetherness, union, etc. It is quite obvious to reject a God that is associated with so many rules, do’s and don’t’s, discrimination, hell and heaven, wrong and right. But what if God isn’t a character that is so cruel. That he’s actually so incredibly loving that he allows us to make our own choices. For as long as it takes to choose to align to him and experience more and more of the wonders of the Universe and all that God contains.
Wonderful Dianne – mind breaking. We are, for one of the first times in this moment of times, truly educated by a blog. An education of true religion and how it applies to all. And how this religion thing has been made about images, ideals and rules – whilst in truth it is not about that.
Reading this has made me realise that for a long time I had hoped there was a God and wanted to believe in one but there was an anxiety about who to discuss this with, as I was fairly certain there was a God. But in my adult life there has been a surrendering to be able to feel that there truly is God in everything. To allow myself to feel, and read, and to connect to that.
‘I have felt and seen in another human being the magnitude of love, truth, joy, harmony, stillness, responsibility, care and understanding that are to me defining attributes of God, and felt them grow within me too, from contact with that greatness freely given without expectation or imposition.’ – I love the way you have expressed this Dianne, I too have felt the undeniable fact that God can be seen in another human being. God is equally in all of us, we just do not always allow it to shine through.
Fantastic blog Diane. ‘I have seen the light and love in my core shining in the eyes of another person, and increasing numbers of people, and know without doubt that we are all one, we are all held in the body of God and we all contain the all.’ Beautiful. From all the conflict of all the religions this brings it back to the simplicity it is, and within us all. Thank you.
“But I have felt the indescribable stillness that is the foundation of the harmony, order and intelligence in Nature.” I was very confused by all the teachings around God too, but one place where I was deeply connected was out in nature as a child too. There was such a joy when I was out in it because I was feeling the stillness and harmony of nature, but probably also because this reflected the harmony and stillness of the universe and my connection to the bigger picture too. Breaking down our images of God and taking it back to the simplicity of this connection is gold.
Dianne, I love how you approached your enquiry about God. To know God we have to be open to people but also open to knowing how the universe works.
So where does this leave organised religions? When we stand back and look at the religious beliefs and customs of our own local community, we can see how they separate people because of their differences. If there is only one God and we are all the same, what interfered with that fact and why?
Images of any-thing prevent us from feeling the actual truth of any one thing.
Have you ever seen one of those pictures of Jesus where the eyes follow you when you walk by? It’s an illusion but still impressive, but scary the first time you experience it. Was this just another way to control us with religion that God was always watching you? The old expression, ‘putting the fear of God in you’ to shock someone into a contrite behaviour, always felt to be a strange idiom as to why would God have to scare you into believing in him. Where is love in all of this? There is none! God will never be something outside of us because he/she is always inside of all of us all of the time. So what does God look like? We currently have just over 7.3 billion images to pick from.
Thank you Dianne ( I ‘mistakenly’ typed thank you God the first time which says a lot in how I was feeling by the end of this read!) an open and honest read that leaves much to ponder on and consider what is my image of God? The questions you asked as a child are valuable and need to be asked to expose and break down the many pictures we all hold.
Your blog Dianne describes to me what true religion is all about, allowing people to make their own choices about what God feels like for them, rather than the various religions that have dictated and created images of who and what God is, primarily for their own benefit.
“If all men are equal, why do religious people act as if they are superior to others and say that they’re the only ones who are right?” This is a HUGE question Dianne. Where does this arrogance come from? When we are truly connected to the energy of God within, a rich and powerful stillness, equality is not something we even need to waste time thinking about, it’s a living truth felt in all of us, an absolute known.
Very insightful Dianne, and a beautiful and deep exploration of the subject of religion.
Reading this article for the first time today has simply invited me to read it again and probably again and again… it is a beautiful piece of writing that opens up all the questions I have endlessly asked myself and the fact that at some point we have all felt and know the unwavering, inviolable spark of light we all have inside us. Thank you.
Dianne, this blog is a powerful statement of the truth and your love for science you have been connected to as a child. What I can see in reading your article and what feels weird,to me is how far away and ignorant we are of the truth we all carry in our inner hearts. This feels unlogical and completely against our nature. We are not anymore natural beings but beings who run around and do not even feel anymore the truth of God inside ourselves, thus everybody carries this truth within. And the question is why do we not feel anymore the truth and love within us? Could it be that we subscribed ourselves to a different energy which makes us blind and numb to the preciousness we carry inside of us ?
I recall growing up and going to Sunday school camp for 4 days. It was something we did more to please my grandparents at the time as they were quite religious, but thankfully my mum was open to us going or not going and gave us that as an option. Even then I still carried this image of God as some big old man with a large beard sitting up on the clouds. How crazy is this? Where does this silly image come from? Why do so many of us have this as our first thought when someone mentions God? Today I know this to be so far from the truth, yet I also know it is such a prominent image all around the world when it comes to most Christian/Catholic etc religions. I now find it quite funny that such an image can actually take hold when we allow it and don’t really question it.
When nature is truly observed we cannot deny that there must be a higher order to which everything adheres to, the higher order we can call the universe or God.
To truly know God we first of all need to know ourselves.
A superb blog Dianne. Making the link between our inner quality of love and conscious and ‘God’ is the grandest step that brings one home… This grand step of one, is actually a giant step for humanity.
A wonderful expose’ of your journey to finding the God within. There is much I can relate to in your journey Dianne.
As Dianne describes, there are places where it is not immediately easy to see anybody making loving choices but it can be very worthwhile to see the hurts from which people then choose to express in such violent ways and to see the source of those hurts and the choices people have made with those hurts.
So beautiful to have religion brought back to it’s origins – we are connected to the all – ligated! Thank you again Dianne Trussell.
What is so inspiring about Universal Medicine and Serge Benhayon’s presentations is the openness and honesty that comes with any topic discussed, and especially in regards to God and religion. There are so many bastardisations of both that to bring the truth and clarity to this is, in part a relief, but also very confirming of what we already know and feel to be true.
Images of God have caused much confusion throughout the ages, seen us worshiping one ideal or another contrasting one….none have necessarily delivered us to the Truth of God let alone presented a living way in connection of God. The Way of The Livingness – is a True Religion…A living way of Life in union with God, the Universe and all that is.
Dianne, you are a master storyteller. I was mesmerised by what you wrote. It shows me that God is universal and available to us all, no matter where or how we grow up. And that nature is an incredible reminder and connector to God – and it is there, free for us all, to be in at any time.
‘I have seen the light and love in my core shining in the eyes of another person, and increasing numbers of people, and know without doubt that we are all one, we are all held in the body of God and we all contain the all.’ This is beautiful Dianne, and this is true Religion – the connection to the all in us all.
So many of the images we hold or have taken on prevent us from truly knowing the godliness that lives within and all around us. Imagine if life were lived without the imposition of the pictures and images we hold of how it said to be, and we just felt and discovered life from the natural knowing we hold?
This is such a beautifully written blog Dianne, loved reading it. I related so much to your questioning and searching for the truth of all that God is, and likewise was never satisfied until I made the connection within. “I have seen the light and love in my core shining in the eyes of another person, and increasing numbers of people, and know without doubt that we are all one, we are all held in the body of God and we all contain the all.”
It is a really interesting exercise to unpack our images and beliefs about things and how life is. Religion can be a big one as there is no ‘proof’ to fall back on. There is only our experience, what we have felt and what we know to be true.
I wonder if proof is actually possible, starting from the assumption that if something is true, whether that can be proved or not, then what it produces or what is derived from it also needs to be true – true love, true support, true healing, true vitality…
Separating children into groups with people they hardly know and then expecting them to share honestly about God… What if such a delicate subject and a very dear relationship is a topic that they want to explore and share with the children they’re most familiair with? What happened to us adults that we make these kind of decisions? Where do they come from? Could this be labelled true care? Of course not. We’re actually imposing and quite intimidating our own beliefs and ideals onto them. No wonder that we hardly dare to speak about God and our relationship with him.
