Definitions of God

God is surely dead, according to any traditional notions.  But "god" continues to live as a word; consequently, it is up to those of us dedicated to capricious semantics to usurp the word for our own delight and future transformations.  So, below, sadoo diaper offers some new definitions of God, in his attempt to re-create divinity in his own image.

1. God is that which most fully can not and never be described; that which most fully has not, does not, and can never exist.

2. God is desire, the waiting for that which may never come.  That which we desire, but do not obtain--the ever-present unknown--is God.

3. Each moment judges the other and finds it wanting; the collection of all these moments is the judgment of God.  Stories are formed from the two gaps that define the human:  the gap between the least a person is able to achieve and the most, and the gap between what a person achieves and what that person longs for.  The first gap is a subset of the second gap.  The second gap is God.

4. In our nightmares, we live our fears of losing what we have.  In our daydreams, we live our hopes of gaining what we do not have.  The union of our nightmares and daydreams, of what we possess and lack, is God.  We stand between, forever in the same position, at the midpoint of fear and desire--the opposite of God.

5. God, from a psychoanalytical perspective, is nothing other than the male fear of female beauty organized into a deity.  But psychoanalysis is only one lens in the fly-eye of God, even as each definition is only one lens in an eye of infinite lenses.

6. Everything can kill us--restraint, abandon, prudence, whimsy, intelligence, stupidity, solitude, society, justice, injustice, religion, atheism, thought, emptiness.  We tell stories about what has killed or might kill, but these are attempts to order the chaos at the guts of life and death.  God is this everything.

7. The artist’s call is to directly experience beauty and pain and to transform this dual experience into a unified work.  This experience is the experience of God.

8. One can only be in relation to two things:  zero and infinity.  The first is the mystic, the second the philanderer.  Meister Eckhart and Don Juan.  Everyone else—the majority—deny the fact of the choice of these two relations and thus exist continually in no relation:  ones in relation to ones.  Here is the hope, the messianic hope, the hope of both physics and poetry:  the one who would be in equal relation to both zero and infinity continuously.  In short, God.

9. God is cabbage soup on a cold day.

10. The nameless wants to be named, for the nameless perceives that to be named is an increase in power; but the nameless moves at its peak power the closer to namelessness it remains; energy is most concentrated in the nameless.  The more something is named, the more it repeats itself in its addiction to remain named.  God is that which is not tempted to become named.

11. God is what is created from the sight of the gap between our attitude toward the universe and the universe’s lack of an attitude toward us.

12. God is that which muddles yes and no.  As that which is perpetually creation and apocalypse--never that thing in-between:  time--God scatters and melds the categories, without intent.  Humanity is the intent.

13. God is that which overcomes passion by means of passion, offering justifications for this overcoming.  We call these justifications myth.  We are now myth’s partially conscious co-creators; hence, our present potency and malaise.

14. In music and sound, there are pitches below and above human capability of hearing; so in painting and color, there are portions of the spectrum invisible to the human eye.  God is that which, in literature and language, falls outside of human thought.

Tao Te Ching IX

Rather than fill it to the brim by keeping it upright

better to have stopped in time.

Hammer it to a point

and the sharpness cannot be preserved forever.

There may be gold and jade to fill a hall

but there is none who can keep them.

To be overbearing when one has wealth and position

will bring calamity upon oneself.

To retire when the task is accomplished

is the way of heaven.

Because nothing lasts, should one attempt nothing?  Because power is given to abuse and ponderousness, should one avoid it?  When greatness and beauty have frequently emerged from stretching capability and resistance to and past known limits but have as or more frequently destroyed and torn, should one walk some tepid middle way?  Because the Tao is natural and human nature is excessive, is this not a contradiction?  Does not that sage of the imagination correlate wisdom and excess?  Did not an older suffering sage destroy the correlation between morality and justice? 

These are the questions of one who doesn’t walk the Tao, who forgets the sage is ruthless and the body is neither to be succumbed to nor negated (though sometimes it is to be succumbed to or negated) but accepted.  Who neglects the Tao’s contradictions, both internal and external, and systematizes, simplifies, verbalizes what cannot be systematized, simplified, verbalized.  Who translates transience into apathy, the perversions of wealth into poverty, and the proclivities of power into cheap victimization and hermitic retreat from the world’s bloody scrimmage.

Why is there poverty and wealth, male and female, wisdom and foolishness, moderation and excess, full and empty, blunt and sharp, calamity and calm?  The Tao includes all and denies none.  So the sage includes all, denies none.  Whereas the one who is moderate requires excess external to him, even as the wealthy require the poor, and calm calamity, the sage, by including all within herself, is able to stop when it is time to stop.  She mirrors the totality of the world within herself.

Does she attempt to create more sages?  Does she evangelize?  Does she strive to expand enlightenment and share heaven’s wisdom with those of earth?  Why should she? 

The Tao Te Ching is not a guidebook for CEOs, bums, bakers, programmers, strippers, or fools, but for sages.

To retire when the task is accomplished might be the way of heaven:  however, we are on earth and on earth the task is never accomplished.  The sage, however, walks the way of heaven.  Not because she is superior, but because she is a sage and this is what sages do.