Question: How do you define God?
Andrew Cohen: Okay. Well, I- also I always give a caveat. I say, “Well, I’ve been teaching for 22 years.” I said, “For most of that time I never used that particular word because it usually would bring up notions of some kind of mythical figure that doesn’t exist anymore and that never really did exist.” So I always- I keep reminding people that there’s no one out there and there’s no one up there. The way I describe what God is I say that God is the sum totality of everything that exists and doesn’t exist. So the sum totality of everything that exists and doesn’t exist we could say is being and becoming. Being represents the unmanifest empty ground or void from which the material universe sprung forth 14 billion years ago and becoming is the entire manifest cosmos. So the unmanifest and the manifest as being and becoming, that entirety, the totality of everything that is and is not, is what I would say what God is. And then finally I would say that in evolutionary spirituality and in evolutionary enlightenment we want- we begin to put a great deal of attention on the becoming or eros, the becoming and the urge to become side of who and what God is because I think for the individual at the leading edge at the beginning of the 21st century that- the created impulse, the ecstatically urgent desire to be here and to- as the greater process I think is the most important aspect of who and what God is for us to realize right now.
Question: How do you define Love?
Andrew Cohen: Well, the answer is absolutely yes but there are different forms and expressions of love, of what love is, so the love that a mother feels for her child is very different than the kind of love that a lover feels to his beloved, which is very different than the kind of impersonal absolute love that is the very nature of what God actually is.
Recorded on: 04/28/2008
Discuss
Musycks on May 29, 2008, 3:27 PM
On what basis does this guy make claims of the nature of god?… westerners have been trying to match up eastern esoteric thought for hundreds of years with monotheistic fairy floss like 'god is love'.. and here's another.
Only a matter of time until he's playing Radio City Music Hall like the Dalai Lama last year!
McBhuddism anyone?
Musycks on May 29, 2008, 7:27 PM
On what basis does this guy make claims of the nature of god?… westerners have been trying to match up eastern esoteric thought for hundreds of years with monotheistic fairy floss like ‘god is love’.. and here’s another.
Only a matter of time until he’s playing Radio City Music Hall like the Dalai Lama last year!
McBhuddism anyone?
Jeff Delano on May 29, 2008, 10:25 PM
My guess is the eastern esoteric community was more right than the monotheists all along but the source can be called whatever, so the monotheist converts call it God anyways by habit.
Ex-monotheist atheists tend to still think that when the esoteric community calls this source God they think it is some father figure up in the clouds that the monotheists have instilled in to your minds. The truth is, is that this guy's God is not the same God of the monotheists at all.
Musycks on May 30, 2008, 1:55 AM
JD… you'll find very 'eastern' threads of thought through all the monotheistic faiths as far back nearly as Moses. Same with the gnostic Xtians, same with some streams of Islam… where god is 'the void','silence' or 'nothing' etc.. the uncaused cause.. it's just that the church bureaucrats usually foisted a more 'unsophisticated' variation on the masses. Esoteric thought has never been the sole preserve of the east.
Jeff Delano on May 30, 2008, 2:25 AM
My guess is the eastern esoteric community was more right than the monotheists all along but the source can be called whatever, so the monotheist converts call it God anyways by habit.
Ex-monotheist atheists tend to still think that when the esoteric community calls this source God they think it is some father figure up in the clouds that the monotheists have instilled in to your minds. The truth is, is that this guy’s God is not the same God of the monotheists at all.
Musycks on May 30, 2008, 5:55 AM
JD… you’ll find very ‘eastern’ threads of thought through all the monotheistic faiths as far back nearly as Moses. Same with the gnostic Xtians, same with some streams of Islam… where god is ‘the void’,‘silence’ or ‘nothing’ etc.. the uncaused cause.. it’s just that the church bureaucrats usually foisted a more ‘unsophisticated’ variation on the masses. Esoteric thought has never been the sole preserve of the east.
sciencesaves on May 31, 2008, 6:31 AM
I always thought that the invisible man premise was a concept that was used for children so they could better grasp the idea's that were being forced upon them.
sciencesaves on May 31, 2008, 10:31 AM
I always thought that the invisible man premise was a concept that was used for children so they could better grasp the idea’s that were being forced upon them.
Luke Allen on June 12, 2008, 8:20 PM
PLEASE go to www.strippingthegurus.com and read what this man really claims. It is free to read and his section is in chap. xxi (11)
Luke Allen on June 13, 2008, 12:20 AM
PLEASE go to www.strippingthegurus.com and read what this man really claims. It is free to read and his section is in chap. xxi (11)
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