“Growing my own sense of God” is a great description of the unfolding of my awareness in life. Childhood was similar introduction to the Sunday School experiences and attending church schools. All something that was done to tick a box but didn’t have any meaning or connection to actual life as I knew it. Outside of these activities I can’t remember church and god ever being discussed at home. A time spent with a Christian group in my twenties was more about connecting with people than appreciating God. At thirty I basically realised there has to be more to life than being born, creating the best existence and dying. The search started for more understanding. 20 years later, through presentations by Serge Benhayon I have re-connected to an understanding and truth of God from me, nothing to do with churches or what others say. It’s a wonderful unfolding knowing God is with-in and around us all and everything equally.
What is my image of God? As a child lying in bed at night I was in wonder at the universe, could feel it all, all of nature and people. That felt like God, it felt natural, ordinary, real, an inseparable part of me. I deviated away from that absolute knowing a little as I grew up, in part due to the many conflicting messages, but it never left. And I have found that all that was required was for me to return to it.
Great blog and much needed discussion. Having spent most of my adult life visiting different churches in the vain hope of finding God or hearing from God, expecting someone to save me, and always being disappointed. Only to find that I already have everything inside of me and that no searching is required just the willingness to deepen the relationship with myself first.
There are so many contradictions in the world and yet we keep on going. I love your inquisitive nature Dianne and that you didn’t let that to be taken away from you despite the often nonsensicality and illogicality you encountered in the world, and kept on asking and exploring.
I remember that happening in my school too, on religious instruction day we got separated into the different religions. For our small school it was ‘catholic’ and ‘others’. I remember thinking this felt strange as it definitely created difference in us and a separation in the playground at times. I remember thinking that being catholic was complicated too with all the things you had to do and feel bad about. The priest used to come with his ‘housekeeper’ and even at the young age I was, I had a clear knowing that she was not just his housekeeper. This also was confusing.
Where we go lost in our search for God is that we are made to believe that he is an entity outside of us, that we need to find and somehow try to relate to. However as you propose with your blog, God is immanent and our connection to him and our own godliness a very natural occurrence, we just have so many images about how it is supposed to look like that we do not realize that what we are feeling inside of ourselves is it.
I enjoyed reading this blog Dianne and I loved the questions you posed as a child. The fact that such questions could not be answered and were met with an uncomfortable response shows how much religion has been bastardised and moved away from the simplicity you felt was missing from them all – they were “..empty of any real love..”
I am always surprised how unsubstantial the discussion becomes when it is about God and how people at times disregard all their intelligence and blindly believe in things that do not make much logical sense. However your blog Dianne is inspiring a very refreshing discussion about God and like a true scientist you do not leave a stone unturned in your observation of people and their attitude towards God as well as your own experience of God.
Dianne, great article, thank you. What a brilliant question, “What is your image of God?“ what I was taught as a child was that God was a grey haired man with a beard sitting on a throne in the sky, I rejected this as I grew up and became very anti-God because everything I heard about him did not feel true. It was attending presentations by Serge Benhayon that has allowed me know the truth about God, what Serge presented made complete sense and feels beautiful.
Our image of God has been based on how we look ourselves, and has nothing to do with the actual being in whom we all reside. We expect God to judge us but in reality we are simply judging ourselves. What many of us have yet to learn and feel is the enormous love that God is, perhaps only when we can truly love ourselves, will we feel that.
‘And whatever God might be, it had a similar feel to that core of light inside me.
It had a similar feel to the feeling of selfless care and love for others that I felt in my heart, and to the ‘conscience’ that was always there guiding my choices and preventing me from doing wrong.’ – This is very familiar to me, there has always been a knowing that there is something grander than me preventing me from ‘doing wrong’.
It is interesting to observe my immediate response to the question “What is your image of God”. I notice I start scrambling in my head to find a picture, a definition or a clever explanation. Yet when I just sit back and reflect on my actual ‘image-less’ experience of God and my fundamental awareness of my connection, the vastness and the expansion I feel defies any logical explanation and my mind can’t turn it into a tidy little story. It seems by focusing on “images” in life, whether it is of God or anything else, we con ourselves into a far narrower awareness than we are inherently capable of.
I loved hearing your detailed story about ‘god’ and the what he might mean and now does mean to you. God is a controversial subject, everyone has their own picture of what he is to them. I realate to what you have now come to in your relationship with god, I am held deeply by a knowing of what he is, I can feel it in my cells.
Your blog is revelatory in the quest of debasing and debunking all of the images of God that now exist.. coming back to the simplicity and purity of God and our Kingdom being inside us all along. Hearing of your upbringing, it is easy to see that you would have questioned God being there at all, and yet had people known or been aware of their own presence how different things could have looked and such behaviours played out. It’s fascinating and the true science of God for oneself is something very worth studying.
Religions fight, and have different interpretations of what or who ‘God’ is. There are so many people who are given up on religion because of all of the false teachings that are out there and the re-interpretations. If I was to life a life of Religion, I would start with what’s in my heart.
“I have seen the light and love in my core shining in the eyes of another person”. Seeing this was evidence enough for me to recognise, know and confirm, that God exists.
What a great conversation. Thank you for sharing all Dianne. Will come back to this when I have more space to take it in fully.
What you share here is wonderful as there are so many people questioning who God is and what is has to do with the image shown to us. I know I did and just like you tried praying and it just felt empty. Now I know God is in me, a very natural feeling inside my chest but also glowing through my whole body and the more I connect to it and appreciate that it is just there I grow, grow in my awareness of what live is truly about. ‘My inner voice of wisdom has grown. My sense of God has grown, and is still growing.’ Thank you Dianne.
Thank you for sharing, Dianne. Most of us have spent a good deal of our lives looking in the wrong places for God and getting answers that did not make sense from those who thought they knew. I am loving my reconnection to God within me, in nature all around me and in the heart of every human being on earth.
Wow, wow and wow Dianne. This is a truly amazing blog – I love it and it’s got you and God all over it.
I love this part ‘I have seen the light and love in my core shining in the eyes of another person, and increasing numbers of people, and know without doubt that we are all one, we are all held in the body of God and we all contain the all.’
It feels so weird that we should all be separated into different religions, which effectively means that we have different ways of understanding God. We are all humans on this planet, therefore do we not have the capacity to feel a one unified truth?
There are many different ideals and images surrounding what and who God is, from different religions, cultures, books, people, societies and so forth, and it makes it difficult for someone to feel for themselves who God is because we are bombarded so heavily with opposing and clashing beliefs.
So very true, Mary – I’ve loved the outdoors and being outside for as long as I remember. Appreciating the space and beauty, the quiet and stillness, the harmony of nature. This, I now realise, was my connection and appreciation of God.
I love that you’ve written this blog and I can relate to so much of what you say – from Sunday school, to God being a grey-haired figure in the clouds, to atheism, to feeling uncomfortable saying the word. And if I’m honest, I’m still working on the last part – I’ve allowed all those years of Catholic schooling to define who God is.
Your blog has been a wonderful read and an experience that has helped me to understand more of what I see and feel. And to nominate those things I see and feel as being the magic of God.
Gosh I could write pages about this topic and my similar experiences and pictures….but one point I like to highlight: Since I made the choice (again and again) to expand my awareness and my inner space, the pictures of God do go and I start to get a glimpse of the true energy of God. As I become more aware of me, the true me – God’s picture change…till there is no picture anymore but a awareness as well.
I love how scientifically you approach life whilst also recognising that your daily living choices have expanded your clairsentience and allowed your sense of God to become more tangible – no images needed when we can feel the all encompassing nature of God in and around us.
The images of a judgmental-finger-pointing-wrath-filled God sitting on a rather nebulous throne as portrayed by many, instilled in me a curious mixture of dread of having always done something very wrong along with a sense of something well out-of-kilter and not true. Over the years, confusion and lack of trust became more entrenched from hearing and seeing the seeming exclusiveness of differing doctrines and dogma delivered by various religions.
“God was sometimes depicted as a huge, terrifying, judgmental hand coming down from the clouds”.
I agree Ariana, it is no wonder that most of those who do not go to church on Sundays have given up on God if this image is being portrayed. We all know that God is within and outside ourselves and some are willing to accept this truth. We do not need to preach about it but live this responsibly so that we reflect the truth of God.
““What is your image of God?“” well this is where i now understand it all goes wrong. The images i have held of God have stopped me simply connecting to God.
