Originally Posted By: Warren


Yes experience does include feeling (of the heart) as well as intellect and that, to the extent it is positive, is connecting to the divine. All experience/feeling has some positive feeling (hopefulness/faith) and negative (hopelessness/despair).

If you are going by feelings then God becomes relative to what one decides is good for themselves and for all. Some people who have in the past decided for the masses what is good for the soul, have a reputation of being less than interested in what everyone gets out of ones personal ideals and agenda. Then there are those who live a life of sacrifice without the need to feel good and think suffering is the high road to God.
Originally Posted By: Warren

That is how I would measure closeness to the divine nature, or being. But we are never entirely apart from divine creativity. Guess you could call it my ideals, but life goodness (quality/quantity for the maximum number— utilitarian) seems self-evident.
Goodness for someone on an evolutionary path includes all that is complete to experience and knowledge. Knowing both the experience of what is described and felt as good and bad. The divine nature then being in both, and equally God, requires a greater objectivity in awareness to be observant of the divine in both, and not bound by the qualities of either aspects or any of the conditions of duality.
If you are going to measure God by your good feelings then you will naturally discount anything you don't like and label it as counter to God. Appreciation of those things that expand the intellect and nervous system are ignored by the attachment to good feelings even tho we know that not all that creates growth is pleasant to the attachments of ego.
This idealism is what drives awareness into systems of belief and dogma, away from absolutes and toward illusion.
Then you have trouble when you measure yours against another, and unity becomes elusive as well as reclusive because of differing opinions.

Then as Ellis says. God becomes a human construct. As people go to war over their ideal feelings they assume God is on their side because they feel good about themselves and their fight.

Before you decided what God is, God already was, and will extend itself by its nature beyond any containment or feeling you want to measure God by, even after your attachments to your ideals are outlived by your mortal beliefs in death. People have feelings but they are not their feelings. Neither is God. Spirit is beyond feeling good or bad.


I was addicted to the Hokey Pokey, but then I turned myself around!!