God
is Necessary
“Unless
God enters into daily decisions and, furthermore, brings about better
results than doing without God, the divine will be at most an add-on
to modern life. Any version of God that is personal, incidental,
occasional, fickle, or unknowable cannot be a God I'd call
necessary.”
Deepak
Chopra (“Making God Necessary” Parabola, Winter 2018, p.19)
In this article in the
Winter, 2018 edition of Parabola magazine, Deepak Chopra writes that
in order to make God necessary, “there is a journey from belief
to faith, and from faith to knowledge.” Belief is step one—the
launching point for examining the possibility that there are powers
in the universe beyond our human understanding, and that these powers
can be relevant and impactful on our everyday lives. In order to
actualize belief, however, we must acquire faith. We have faith only
when we have personal experience of the work of “God” in the
world. That is, when we experience—usually because we have been
unable to steer the stars ourselves— truly letting go and asking
for help from an impersonal universal source, and that help
materializes. We don't see those events with some kind of miraculous
vision, we see them with our eyes, hear them with our ears in this
everyday world. As Chopra says, “To see angels requires the same
visual cortex as seeing a cow.” In other words, we don't create
those experiences inside our heads—they actually happen in time and
space.
Once we begin to
understand that faith is not something unique to any one group of
“believers” we can gain knowledge of the reality of the divine in
our world. We can walk through our day-to-day experience, regardless
of what is going on around us, with assurance (faith) that the
presence of the divine is real and active, and we can call upon it
for guidance any time we choose. In fact, it becomes as necessary as
food, clothing and shelter to our well-being. We will never find true
security by acquiring more material wealth or by surrounding
ourselves with the technology of fear. We will find security when we
have true understanding that our lives have purpose and meaning, and
that we are connected at all times and in all circumstances with the
most potent power in the universe—that power that we call God.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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