I have always felt within me there was a God but I certainly was very confused as a child. Although I went to Sunday school and did my best to ‘fit in’ I later discovered that the ‘real’ God wasn’t to be found there. As a child I was forever asking questions in my mind and it took an illness to stop me in my tracks and question my relationship with God. I went on a journey wanting to know about ‘spirituality’ and the ‘new age’ movement but God wasn’t to be found there either. It was in 2005 that I met Serge Benhayon. I had found God, and ever since my relationship with God has, and is getting stronger as I re-awaken to truth. It was through the Gentle Breath Meditation presented by Serge Benhayon where I was confirmed that God was within me and within and around everyone and everything too. It was a moment to deeply appreciate, honour and treasure because from there on my life has never been the same, and it continues to unfold in the way of my commitment to myself, life and humanity.
What’s totally mad is that we all know God inside out and yet we either proclaim that there is no such thing as God or we believe in ridiculous bastardised versions of God. It’s utterly ridiculous because if we lived the knowing that we each of us holds inside, (which is that we are all made up of God’s particles) then we would be able to address every single problem that we are currently experiencing; yet we don’t. In fact we actually either sit back and let the atrocities of the world unfold or we take wild stabs at fixing the problems, whilst in both scenarios we knowingly hold the answers to all of our problems.
“However, as my choices changed upon the basis of experimenting with the new knowledge, for example quitting drugs, changing my diet, claiming a higher level of awareness and responsibility, etc, my ability to directly sense and experience things that are beyond physical and scientific understanding has grown.”
Developing an inward relationship with my body, my beingness, from where the heightened awareness of microscopic/cellular movements within connects me to a sense of stillness that is beyond the boundaries of my temporal frame, access to the universe, to God.
Someone recently explained to me that god is within me and that made a lot of sense, it isn’t something I look up to or see as separate, more as I understand that I have a body on loan from, let’s call it heaven, and I walk around as a son of god in this body made up of particles that are constantly shifting and interweaving with the Universe and the other sons of god. If god was explained in church in this way I know that for me this would have changed everything and I wouldn’t have such a hard time appreciating what and where god is.
“… no matter how much I would have despaired of life, I had that core of light inside me.” The spark of God within and this is what I feel many religions choose not to nurture. To make God an external master lessens our responsibility and the awareness of our true power. When we make the choice to honour our internal flame, we realise that God is not somewhere out there, but deeply in here, a quality to be surrendered too. What your blog empowers me to see Dianne is that when we keep God external, we keep our own identity, when we connect to God within, we are being asked to surrender to God’s all loving, all inclusive Will and relinquish ‘me’ in favour of ‘us’, a collective unit of immense Love.
It is our ‘images of God’ that prevent us from being with God.
It really is quite astonishing how when the contradictions are so blatant yet we so often are willing accept them as part of a package. I know that I have done that in different aspects of my life, often because of some form of comfort. However, eventually the comfort does not last.
Nothing really adds up with most religions definitions or images of God, but without God, science and philosophy don’t make a lot of sense either.
Thanks Dianne, this is a great account of your rediscovery of God. My own experience was quite the opposite as I was heavily indoctrinated as a young child in Catholic teachings. This drove the fear of God home in a way that each night as I felt so insignificant in the broader scheme of things that I thought that God would simply withdraw my life force/source of energy and I would die. I had a terrifying Irish nun at the ages of 6 and 7 who would strap you with a leather strap for no real reason other than to keep this fear alive and fed us stories in graphic detail of the deaths, possessions and exorcisms. When the movie the Exorcist came out and everyone was shocked I felt like I had already lived it in every detail thanks to this teacher. So my images of God as a child were all about punishment, basically if you did not toe the line and attend church every Sunday a building would fall down on you and take you out. Yet my image of the Master Jesus was all love and light. It was a bit like the good cop bad cop routine, In fact like you, I have always held a special place in my heart that I now know as my true connection to God
This is a cracker of a blog – great questions and sharing about God and Religion which we can each relate to in some way. I love your candidness, raw honesty and simplicity of presenting what we have each felt in our own way and know.
Our history is littered with religious wars and today’s world is no different. The churches in the past hiring of mercenaries, not missionaries, to convert non-followers with the simple edict of convert or die were seen as a viable solution to grow their flock. I have also been shown the real meaning of God and the temple it has always resided in, and what it looks like, the only thing required is a mirror.
I feel like I don’t have an image of God either, it’s more like a feeling of God, greatness, awesomeness, love, home, harmony, stillness and motion, all here and all within. A wonderful article Dianne, thank you so much.
Thankyou for sharing your experience with God Dianne. Reading your blog reminded me that I had many similar feelings around God as I was growing up, and even into my adult years, being told one thing but not being able to make sense of it for myself. There always seemed to be so much contradiction around so many different belief systems. It wasn’t until I found Universal Medicine and heard Serge Benhayon talk about God in such a simple and practical way that made complete sense to me, that everything fell into place, and confirmed all I had felt in previous years.
Dear Diane,
Your sharing has reminded me of a dream I had years ago where I was shown a person and asked what did I see, my answer was, I see God, I then tried to take this back, but I was gently guided that I had spoken the truth, God resides in us all. This completely revolutionized my life and brought home a deep truth about God, to this day this dream supports me to know that there underneath whatever a person presents as their way, is the truth, God.
Many unanswered questions Dianne that take me back to my own questioning of my late mother a deeply religious woman. I asked ‘How can there be a God for one group of people (Christians) that condemns everyone else’ For decades I have known there is only one religion and the various forms that exist in separation are a travesty of true religion. I remember door knockers tut tutting when they asked me ‘where is the kingdom of God?’ and I placed my hand on my heart. Now I can simply rest in the knowing that God is Love, every where and in all of us, the search for answers over.
The images I collected of God were from a colourful bible given to me as a six year old, seeing God in the thunderous black clouds made no sense but it was what everyone around were satisfied with. Rejecting Sunday school was simple for it was all so contradictory. For example, how could one stand in the church and pretend all was okay then go home get drunk and beat up your wife…It seemed crazy and was. Seeing through this allowed me to then reject myself and in teenage years rebel and indulge to not feel all that was happening. Fast forward years later and Universal Medicine on the scene – the presentation that I have a connection with God as every one does becomes obvious and important to claim again. Images are fleeting, the presence of God steadying you as we walk together through this life is eternal.
“I have seen the light and love in my core shining in the eyes of another person, and increasing numbers of people, and know without doubt that we are all one, we are all held in the body of God and we all contain the all.” I only can agree what you have shared Dianne as it is my feeling too. Thank you for not holding back your thoughts and pondering about god and all the ideals and believes around him – I found this very refreshing.
What an amazing blog Diana and beautiful to read as it shows all the ways in our Western societies where we have lost ourselves in the to me false images of God. You could say as a society we are pretty lost without direction and in fact all looking for the same truth we all know from an inner feeling. We are looking for God but unfortunately in the wrong direction, outward instead of inward as is so clearly shared by Jesus and known for ages that the Kingdom of God resides inside of us all.
As a child I did feel God in the world of nature, stars and clouds and trees, and raindrops, but never felt him in the church. Now I realise that nature was reflecting a grandness and harmony that I felt, but in a church I felt disturbed with the sermons and confused with the practice of confession. ‘The kingdom of God is within’ is beginning to make sense as I develop a deeper and more honouring and loving relationship with myself. Thank you for your great sharing Dianne, although my childhood experience was very different from yours, much of what you have felt and experienced is very familiar.
How beautiful Dianne that you grew your own sense of God, that here you are now not impeded by the ideals and beliefs of others and religions. I so enjoyed reading your blog, thank you for sharing your knowledge, experiences and wisdom.
It is amazing how strong those images are we are given through religious institutions of what God is, and that to question these is sacrilegious. Who are you (read…mere mortal/sinner) to question something that is foundational to a religious movement, regardless of how irrational, nonsensical or just plain ridiculous it might be. It has never ceased to amaze me that so-called intelligent, well educated people ‘buy’ some crazy religious belief that makes no sense to life or anything that might follow life as we know it. I recall hearing that some very specific number of a certain religion would ‘enter heaven’ when they passed over… and no more. So what happened when that number got reached, for every person thereafter, no entry, regardless of religious affiliation. Hardly fair and certainly made not an iota of sense. And yet very intelligent and otherwise sensible people subscribe to this belief.
