RoyLennigan
Registered Senior Member
I talk with God every day of my life
First I must listen, because knowledge always begins with listening.
I listen to the wind blow across my ears--I hear its raggedly fluctuating oscillations as they are affected by the shape of my ear.
I hear the leaves blown to and fro, the branches creaking under age-old pressure; the kinds of pressure that have been here millions of times the length of my miniscule life--if life is what it can be called.
Listening does not only include just sound, but touch, smell, taste, and sight as well:
I feel the central Floridian sand give way under my feet, that sand which was once at the bottom of the ocean, evidenced by the shark teeth I recently found in a nearby creek.
I smell the musty, thick ozone brought down from the upper altitudes by the recent thunderstorm--those pieces of O3 which rode the lightning down to earth. The air is thick with oxygen, nitrogen and water vapor, flooding my lungs and making me feel as if I am partly underwater.
I can almost taste the chemicals, that strange similarity of taste/smell between tongue and nose as I feel the chemicals carried on the wind reach both my sensual chemical detectors.
I feel warm rays heating up my back as the humidity, receding from nearly 100%, allows electrical energy to pass more readily through the fluid air. I feel the sun revealed by departing clouds as my skin heats up and a red glow brightens over my closed eyelids.
I open my eyes and the first thing i notice is the brilliant yellow lighting up the deep green tree line. The tops of the pines and oaks--like masts of a great ship of nature--wave back and forth as great gusts of wind push a monumental cumulus mountain across the sky. I see the cloud is dark, but waning after leaving most of its water here.
I listen and God tells me that everything is a cause of something just as every cause is an effect. He does not use words, he is too powerful, too intelligent to use mere words. He knows that words are deceiving and that the only truth is what we can see and touch and smell and hear and taste. So he uses these things to talk to us.
And so, after listening, I talk back.
I ask him in my thoughts, why do birds fly south for the winter?
it was the first thought that crossed my mind, maybe not the most monumental thing to ask god, but I did nonetheless.
And no answer came. Time passed and still no answer came. I looked to the sky, I looked to the ground. Time progressed still and finally I heard birds calling from above. looking up I saw them flocking south, from as far away as Maine and Canada. But why?. And a chill wind blew from behind me, from the north. A few dead leaves fell and winter flashed through my mind. God had answered me.
So I ask him another question. why is the sky blue?
this one, I knew instinctively, was quite harder, though the difficulty was not in God answering it, but in God finding a way to show me the answer. Again I had to wait. After waiting an even longer period than before I noticed a blue jay fluttering around in the grass. it would fly up to a tree branch, then dive down to the ground and begin to dig till it came up with a worm, then it would fly back to some hidden nest. it made me think. This bird does not wait for answers from God, it knows, instinctively, that the answers are already present and must be sought out personally. So I took the advice from the bird (which may as well have been advice straight from God, it didn’t matter) and I set out to find the answer to my question; an answer which God had put somewhere in this world (for every available question, there must also be an answer, that is how the world works). I figured the best place to find an answer would be where I could see as much of the sky as possible. So I went to the beach. It was morning when I arrived and the sky was cloudless, a brilliantly deep blue, stretching a spectrum from azure baby blue around the horizon to dark navy blue above me. The sun of course turned that navy blue to white as the rays distorted colors. I found all of this very curious and somehow important to the answer of my question. Why, for one, should the sky be a different color near the horizon than it is straight over head? I watched the sun go over me and sink towards the western horizon, the side over the water of the gulf. As it did I noticed how as the sun set, the colors deepened to paler shades of blue until it began to turn brown and then a brighter orange. Very curious indeed. where once there had been navy blue above me, there now was a deep purple that faded into the dark navy blue behind me, on the opposite horizon from the setting sun. So there was still blue in the sky, but why? I put my hand down in the sand and jolted it back up again quickly with pain. Looking down i saw that I had cut it on a piece of glass buried in the beach. I pulled it out, looking at it and was about to throw in away when it caught at just the right angle in the light and sent a rainbow of color onto the sand. Beautiful, I thought. It was then that i realized something. It was as if two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle had snapped together in my mind. The white light of the sun was still shining down to me and the glass shard and when I held the glass up to it I could see the light fragmenting into these separate colors. I looked up at the colors in the sky and saw a visual analogy. God had answered my question, but now I had to make sense of it. Studying the colors made through the glass i found blue and saw that it was near the end of the spectrum, followed only by a deep violet color--the same color I was now seeing directly above my head in the clouds. I began to laugh when I realized the answer. The light in the sun held many different frequencies and when they traveled through a medium other than a vacuum--such as the gases in our atmosphere or the glass shard in my hand--those frequencies traveled at different speeds. So the earth's atmosphere acted exactly like the piece of glass; it caused the light to be spread out and since the atmosphere was so big, the other colors just bounced off particles in the air, leaving only the blue part of the spectrum to hit the earth. As the sun set--as the angle of the rays coming to earth changed--the spectrum also moved with it and the colors reaching earth through the atmosphere moved through the spectrum.
I have found, by listening to others (something you must always do) that everyone has a different definition of God. God must transcend the individuals' definition of him, but how? Through our use of language, we are able to imagine entities and ideas that are not real--in fact every thought we have is of something completely made up in our minds. It only loosely relates to the reality around us. Our direct experience and memories are the only definition we have of God, and it is something that cannot be told to another person; it is something we each have to find on our own.
God is time, time is change, change is diversity, diversity is chaos. God is entropy, entropy brings all to chaos and diversity eventually. God is space, space is the inherent energy of the universe, an energy that can't be tracked down but can be theoretically measured, an energy that determines--through probability--the outcome of every minute event in this universe.
