1. God is both manifest as the totality and all-ness of creation and unmanifest as the Godhead, the infinite potentiality and source (voidness) prior to form.

2. God is infinite, beyond time, space, locality and without beginning or end.

3. God is omnipresent. The same as all-ness. God is omnipotent. The same as all powerful. God is omniscient. The same as all-knowing.

4. God is the substrate and source of consciousness, awareness and knowingness.

5. God is the sole source of life. God is the sole source of life energy.

6. Evolution occurs in consciousness and then manifest in form.

7. God is the source of evolution and creation, which are identical, ever-continuous and ongoing into this moment.

8. God is the source and essence of peace, love, stillness, and beauty.

9. God is beyond all universes, all materiality, all galaxies, and yet the source (rather than cause) of All That Is.

10. God is the sole source of existence and the potentiality of Being-ness.

11. God is the ultimate context of which the universe and all that exists is the content.

12. God is the a priori formless source of existence within all form. Within the illusion of form is non-form, which is the essence of form, without which form could not exist.

13. God is not within the preview of the provable or the intellect. That which is provable by the intellect or reason could, by definition, not be God.

14. God is the source and essence of the subjective state of �I-ness� called Enlightenment.

15. God is the radical subjectivity of Self-Realization.

16. God is descriptively both imminent and transcendent and those two terms are merely artifacts of vocabulary.

17. The human experience of the Presence of God is the same in all ages, all cultures, all localities. The effect on human consciousness of the experience of the Presence of God is subjectively transformative and identical throughout history.

18. The essence of God does not include human frailties such as partiality, controllingness, duality, judgmentalism, vindictiveness, retaliation, wrath, righteous anger, vanity, resentment, limitation, arbitrariness, revenge, jealousy, vulnerability, or locality.

19. The variabilities in depictions of divinity reflect the variabilities of human perception and the human ego.

20. When the obstacles of human mentation, emotionality, and the ego structure from which they arise are transcended, the Self is God imminent. The divinity within shines forth as the essence of ones own sense of �I� as the Self. The Self shines forth just as the sun shines forth when the clouds are removed.

21. God is the context and source of the karmic unity of all creation.

OK, to get this thread recognized in this forum (I'm deleting it in the other).

- I like a lot of what the statements assert . . . a few are over-the-top, however (#17, for example, is just not so).

- For addenda, see this thread on the Trinity. For Christians, this understanding of God comes from revelation--what we believe God has told us about GodSelf.

- I realize the thread title is deliberately provocative, but I'll state the obvious anyway: there are no "facts" about God. #13 makes this point, but that didn't deter the author.

- Speaking of author . . . your list, TBiscuit? Not bad!

Hey Phil,

BTW. I really enjoy this message board. Thanks for putting up with my antics. I'm learning a lot.

I changed the title because I tracked down the source. It was from a lecture by Hawkins at the Creative Life Center in Sedona in 2002.

Facts though, (the title was 21 Facts About God) can be stated about anything that has a Reality. Facts about morality for example are not facts, because the moral dimension is completely mind-made, has no True Reality, and varies depending on who you think you are.

Facts ABOUT something with a True Reality, however, can be stated. If you want to KNOW ABOUT something, you can read a list like this, but the KNOWING ABOUT is not the state of KNOWING. The state of KNOWING is beyond the preview of the intellect, as 13 states. If it was said that 'Fact #13' WAS or IS God, that would be incorrect.

What's wrong with #17? All of man is on the same earth, has the same sun, same sky, same body type, same wet times, dry times, hot times. We all have an East, West, North, South, and moon. Plants grow around us. We all eat, drink, poo, pee. We all laugh, cry, love, die, live.

What makes you think we would not all have the same Presence of God?

TBiscuit, I'm glad to hear that you're enjoying the discussions.

So, this is from Hawkins? He used the term "facts"? That's just more of the same idiosyncratic use of words, for everywhere in the world, it is generally agreed that the word "facts" means data that can be empircially verified, or else an indisuputable, incontestable truth. It's impossible to apply the term to God, as it cannot be empirically verified or indisputably proven that God even exists, much less that God is such or so. See the problem?

Why would we not all have the same Presence of God?

You don't even have the same presence of an individual human being, so why of God? Our experience of another depends much on the kind of openness and receptivity we bring to the encounter. Saying that the world religions have difference experiences of God isn't saying anything about God's presence, but of the various kinds of faiths with which we approach God. For example, those who approach God as relational Partner and discover that God is so have a different experience of God than Zen people who strive to awaken to sacred presence in the ground of their being. We have a lot of discussion about all this in the thread on Enlightenment in the Spirituality Issues forum.

Missed a point
Facts about morality for example are not facts, because the moral dimension is completely mind-made, has no True Reality, and varies depending on who you think you are.

Why should the basic moral sensibilities concerning good and evil found all over the world be considered "completely mind-made?" Why not consider that maybe the mind is apprehending an order of right-relations that actually exists, and the violation of which would endanger the human species. After all, the mind evolved along with the rest of is; assuming that all its conceptualization and judgments are completely arbitrary or only in the service of a deluded ego seems an equally arbitrary assumption, imo.

quote:

Facts about morality for example are not facts, because the moral dimension is completely mind-made, has no True Reality, and varies depending on who you think you are.

#21 reads: "21. God is the context and source of the karmic unity of all creation."

Karmic unity implies order, doesn't it? Even a moral order? Why would there be negative karma if no lawfulness (morality, right relationships) in the universe? #21 connects this with God, so we could say that going against karmic unity would be a good way to understand sin?

- Mike