The deeper I connect with myself and know myself as a multi dimensional being the more I have a sense of God… the real deal.
It does seem that through man made religions, there is so much that doesn’t make sense leaving many questions and doubts. Through nature however there is an exquisiteness in order that even through beyond our scientific understandings and capabilities, makes sense. It is only here that I can consider the possibilities and magnitude of God.
Love how you break this down Dianne. We have been squirming under many images, let alone this big one – our image of God, which can place us underneath God, or actually take God from our sight. When we don’t need to play ourselves anywhere – simply to be in and live the Love, Harmony and Stillness of God’s Truth, which we all innately known and is natural to our body.
The images that we hold of God keep us from connecting and feeling who he is and that he is always present. It is great to deconstruct the pictures that we have accumulated around God and as we break them down, we make room for seeing the truth of God.
It is totally understandable that with what you were witnessing in daily life around where you lived – the abuse, alcoholism, violence – that it would seem that God was nowhere to be seen. It is certainly a question that crossed my mind later in life after I left my protected home (where there was no violence, no alcohol) and went to Sydney where a whole other life was there to be seen. I could not believe that God would have created a world where one lot of people could throw napalm on another lot of people’s land, and so cause immense damage to those people. It was beyond anything one could imagine and I could see no divinity in this state of being. Yet I could feel an inkling of God in my heart and my ‘mind’ could not reconcile these realities not deeply understand what has happened with humanity. Thank heavens for Serge Banhayon and his presentations of the Ageless Wisdom which bring such a profound and loving understanding to what is going on.
Yes I agree Dianne, it was utterly weird, as you say, being split up from classmates and friends for Religious Instruction at school. My best friends were all Church of England and we had no religion in our household – my dad used to tell me how the Catholic Church tortured and killed people in the Inquisition so he would not have religion. So I was put randomly into the Presbyterian group which was lacking numbers. Hilarious! So this had a quite divisive affect on us – to be divided in this way.
What an important conversation to have about God so that we can come to our own connection with God. I know I do not pay attention to what I feel God to be enough, to have a daily relationship. But I know I have a sense of God that is growing and it’s beautiful and it is only me who limits it. So I can really relate to, ‘My sense of God has grown, and is still growing.’
An enormous topic Dianne. It also brought up for me all the crushing and contradictory images of God I experienced as a child, many as you describe, were supposed to create feelings of being “sinful, lesser, guilty or judged.” That to me is really human control, and has nothing to do with the truth of God. It’s amazing just how many images there are out there of God, which is perhaps a reflection of how disconnected so many are. After all if there is only One God and we are all connected to it then wouldn’t we be experiencing the same thing? The only answer for me in this, and as to the many conflicting images, is the rampant disconnection to God. Ironically, institutionalised religion actually promotes this disconnection.
That contradiction of God being love and also being vengeful, as well as the hypocrisy of the priests, brothers, sisters, etc. of the catholic church put me off thinking too much about God, but I always had this inner knowing that that there was a spark in me that was some sort of reflection of God. Thank God for Serge Benhayon & Universal Medicine, finally knowing the truth without a doubt is everything to me.
Thank you Dianne. I loved reading about the way you were as a child, inquisitive, innocent and knowing of truth. It is clear to see you stayed connected to these qualities for most of your life and now so express them more than ever. My images of God were smashed at the presentation you write about in your opening paragraph. I came to know God as love and to understand that love means being held accountable for the energy I express in every moment and movement. I came to accept that God in absolute love allows us to feel the full effects of our unloving choices until such time as we decide to reconnect to our divine nature and express our divinity once more.
Amazing expose Dianne. I don’t believe in God and never have. However, like you since meeting Serge Benhayon, and experiencing the loving way he lives and the love, stillness, truth, joy and harmony he expresses, I have reconnected to an energy of that quality within myself and in that reconnected to God. I still do not believe in God for I now know God and in that knowing, I recognise that I have always known and that we are all of that source.
Something that always used to irk me when I listened to sermons was how ‘righteous’ the religious person talking seemed to be. Their relationship with God was such that they felt they ‘knew’ exactly how we are all meant to be in our lives. The first time I heard Serge Benhayon talk he never once suggested how I or anyone else should be, rather, he presented facts, giving me the space to decide for myself whether to make them my own truth or not. What was overwhelmingly apparent was his embodiment of everything he shared, you could feel he very much ‘walks the talk’ and that is incredibly powerful and inspiring. To feel the lived embodiment of love from another person pulls you to be more love yourself. It’s what we all crave more than anything else, it’s our natural way to simply ‘be love’, what stops us is our resistance to being so. Being around someone who ‘lives the talk’ is like balm to a wound, there is a familiarity, something we’re connecting to is already ‘known’, we know that we can all choose to live that way too.
“How could an absolutely loving God also meter out terrible judgments of vengeance and devastation?” I knew from young that the God that was portrayed did not ring true, however it took me 40 years or so to realise that I could’ve only known this at such a tender age if somewhere inside of me I knew the truth of God. This point was a beautiful confirmation of the essence that we all know.
I have been re-reading your blog again this morning, Dianne, after an early morning meeting and my eyes were suddenly drawn to the window. I was amazed at the beauty in the sky, it looks as though God has turned the lights on. The sky is literally alight with a warm orange glow …… so apt.
It’s knowing God a ‘picture’ or is it something else? God is expansive, present and deeply loving. God is in the finest of detail and everywhere yet takes up no space – God is in our breath. Thanks Dianne.
This is what I’ve been working on, Christine – the images which I’ve allowed to be painted about who God is and what he looks like. As if there has to be a physical description or explanation. But I love what you say here, ‘God is in our breath.’
Dianne what an amazing understanding and unfolding of what you have always held true in your heart. Thank you for never losing the connection to you regardless of all the experiences that may have prompted you to forget that there is an inner essence and connection to something far greater than we can see. However your connection to nature was always there offering the loving harmonious order that we naturally are part of regardless of the day to choices that are made.
It’s funny in the world today how many images we have of God with each one claiming their’s is the one. It’s not that I mean any disrespect to any of those people or God’s but how can we all allow this to be. Surely there would be only one God? In a way I can’t believe we live in a world where we openly allow everyone to have everything and think this is a way for us to be. Again not a criticism but more of a disbelief to think that this is normal or fine when it seems a little ridiculous really. As I’ve said, this is one world and our differences are only skin deep and yet we foster this major subject like we are all living on different planets within the one planet. I know from experience the more we are together and the more of us together the more power there is. Maybe this is what this is about, keep us divided and in our different corners and the power is diminished. There is a way’s to go to bring this all back together but as always we need to start somewhere and God maybe not the first step but possibly in time this is where we will be, unified with God.
I had a little chuckle remembering how much grief I gave my religious teaches when I posed similar questions. If questions didn’t have an answer, it only proved to me that a particular religion didn’t hold the truth. A truth I knew in me existed. In came ‘The Way of The Livingness’ and my inner knowing was confirmed.
It is interesting how we have all learnt or even have images of how God should be or what he should look like and some of my beliefs I have never stopped to question where did they come from. Do I really believe that or feel that way. I can also see how many expectations we have on God and expectations are just a killer.
Totally agree Rosie. God is felt and for me this reconnection has been supported through the reflection of Universal Medicine, The Way of The Livingness, the student body and of course Serge Benhayon. Through this support I have reconnected to me, God and see and feel it in others and nature.
It is important perhaps to have a journey with our understanding of God, to discover who he is from our own terms and with our own hearts leading the way, but it is equally as important to acknowledge our place among the whole that is God’s love and to not be arrogant in thinking that we know so much and can do it all on our own. The humbleness therefore that comes from understanding and knowing what God is all about is pure gold to living life on earth.