First I must listen, because knowledge always begins with listening.
I listen to the wind blow across my ears--I hear its raggedly fluctuating oscillations as they are affected by the shape of my ear.
I hear the leaves blown to and fro, the branches creaking under age-old pressure; the kinds of pressure that have been here millions of times the length of my miniscule life--if life is what it can be called.
Listening does not only include just sound, but touch, smell, taste, and sight as well:
I feel the central Floridian sand give way under my feet, that sand which was once at the bottom of the ocean, evidenced by the shark teeth I recently found in a nearby creek.
I smell the musty, thick ozone brought down from the upper altitudes by the recent thunderstorm--those pieces of O3 which rode the lightning down to earth. The air is thick with oxygen, nitrogen and water vapor, flooding my lungs and making me feel as if I am partly underwater.
I can almost taste the chemicals, that strange similarity of taste/smell between tongue and nose as I feel the chemicals carried on the wind reach both my sensual chemical detectors.
I feel warm rays heating up my back as the humidity, receding from nearly 100%, allows electrical energy to pass more readily through the fluid air. I feel the sun revealed by departing clouds as my skin heats up and a red glow brightens over my closed eyelids.
I open my eyes and the first thing i notice is the brilliant yellow lighting up the deep green tree line. The tops of the pines and oaks--like masts of a great ship of nature--wave back and forth as great gusts of wind push a monumental cumulus mountain across the sky. I see the cloud is dark, but waning after leaving most of its water here.
I listen and God tells me that everything is a cause of something just as every cause is an effect. He does not use words, he is too powerful, too intelligent to use mere words. He knows that words are deceiving and that the only truth is what we can see and touch and smell and hear and taste. So he uses these things to talk to us.
And so, after listening, I talk back.
I ask him in my thoughts, why do birds fly south for the winter?
it was the first thought that crossed my mind, maybe not the most monumental thing to ask god, but I did nonetheless.
And no answer came. Time passed and still no answer came. I looked to the sky, I looked to the ground. Time progressed still and finally I heard birds calling from above. looking up I saw them flocking south, from as far away as Maine and Canada. But why?. And a chill wind blew from behind me, from the north. A few dead leaves fell and winter flashed through my mind. God had answered me.
So I ask him another question. why is the sky blue?
this one, I knew instinctively, was quite harder, though the difficulty was not in God answering it, but in God finding a way to show me the answer. Again I had to wait. After waiting an even longer period than before I noticed a blue jay fluttering around in the grass. it would fly up to a tree branch, then dive down to the ground and begin to dig till it came up with a worm, then it would fly back to some hidden nest. it made me think. This bird does not wait for answers from God, it knows, instinctively, that the answers are already present and must be sought out personally. So I took the advice from the bird (which may as well have been advice straight from God, it didn’t matter) and I set out to find the answer to my question; an answer which God had put somewhere in this world (for every available question, there must also be an answer, that is how the world works). I figured the best place to find an answer would be where I could see as much of the sky as possible. So I went to the beach. It was morning when I arrived and the sky was cloudless, a brilliantly deep blue, stretching a spectrum from azure baby blue around the horizon to dark navy blue above me. The sun of course turned that navy blue to white as the rays distorted colors. I found all of this very curious and somehow important to the answer of my question. Why, for one, should the sky be a different color near the horizon than it is straight over head? I watched the sun go over me and sink towards the western horizon, the side over the water of the gulf. As it did I noticed how as the sun set, the colors deepened to paler shades of blue until it began to turn brown and then a brighter orange. Very curious indeed. where once there had been navy blue above me, there now was a deep purple that faded into the dark navy blue behind me, on the opposite horizon from the setting sun. So there was still blue in the sky, but why? I put my hand down in the sand and jolted it back up again quickly with pain. Looking down i saw that I had cut it on a piece of glass buried in the beach. I pulled it out, looking at it and was about to throw in away when it caught at just the right angle in the light and sent a rainbow of color onto the sand. Beautiful, I thought. It was then that i realized something. It was as if two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle had snapped together in my mind. The white light of the sun was still shining down to me and the glass shard and when I held the glass up to it I could see the light fragmenting into these separate colors. I looked up at the colors in the sky and saw a visual analogy. God had answered my question, but now I had to make sense of it. Studying the colors made through the glass i found blue and saw that it was near the end of the spectrum, followed only by a deep violet color--the same color I was now seeing directly above my head in the clouds. I began to laugh when I realized the answer. The light in the sun held many different frequencies and when they traveled through a medium other than a vacuum--such as the gases in our atmosphere or the glass shard in my hand--those frequencies traveled at different speeds. So the earth's atmosphere acted exactly like the piece of glass; it caused the light to be spread out and since the atmosphere was so big, the other colors just bounced off particles in the air, leaving only the blue part of the spectrum to hit the earth. As the sun set--as the angle of the rays coming to earth changed--the spectrum also moved with it and the colors reaching earth through the atmosphere moved through the spectrum.
I have found, by listening to others (something you must always do) that everyone has a different definition of God. God must transcend the individuals' definition of him, but how? Through our use of language, we are able to imagine entities and ideas that are not real--in fact every thought we have is of something completely made up in our minds. It only loosely relates to the reality around us. Our direct experience and memories are the only definition we have of God, and it is something that cannot be told to another person; it is something we each have to find on our own.
God is time, time is change, change is diversity, diversity is chaos. God is entropy, entropy brings all to chaos and diversity eventually. God is space, space is the inherent energy of the universe, an energy that can't be tracked down but can be theoretically measured, an energy that determines--through probability--the outcome of every minute event in this universe.
You're a contemplating kind of person.