Life for God/What Is God?

What Is God?

Vladimir Antonov

In order to understand how we can live for God, we must first understand — what is God.

We have discussed this subject in detail and from different aspects in many of our books [5-9,12-13,15-23,27-36,38-40,42-43 and others]. Therefore, I will speak about it here in a concise form.

First of all, one needs to understand that the word God has different meanings for different people.

There are many examples of worship of fictitious “gods”. Apostle Philip [17] laughed at such believers, writing: “Earthly people also create ‘gods’ and worship their creations. So, let these ‘gods’ worship these people — it would be just!”

There are, however, several adequate uses and meanings of the word God.

The first one of these meanings is the Universal Primordial Consciousness, Which is also called, in different human languages, by other words: The Creator, God the Father, Ishvara, Allah, Tao, Jehovah, Svarog, etc.

One may also use this same word for the Representatives of the Primordial Consciousness, Who come out from the Abode of the Creator and are coessential to Him. They can be either presently incarnate or non-incarnate. When they are non-incarnate, They are called Holy Spirits (or in the aggregate sense — the Holy Spirit or Brahman). If, however, They are incarnate, They are called by the words: Messiah, Christ, or Avatar.

The word God can mean also the Absolute, i.e., absolutely Everything: the Creator coessential with His Creation.

God in the Aspects of the Primordial Consciousness and of the Absolute, is one for the entire universe.

His Life is an unceasing development. It is for this purpose that He creates “islands” of material world where He incarnates souls — so that they may grow in the material organic bodies of plants, animals, and then humans. As a result of this development, souls must achieve Perfection. Such Perfect Souls then flow into the Creator and thus enrich Him with Themselves.

It is for this purpose that we exist on the Earth, and only on the basis of this knowledge can we understand the meaning of our lives on this planet and how we should live.

Briefly speaking, the meaning of our lives consists in self-development: development of oneself for one’s own sake (so that one may become free from the suffering peculiar to life on the Earth) and for the sake of God (as it was discussed above). The result of this process of self-development is the ultimate Freedom — the Freedom peculiar to all the Representatives of the Creator, Who comprise in total the United We (Which is the same as the United Higher “I” of the Creator). [17-20 and others]

Every person, in a natural way, begins self-development first in the aspects which are related to the material body, then in the aspects related to the mind, and then — to the consciousness.

* * *

Space is really multidimensional. The same is true with the Absolute.

The layers of multidimensionality are called lokas in Sanskrit and eons in Greek. They differ from each other by the level of their subtlety or coarseness. Therefore, they may be analyzed by using a subtlety-coarseness scale.

On this scale, the subtlest is the Creator; the coarsest are the inhabitants of hell.

The Creator dwells in His Abode — in the subtlest loka.

As for hell, it is the “rubbish heap” of the Evolutionary Process. It is the outer darkness, as Jesus Christ called it (Matt 8:12 and others): it is outer with respect to the Absolute.

Our emotions are the states of ourselves as consciousnesses (souls). If we habituate ourselves to emotional coarseness, we appear in hell. On the contrary, the way to the Creator implies refinement of the consciousness.

What is paradise? It is the abode of those ethically pure and refined souls who can come into the Abode of the Creator at the next evolutionary stage.