I was out walking last evening, stood on the river and looked at the exquisite view of the stillness of the water, the colour in the sky and the duck quietly floating as they ready for their evening. At that moment I remembered that I always thought that God is Everywhere. But this was about God being all around us “out there’ somewhere. I did know that there was more to this but did not know quite where. Over the years I traveled in part to see if God was there too. Always looking but in what I was seeing were not matching the pictures in my head of what I was supposed to see, not that they were particularly clear either. Things just didn’t quite make sense. I had so many questions like you Dianne. But something I did know was that our limited mind could even imagine the breadth and depth of who and what God truly is. I know there was a vastness much greater than the cap that only the human mind could place on God – putting God in a box if you will. Studying with Universal Medicine and attending presentations by Serge Benhayon has put the wonder back into God for me, presenting God with the ordinariness, but extra ordinariness that is possible in our everyday experiences and moments of God and that God communicates constantly if only we were to truly listen. There is no perfection here and there are lots of times I get caught in life and ignore those messages. But sometimes when I feel super still I can feel God within me, I can feel the vastness of God and know that that is also me. It’s exquisitely beautiful. Then I get caught up in life again. But that’s OK.
Dianne, I am blown away by this down to earth, very real yet extraordinary path to God. What a journey!
‘I still don’t have an ‘image’ of God, but I feel I now know something of God, for real. It’s taken 6 decades, and this is still only the beginning!’ – I SO love your humbleness.
I love how you just kept discerning and questioning when things were presented that didn’t make sense or were inconsistent and that you didn’t give up either on there being more to life, something tangible yet unseen, because you had felt it and even though other versions of God didn’t fit it didn’t mean that he doesn’t exist.
Definitely, Fiona. Trusting what you know inside, not what you’re told. I have done the latter for most of my life and found Dianne’s story to be very inspiring.
We think we turn up to Sunday services in church, and the go back to our life and can pick and choose what we believe. But what your words remind me Dianne, is how profoundly these ideas of a God who is vengeful, judgemental and exclusive permeate our culture and our every day. For when you look around at people do we not call out ‘oh god!’ and don’t we judge ourselves harshly just the same? To me God, I now see is in literally everything, because even the judgement and horrible words, killings and unloving actions you mention, they are all part of our course back to Love. And so each action and its consequences come complete with everything we need to re-learn we are an equal part of God, designed to reflect back the universal truth to human kind.
Thank you for sharing your experience of god and religion Dianne. When I was younger I searched for answers about god, knowing that god was real but that the explanations and depictions of god in the various religions did not make sense to me. Now I have an understanding of religion as my personal relationship with god and that god is within and around each of us equally. No one has more or less access to god than another, it is a matter of our choice to establish a relationship with god or not.
I love the questions that as a child you posed Dianne, which phased those who were trying to sell their images of God. Humanity would be exhibiting a far greater intelligence if we were more prepared to listen to children and reflect on the deep wisdom in their open and innocent questions.
Indeed! The wisdom of a child! Just because we’re older and have had more experiences in life doesn’t make us right – a humble reminder.
A brilliant blog Dianne that is jammed packed with so much consideration and expansion – thank you for sharing your story
God…such a big topic but so important to come to some sense for peace and relationship with.
I love the connection you have made between the inner light that you always felt within you and God. Basically, God lives within, he lives within us and the moment we connect with our inner selves or our essence the more we know God.
Throughout my life I have always not believed, but known god to be true. It was this knowing that supported me to see through the many bastardisations of religion. It is sad to see so many arguements about difference of opinions and semantics, all of which embed us further away from connecting deep within where we can really get to know god.
This is awesome! I really relate to walking away from God – as the idea of some dude in the sky. And I resonate so much when you say ‘…But I have felt the indescribable stillness that is the foundation of the harmony, order and intelligence in Nature….’ – I too see and feel this – and in people as well.
I look at my daughter and I know there is something more – something divine that made it possible for her to be here. And in nature I see order and comunication all the time – another divine experience. God is no longer what I thought it was.
What an article Dianne, loved it. Finding Universal Medicine certainly clarified many beliefs I had had about God and Religion.
Brilliant blog Dianne and it does make a lot of sense that those images don’t make sense such as not seeing God on a clear day with no clouds!
For me God is very much more becoming something I can sense or feel than can visually see. Limiting God to a certain image we miss out on all the ways God does make themselves known.
The mystery of God is such a big topic that many a war has been fought over. I grew up with a deep knowing that God existed but also with an image that he existed outside of me and was unobtainable unless I was good in this life, died and went to heaven. Then and only then if I was lucky, would I come to know God. Through living via the esoteric principles as shared by Universal Medicine, I have come to know God in a different light through my body. God dwells within me as he does within all of us equally. God is easily accessible in any moment, he is grand, he is love, he is space, he is universal. My connection with God deepens and grows as my self-love grows.
‘You write so beautifully Dianne Trussell and I stopped at these words. ‘But I have felt the indescribable stillness that is the foundation of the harmony, order and intelligence in Nature.’ What a gift to humanity you are. Posting this blog everywhere I can!
Dianne, I love how you have brought all your questions about God to this blog. To have asked such difficult questions at such a young age is inspiring, as it is obvious that you were deeply aware there was so much more to God than what was being offered to you. This is a wonderful article and one that should be shared widely with adults and children alike, as it would encourage others to not only pose more questions, but to open up about what they really feel about God for themselves, and to potentially realise that they already have their own connection to God.
This is a great blog on how an image of something we deem really important as the appearance and the question what god is.
This blog explores how much the image can distort and interrupt a true meaning.
However how does this affect all our ‘little’ beliefs that we may not know we have.
How much of our world is a spiral of images that serve no purpose than to keep us less then who we truly are?
Isn’t this a quest worth investing time into?
Spot on, Luke – I love what you say about how ‘the image can distort and interrupt a true meaning’. The eyes get greedy and let the image override what we feel. I’m sure Dianne’s not the only one who wrestled with the image of God being a grey-haired guy in the sky.
So we agree, the blind man sees more than a man with full vision.
Thank you for sharing Dianne. It’s fascinating to read how your relationship to what God and ‘Religion’ meant changed so much over the years, and about how different influences played a part in what it meant to you from a young age.
Dianne your blog is sensational! There is so much out there about the word God, there is so much beliefs and so many differing points of view. When I read works by Serge Benhayon and read the word ‘God’ every part of me knew what I was reading was true and did not have an issue with reading God presented in this way, it was indeed the energetic quality of the writing which I was aligned with. Previous to that I had a lot of issues with the word God, I wanted to hide that I knew there must be a God and pretended It was foolish to believe in him – simply for protection.
Dianne, I love that you asked so many ‘difficult’ questions, it shows a true scientific enquiring mind! For me there was a dull acceptance of everything I was told, and where I didn’t feel the images to be true, I escaped into my own imagination. I met a guy when I was 17 who challenged my Catholic beliefs and so I dropped religion and went along with his idea that God might not exist at all and became an ‘agnostic’. Later I got into New Age stuff, latching onto whatever beliefs offered from time to time without actually feeling for myself what was true. I didn’t bother trying any other religions, although I had many friends who had adopted buddhism. It was only in 2005 when I met Serge Benhayon that the word God re-entered my life. I felt hugely challenged a few years later when he talked about his way of life being a religion, and God was always presented as a fact of life, not just a concept. I have got as far as accepting God as a concept but old images of what God is are still hanging around and getting in the way of truly feeling God as a fact of life. Like you, I love Nature, always have, but that is outside of me, what I am learning now is to feel what is deep within, to allow that my body knows God, and can guide my way.
‘But I still squirmed at the mention of the word ‘God’ and had trouble even saying it because of all the false pictures I had seen in society up to this point’
This was true for me too Dianne and I suspect many others, that we are put off the notion of God or something divine because of what we clearly see and feel to be very far from God. But, then surely that goes to show we do know what is false…
So much in this article which reminds me of my own questioning of God, our existence and the searching for the Truth. The funny thing is we think we are the only ones who are conflicted (at least I did at the age of 18 as everyone seemed to be getting on and accepting their lot) but there was always this sense that there was more.
Love your article Dianne. The questions you asked the door-knockers are great – no answers for those! “My inner voice of wisdom has grown. My sense of God has grown, and is still growing.” Universal Medicine has also opened my eyes to the reality of God – in all of us, in everything.and in space. “…..we are all held in the body of God and we all contain the all..” Yes.
Truly gorgeous! Beautifully encapsulating the contradictions of the standard images of God, yet for all their logical reasoning that leads to the non-existence of God there is the undeniable inner-knowing there is something. A something, if truly listened to and explored, leads to one answer alone that is beautifully shared here. Thank you Dianne.
“You can’t study Pure Mathematics for long before you realise there must be a God.” What an amazing statement.
I recall sitting in a church a few years ago – on Christmas Eve – and seeing embedded into a stained glass window the words ‘Fear God’. This was another of those contradictions that did not make sense about God. If God is Love, why should we fear him? Just as you share here Dianne, ‘how could an absolutely loving God mete out terrible judgements…’. If it is true that we have been given ‘free-will’ – and I feel it is – it would be a pretty dysfunctional God who grants his children free-will only to punish them when they use it. It’s a bit like being given an amazing toy by your parents at Christmas and then told never to play with it – or else. No, this isn’t the God my heart knows. His is a love that is without condition and one that honours the right we all have to choose to ignore him, deny him, blame him, fight over him et al – until we have exhausted all the possibilities other than the absolute love that he is and then choose it for ourselves.
Great points, Richard. I think we’ve got the church to blame for the ‘Fear God’ complex – which is a whole other subject! A real bastardisation of what and who God truly is.
Dianne your blog got me pondering on whether I ever had an image of God, I didn’t fall for the religious images and the only time I felt close to God was when I looked at the stars. What I did know strongly within myself that God was not like the images that were presented from the various religions, and that he was not the white bearded man that looked down on us and that he was not like a form that we could relate to but an energy that over saw the world, I rarely spoke about this but when asked, that is what I would say. I dismissed God for most of my life, unless something traumatic happened and then I would look for him to seek answers. In my 40s I was looking for answers, I wanted God to show me he existed and so the New Age was where I sought solace, before Universal Medicine came into my life. The presentations by Serge Benhayon made sense of what I had been feeling, and so the search was over, I had found what I knew in every cell of my body to be true.
Thank you for sharing your journey with recognising God in yourself and others which I can really relate to. For me all the images I was presented with about God as I grew up did not ring true and I spent many years describing myself as agnostic yet knowing there was something deeper. In recent years I have connected to the expansiveness of God being within me and been inspired by the reflection of God in others and I am loving my growing relationship with God and also with everyone I meet as I go about my daily life.
Wow you indeed had a lot to say about the images of God that you held and I think it is very much a reflection of society. There are so many images of God around and thinking about that, it does not make sense as there can not be many Gods whilst everyone is saying it is the one and only God. I appreciate your sharing as it exposed some of my images of God that were in the way of feeling that God is very simple and can be seen in every part of life: nature, science, people etc. As you said it is not possible for the order and perfection that is there to be without a God constellating it all.
“Deep inside me, in the region of my heart, but somehow not confined by the thickness of my physical body, was a ‘place’, more like a ‘presence’. There was a core of light:” it seems that even in the daily challenges of life in your neighbourhood Dianne you knew God even though you didn’t have an image that fitted.
A majestic sharing about God, thank you Dianne as always, for your practical, scientific non-nonsense way of reporting on life and beyond.
I have also spent my share of decades cringing at the mere mention of God. There were even the times when the ‘bible bashers’ that would knock on my door that I would try to pick holes in the contradictions the bible presented and why there were so many different flavours of God and his works, lest we forget all the rules to control you. As so many others have re-found, the real meaning of what God and religion is, and that it resides within all of us. This is a joy-full work in progress.
Dianne, wow what a great article, I love what you are sharing, this is so simple and beautiful, ‘I have felt and seen in another human being the magnitude of love, truth, joy, harmony, stillness, responsibility, care and understanding that are to me defining attributes of God’, I love this, it makes sense for me of God and how God is inside us all.
I was brought up a Catholic and this certainly didn’t convince me that there was a God and the many images there almost convinced me there wasn’t, save this inner knowing that there was. I have no real image of God but also know or feel we are held within the body of God and that the chances of us existing without him are zero.
I also love the ‘journey’ that Dianne described. The permission she’s given herself to explore God, the pictures of God and all false beliefs and ideals about God is something deeply touching. As in giving me permission to have a very personal relationship with God and one that shouldn’t be ‘something’ or ‘perfect’, but rather an ongoing expansion of this relationship. And if there’s equality, could it be that he’s got also a very deep interest in me? Equally a forever student as we all are?
Coming to the end of this beautiful and very real sharing about personal experiences around God made me cry. I became aware that I do have an image of God in my head of a man (!!) with a beard. I can also feel how I’d love to surrender to his love, but something’s keeping me from choosing the surrendering. I can see that I try to understand God with my mind, that is the mind not connected to my body.
Floris, beautiful, and it made me laugh – not at you but with you and at myself. Apart from the ludicrous impossibility of God being so small, on top of that the ‘big guy with the beard’ fell foul of my lifelong resistance to ‘male authority figures’!
Firstly thank you for taking the time to write and share this. This is what I am starting to understand even if for some reason I do not express something that I want to in a group I cannot just ignore it, in some way it needs to be written or expressed. As Serge Benhayon has shared ‘expression is everything’ and this I am learning more and more. When there is so much abuse and lovelessness around us as you described growing up it is understandable to question if there is a God, why is ‘he’ not around at times like this? And growing up I asked myself the same question many times. The absolute true answer I know now is God is everywhere the whole time it is our choice whether we connect to this or not. Which despite all the bastidisations of Yeshua (Jesus) one truth of what was shared is still known today that is ‘the kingdom of God is within us all’. It is our connection and relationship with ourselves, our choices and how we live that are either in line with this or not. Life currently (and for eons) has been directing us away from this truth and connection that lays innately and sacredly within all and it still does with tv, adverts, magazines, news, social media, holidays, material possessions drugs, alcohol, study etc, etc. I love what you shared here ‘How could God be male when there was only one God? Male without female is like the right shoe without the left: useless and pointless. Thus God must be either gender or both. At least I got that bit sorted out in my mind!’ I have felt and appreciated two things whilst reading your blog, how I am finding it less and less hard to use or write the word God and how I never had an image of this in the first place. I had a knowing of the truth of God and my relationship with God in my body the whole time which has been confirmed with what Serge Benhayon and Universal Medicine reflect (I just walked away from this truth with loveless choices I made) teach but I didn’t have an image, all the false images came from outside of me saying what God is or is not. And lastly isn’t it ironic that we can spend our whole lives questioning something which we already deeply know and are connected to as I can feel by what you have expressed you already are … in the 6 decades of questioning and searching it was always there! Our love and history is ancient and our Soul all knowing.
I love the clear analogy you bring here Dianne to the gender of God being like one shoe with out the other. I am still chuckling at the image and aware of the absurdity and complication of being fixed in seeking of knowledge this brings.
“As I got a bit older and understood more science, another whopping contradiction became apparent. How could God be male when there was only one God? Male without female is like the right shoe without the left: useless and pointless. Thus God must be either gender or both”
I was christened and confirmed into the church of England, not because of religious reasons but because it was what people around us did, without question. I was confused by the devout seriousness offered by the church and the light disinterest of those around me. Why was I sent to an all girls catholic school when my family were not religious? I was confirmed at school at the age of 13, the only thing my peers seemed interested in was, what dress they got to wear and what presents they received from their god parents. The God that my school presented was just another part of my school calendar, I had no relationship to what was presented or the people who presented – I felt no inspiration, no call.
Dianne Trussell – thank you, this is awesome! What a powerful, inspiring and highly relatable blog to read from beginning to end describing your various searches for meaning and understudying of God and that which is true.
Suberp blog Dianne thank you for taking the time to share your experience. I just loved the questions you asked, because they are so common for so many of us who struggle to just accept what we are told. I too felt bemused by the varying images and beliefs about God, because I felt they never stacked up. Yet I have always had a relationship with God and for years would say of myself that I had ‘faith without religion’. Studying esoteric philosophy with Serge Benhayon has confirmed for me without a shadow of a doubt that God is first and foremost an energetic quality that we are all inescapably infused in, its a quality that resides within us and around us for infinity. And this quality is deeply felt in Serge and openly shared with all, as is God’s nature to never hold back his love. And the more Serge delivers, the more it pulls us back on track, back to feeling, sensing and knowing God by “the magnitude of love, truth, joy, harmony, stillness, responsibility, care and understanding” that flows through Serge and many other people when we truly get our selves out of the way and surrender to the glowing flame within us.
I remember as a child trying to get to grips with the bible. I would read the odd snippet here and there, searching for truth. There was a part of me that knew God existed, but the way he was presented simply didn’t make sense. I also went to Sunday school for a couple of weeks when I was about 9. I refused to go after that because it was one of the most unloving places I had ever encountered, and again what was being presented didn’t add up. It has certainly taken me a long time looking out there for God. Of course I was never going to find him, and I did give up at one point and became an atheist. Little did I know he was always very close by.
This is an amazingly beautiful blog. So real!! Images of God abound indeed and each established religion has its own. So called religious people participate of them. As an atheist, sometimes I felt an intellectual sort of envy for the religious people. I used to say to myself: their life is easier. Being an atheist, God was pretty much out of my radar. I held no image of Him. And it was precisely that lack of images that made my first religious experiences so real and intriguing. Once I felt the enormous love of God in my body, there was no way to walk away from it. I still have no images of God. I do not need them. Moreover, they do not do anything for me. My religiousness is very physical as it is beautifully energetic. It opens the door to a version of me that is strong, solid, and magnificent in every way.
There is no ‘image’ of God as that is a mental construct. To have an awareness of God is to feel within my body the unbounded love that is always there as a stillness where i sense the true joy of knowing that as a Son of God I have an intangible connection to every other being who is an equal Son of God.
Its that final sentence that sums it up beautifully for me. Any image of God that I have had through life has always been false, a source of disillusionment and makes no sense. However, in the last few years I have discovered a feeling inside me which I can correlate directly with divinity. I have met God there and while it may only be the beginning, its the most natural and welcome relationship I have ever experienced.
Wow! What a blog Dianne! The point that is clear after reading this blog is that there are so many mental and theosophical theories about God which we attach to and try to live by but none are from a livingness, a lived experience of having a true relationship with Him. That is of course until The Way of The Livingness came along and the truth of this fact was suddenly very clear.
WOW Dianne, I am speechless other than to say, you have echoed so much of my own experience, and your description and understanding of what God is, is the first l’ve ever read that is absolutely relatable, and yet so grand it is befitting the enormity of what God is and must be. Thank you for taking the time to express it in full.
What a beautiful and humbling quote here…“You can’t study Pure Mathematics for long before you realise there must be a God…”
Dianne I love this, my image of God was a bearded man in the clouds in white gowns. Quite ridiculous really but one I grew up with, what I loved was that your pure maths professor confirmed that you can’t study pure maths without knowing God to be true. I am starting a whole new relationship with God and one that comes from my own connection with myself, its certainly been a leap forward with what Universal Medicine has presented and helped me reconnect to.
A wonderful sharing of your journey to finding God Dianne . This shows that we can hold that image of God within all our lives until we come to a point where things start to fit together. Then we know without doubt that there is indeed a God who resides within us, who is not judgemental as many would have us believe, nor an old man in the sky. but is in fact pure Love and that this is also what we are made of. With the Teachings of Serge Benhayon of the Ancient Wisdom, I know without a doubt that God is the face of Love, we can all know if we so choose.
Dianne, it is really beautiful and clear when you tell us your experiences.
Your blog prompted me to question my ‘images of God’. Like you, Dianne, I had my religious education at school, it wasn’t something that was really discussed at home. I accepted a ‘picture’ of what God looked like from the illustrations in books, a bearded man living in heaven, above the clouds. However, I felt quite detached from him and Jesus, I put the pictures to one side and as I grew older what felt true to me was that there was a higher form of existence than me that I didn’t fully understand, but I felt with certainty that in each life we have, we are at ‘life’ school, the school that really matters, learning how to evolve. It was only when I started attending Universal Medicine workshops that everything started to make sense to me and why the ‘picture’ of God that I so readily accepted without question, just didn’t feel true. God is everywhere, in each and everyone one of us, and all around us, holding us all in love. It’s up to us to develop our own relationship with God, how wide we open our hearts and how bright we shine.
‘I did not attach the name ‘God’ to my core of light and love or my conscience, as I was still in rejection of all the images of God that existed in society around me’. How exactly this describes my own journey with God Dianne! I too couldn’t handle Sunday School and refused to go and my Dad was fine with that and said ‘If there is God I feel closest to that when I am in the rain forest or down at the sea, or picnicking next to the waterfall out near Dunoon, so lets do that on a Sunday’ and I replied, yippee! I know my core of light strongly and it has nothing to do with the images of God that we were having about the world’s atmosphere like a plague. How many people must feel and have felt exactly that!
Wow wow and wow Dianne! This is the most gorgeous article. All of it has flown me away with the extraordinary and absolutely real and known detail of how thin were the pages of the hymn books! I could feel such breath of fresh air happening within me as I read the following passage of your perception of the ‘two’ worlds – the inner and the outer: ‘And there was another sanctuary, like the inner form of the outer Nature. Deep inside me, in the region of my heart, but somehow not confined by the thickness of my physical body, was a ‘place’, more like a ‘presence’. There was a core of light: an inviolable, unwavering, dependable, powerful, shining flame that could be trusted to always be there and not be tainted, destroyed, weakened or taken away no matter how dark and ugly things got around me, no matter how hurt or angry or afraid I felt; no matter how much I would have despaired of life, I had that core of light inside me. It sustained me through challenges that many of the kids in our neighbourhood did not get through.’
We get fed so many images of god and most of us do feel something doesn’t quite feel right about them. But for us to feel that way, we must know God somehow – but strangely we deny or at least question that because we think we have no evidence if there is no concrete image, or it could be that if we pretend we don’t know God we think we don’t have to acknowledge the connection we have with Him and feel how we have been living in ignorance/opposition to that.
I too believed God to be a long haired man in a white gown when I was young, but now see how God is instilled in us all and the beauty all around us that is nature. My love for God is a forever deepening relationship which starts with me and my connection first. Thank you Dianne simply amazing.
I’m so glad you took the time to write this blog, Dianne, I absolutely loved reading all that you shared and it seems particularly apt that as I read this sitting by the ocean, with the rhythmical crashing of the waves all around me, I am feeling particularly sensitive to the power and steadiness that exists in nature. It’s completely dependable. This is what I feel in my connection with God, the expansiveness of being a part of the whole and honouring my part in that in my commitment to being all of me, allowing my divinity to shine brightly. This builds a steadiness in me, with me, with God with humanity and with the All.
Dianne, it’s funny isn’t it, all religions at their core have the same basic principles yet each tries to individuate and differentiate each other and in the process they step away from those core principles, and become the falseness of religion we see in the world.
Even with all the images and information we are fed about God that is so contradictory, I have never been able to deny Gods existence and eventually thanks to Serge Benhayon and Universal Medicine I too have come to even if only minutely at this time understand the true essence of God’s endless love and my deeply intrinsic relationship with God and with my fellow human beings no matter what their beliefs may be. Thank-you Dianne for sharing your journey back to the true knowing of God.
The question that prompted this blog has initiated in me an invitation to go deeper Dianne. Reading what you have written has encapsulated much of life’s hazards that can trip us up and distract us from re-connecting to the light that exists within me and also in all others and the world around us. Thank you for choosing to put the words down on paper, I know that my pondering more deeply has only just started and because of this blog it will continue to deepen.
God lives beyond the world of images that seek to veil such majesty, order and divinity from our eyes. This great love is found deep in our inner heart as it is also found in the Universe – the Body of God – that holds us all. Our job is to peel back the layers of lies that have tried to obscure the truth of who we are, so we can live this majesty once more. Gorgeous blog Dianne, thankyou.
It is worthwhile to explore our image of God – there are so many false images fed us from our early years. And we all are exposed to these images whether or not we come from a religious family. I went through a period when I rejected God simply because I rejected the religions I had been exposed to – throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The New Age opened me to the fact of energy, though it did not feel to have a firm foundation I could grasp. Only when I was presented with a person who lived the principles of love (which we can feel and observe in action) and explained matters from a scientific, philosophical and religious perspective was my innate sense of God restored – no images required!
‘Living the principles’ and “explained matters from a scientific, philosophical and religious perspective” – precious and to the point, Anne. Practical and commonsense.
Wow, there are so many different images, ideals and beliefs about who or what God is or isn’t abound in our world. What I especially love about what you’ve shared here Dianne is the simplicity that our experience of God can be – free from images and in essence a connection from within.
Fiona, yay for simplicity! Like it’s there all along and we have constructed an ‘almighty’ complexity so big we can’t even understand what we have created ourselves…
When I first attended Universal Medicine events I too felt very uncomfortable whenever the word God was mentioned, and found it difficult to even say the word God. My image of God was so tarnished with all the ideals and beliefs around me and that I had taken on. The only true sense of God I had was the stillness, that presence I felt in nature. Now God is part of my everyday life… a knowing and presence felt within me and around me always.
Me too, Paula, it’s been Universal Medicine and Serge Benhayon that have helped clear away the last tatters of the God-allergy program from my being…
There are so many contradictory stories and information that abounds in relation to God. All your questions growing up lay it all out for consideration, and in that, none of it makes sense. It has only been since attending Universal Medicine presentations that I have come to truly understand who God is and to make sense of what I’ve felt over the years.
Diane, I can relate to squirming at the mention of God and finding it difficult to even say the word. This, like you was because of all the false ideas I had taken on about who I thought God was. It’s taken me a while to reconnect to God, which is about the same amount of time its taken me to reconnect with myself. Accepting that God is within me and so in us all has been a big step and has changed how I see God. It’s no longer as a person with grey hair sitting on a cloud, but a feeling that I can choose to connect to at any time. That feeling encompasses love, harmony stillness, joy and order.
Yeah, Debra, the squirming. I realized it wasn’t just discomfort with the untrue feel of the images, but also concern that if I even said the word ‘God’ in any favourable context I would be judged as a flaky bible-head and all the credibility I had as a respected person would just fly out the window…
Brilliantly brilliant Dianne showing us all the angles of images we can have, and how these images can drop down as snow in winter.. as they hold no true steady basis. It makes absolute sense to how you simply share all those you have re-vised or have been brought to you, yet you stayed very much with what you feel.. And hence no images could replace that true feeling within you.. Is that not an answer to your question. God must be within all of the time.
So true Danna, within all the time. I still remember the first time I heard: “The Kingdom of God is within you”, something in me lit up and leaped up with recogniton of the truth.
An awesome and fascinating read Dianne… I can so relate to the stillness in nature and within. I used to call it “the sound of silence” although the ‘sound’ is more a feeling of strong presence of stillness – all around in nature and felt within at the same time.
I know what you mean about that silence, Paula. On the occasions when I felt it, it was ‘deafening’ meaning unignorably huge and definitely ‘something’ – not just the absence of sound and motion, but a very tangible whopping big presence …
Not only do you share so much of your life story, you deliver it in the most humble way. Your upbringing sounds quite horrific on many levels, but reading about your connection to nature and to yourself in the face of all that was being presented to you about life is incredible. This has helped me appreciate all that didn’t feel right to me about religion when I was growing up, none of it made sense, and now years later I know that so much of what was fed to me simply wasn’t true….although knowing that when I was little, just not having the backing that what I felt was true.
Elodie, that ‘lack of backing’ is a good point. I’m sure just about everyone on the planet at some point goes through the questioning of what God is and so ought to be able to provide backing to each other. I’m sure most of us feel that the images are not it, even if we’re constrained to make all the ‘right movements’ in unquestioning faith and acceptance of what we’re told. A massive collusion of dishonesty. Imagine if everyone opened up and shared what they truly felt and knew inside!
WOW!! I absolutely enjoyed reading this Dianne. To be honest, when I first read the title of the post, I considered reading something else instead…because of my own allergy to talking about ‘God’…but I decided to read it anyway, knowing that the chances of this article helping me to understand more about what I’ve been avoiding was very possible.
Funny Elodie! God-allergy… yes it’s really an ‘allergy’ to the word, not to God himself. But early in the path, the two get blurred and we think we’re allergic to actual God, which is of course not true.
I had similar images of God like you’ve describe Dianne projected to me from all angles as I was growing up. They were confusing, they felt false and at one point I started to doubt what I felt, that God is real. I have found by trusting what I feel and not seek images to prove that God exist was the start of me reconnecting back to God. Now, I simply trust what I feel and allow myself to feel the truth of who God is, understanding what part I play in developing my reconnection and return to God. To me, God is formless, no images can match his presence, and I can feel he is with me in every moment when I connect to truth and to my stillness from within.
Formless, true, so simple and obvious really. If God created everything, then God must be not a ‘creation’ too, as nothing can be less than what it is! Created form can only be less than, and within, formlessness which is greater.
I love how you shared about getting the Mormons and Jehovas Witnesses running away with your questions about God that could not be answered. Very exposing when this happens – to me it shows that so many of us are very confused with all the information we have been given about religion, and some of us have swallowed it without questioning it and actually sitting with it and feeling what feels ‘right’ for us and not. This is a great can of worms topic to open up to everyone for discussion. We need to share (and hence expose) all the images of God we each have (which are false) so that we can get closer to a real understanding of who and what ‘he’ is and how we are all a part of the big picture too. For if we know that these images are false, then surely we must have known at some point the truth of God, and the Godliness within us…in reality I see it more as a journey of acceptance – acceptance of the truth we actually do know and acceptance of the Godliness within each of us.
Good call, Henrietta! Let’s everyone share the images of God they were fed – I’ll bet there are many more than what we’ve discussed here so far….
Simply brilliant Diane; a great blog, that for me, as one who is still developing my relationship with God, that I know will be returned to often. There is so much of what you have written that I can easily relate to, especially as I had some of the same experiences around God and religion as I was growing up, and definitely asked many of the same questions about the God that was being presented to me. These days I can see clearly that I first begun to understand the majesty but simplicity of God in nature and the cycles of life, but what I felt and saw was in total conflict to what I was being told by some of those closest to me, that there was no God. I know that there is so much more to explore and expand on in my relationship with God and that is a knowing that brings a smile to my face and a warmth from my heart.
Majesty is a great word Ingrid, and also is how I felt about nature I saw all around me, and the science I learned underneath the visible. I could never accept that ‘random mindless processes’ could generate the incredible level of order, connectedness, and synchronization seen in the universe from the biggest to the smallest. And consciousness – well, no way that could be a random ‘noise’ phenomenon!
Diane, this grey haired man up on a throne in the sky or the big hand coming down to point its finger accusingly is such a common image of God, and one that I too have ‘seen’ in my mind, Yet it is utterly ridiculous and makes no sense whatsoever. It’s funny how such images can be given to us to keep us distracted from the real deal.
Like 7 billion people distracted from the real deal – can’t be an accident!
Hello Dianne and I will have to come back to your blog. You raise a great question which brings some funny pictures for me, “What is image of God?” For me growing up in a catholic household I think of Jesus Christ or Yeshua as God. He is the first image that pops into my head when I think of that question. I find it funny to search my head for this answer because I have no real image for him, God that is. We were taught that he was everywhere but I never really knew what that meant and I use to look for him in people’s faces and things. When I was young I fully expected God to show his face within another person, a person within a person. I was very confused growing up with all this and for me the church didn’t help often giving more questions than answers. Looking back now I can smile, but at the time the whole thing was very, very confusing. Like with other things Serge Benhayon ironed a few of these confusions out, not directly one on one, but in his presentations. I wasn’t really looking for answers but more understanding to the things I already knew and couldn’t quite grab hold of fully. Thanks Dianne and I will be back.
I’ve heard that – but they mean Jesus Christ is God in a way that no-one else ever can be!
I have had the experience that I have an image of what God is like, or how it feels to be with God. I have worked through at one point in my life, not wanting to say the word, name God. I am relating that my relationship with God, and so of God, is in the details of life, how I move, how I breathe, how I feel, whether I am open to the symbols and signs that are all around me and within me.
I agree, Samantha, God in everything, not just ‘up there’…