[...] While I attempted to sleep, one idea from among many sprang out at me, literally shocking me: ‘We are IN God. [...] For suddenly I felt being-in-God as being-in-a-house. [...]

[...] But almost immediately came the oddest feeling of fantastic security, and I realized that being inside God … we were literally made of God-stuff and were therefore eternal.

[...] I began to dress, still aware of the inside-God feeling. [...] The birds were the gods singing! [...]

[...] And inside God or not, here I was, quite capable of thinking in such mundane terms. [...]

[...] You see, I am not using a flower, and the onion comes up and it insists that it must know who God is and where He is that makes him grow. And so our onion, with the full vitality within it to grow from the inside out, as all things grow, instead looks at the fine carrot next to him, and such a lovely hue, and examines the carrot in his mind to see if this is God. [...] And the tree is much larger so surely, the tree must be God. Aha, but the tree does not look like an onion so, therefore, the tree could not be God. God instead must be a giant onion, a beautiful giant onion, and so our poor and stupid little onion spends all its life waiting for this giant perfection of an onion to come by and save it. [...]

[...] It does not think, ah, there is a bad (word missing) in Elmira, New York and, by God and Jesus Christ, we are going to save her for her own sake. [...]

There will be an evolution of it, and an evolution of all religion as the people realize that the God is within them. [...]

[...] Some believe that suffering is a punishment sent by God for past or present sins, or even omissions, while other religious schools insist that suffering is sent by God as evidence of his particular love for the individual involved: “God must love you very much, because he sent you so much suffering.” [...]

[...] Their implications were that God loved Jane more than he loved them, and would reveal this in heaven. [...]

(Ron:] “So there would be no contradiction in that if you conceive of God consisting of all personalities, then as individual personalities progress up through different realities then He would eventually become in His identity God in that God is All That Is.”)

Except that God is always more than All That Is, is the sum that you cannot find and for my definition of God I, therefore, leave you with that one for God is the sum that you cannot find, that resides within you, that is more than anything you can discover, that is his creations and yet more than that which is created within; whom infinities rest. [...]

I have tried to explain the God concept in many ways, using different vocabularies, speaking very simply; and yet because of the subject matter I see that it is not understood. [...]

[...] The individuals then accept this projection upon themselves—the heroes, in other words, or the gods, or the prophets, or the kings. [...]

[...] Many religious people believe that a god exists in a larger dimension of reality, and that he created the universe while being himself outside of it. [...]

[...] Either God “made it,” or physical matter, in some unexplained manner, was formed after an initial explosion of energy, and consciousness emerged from that initially dead matter in a way yet to be explained.

I will purposely avoid using the word “God” because of the connotations placed upon it by conventional religion. [...]

[...] Instead she continued to work on her own God of Jane. [...]

[...] The overconscientious self must be shown that the spontaneous self is the God self. [...] It disapproves of anything it does not consider godly.

[...] It believes the personality must be toned down, held in bonds, slowed down, or else the wrath of God will descend upon it. [...]

[...] The poor were virtuous and on the side of God. [...]

[...] He expects the wrath of God to fall upon them at any time. [...]

[...] The idea of a god’s “descent” to earth was ancient. The old religious myths fit a different kind of people, however, and lasted for as many centuries in the past as Christianity has reached into the future.² The miraculous merging of imagination with historical time, however, became less and less synchronized, so that only r-i-t-e-s (spelled) remained and the old gods seized the imagination no longer. [...]

[...] The planner might be God, or nature itself, or man within nature or nature within man. There might be many gods or one, but there was a meaning in the universe. [...]

If you look for signs of God’s vengeance you will find them everywhere. An avalanche or a flood or an earthquake will not be seen as a natural act of the earth’s natural creativity, but instead as a punishment from God for sin.

[...] Each man does survive death, and each woman (with quiet amusement), but only such a literal-minded species would insist upon the physical death of a god-man as “proof of the pudding.”

The span of a god’s love can perhaps equally hold within its vision the existences of all individuals at one time in an infinite loving glance that beholds each person, seeing each with all his or her peculiar characteristics and tendencies. Such a god’s glance would delight in each person’s difference from each other person. [...]

[...] They became unified only through religious visions or experiences, for only God’s love was seen as “good enough” to justify a sexuality otherwise felt to be animalistic. [...]

(9:47.) God, therefore, became male. [...]

We shall have a session dealing almost entirely with the nature of energy gestalts, and you will see that while these pyramid energy gestalts do, on the one hand, achieve a unitary character and sublime intelligence, on the other hand they form only an approximation of humanity’s concept of a God. This unitary gestalt which we may call, and I prefer it to the word God, the primary energy gestalt.

The Trinity concept in your terms was a masculine one, projecting to the one God concept the duality which all mankind feels, but because the theory originated with the male the duality is expressed in terms of the male viewpoint.

[...] When he attempted to further formulate his God concept he then projected upon it those mysteries of self.

[...] This is known, that man forms his god in his own image.

The attributes of the gods are those inherent within man himself, magnified, brought into powerful activity. Men believe that the gods live forever. Men live forever, but having forgotten this, they remember only to endow their gods with this characteristic. Obviously, then, beyond these earthly historic religious dramas, the seemingly recurring tales of gods and men, there are spiritual realities.

[...] In one sense, you can say that man identifies with the gods he has himself created. [...] Then, say that gods and men create each other, and you come even closer to the truth; but only if you are very careful in your definitions — for how, exactly, do gods and men differ?

Ideas of good and evil, gods and devils, salvation and damnation, are merely symbols of deeper religious values; cosmic values if you will, that cannot be translated into physical terms.

[...] Here are the paragraphs in question from pages 246–47 of the chapter on “The God Concept”:

STORIES OF THE BEGINNING, AND THE
MULTIDIMENSIONAL GOD

[...] It will be called: “Stories of the Beginning, and the Multidimensional God.” [...]

[...] When you ponder upon the aspects of God, you unthinkingly speak of the creator of that one light. [...]

“So, in that moment, I named that part of me the God of Jane, and that designation makes sense to me, at least. In those terms, we each have our personal ‘God,’ and I am convinced that the universe knows us no matter who or where — or what — we are. I think there is a God of Mitzi, and a God of Billy, for each of our cats, and that each consciousness, regardless of its status, possesses this intimate connection with the universe….”

When man identified with nature, as given in Psyche, he did not imagine that the gods disapproved of him when storms lashed across the landscape. He did not at that time, as is supposed, do sacrifice then to win the gods’ approval. [...]

[...] If a large area was besieged by stormy weather of any kind, then obviously a god must have somehow disapproved of human action. [...] Acts were scrutinized so that those offending to the gods could be clearly categorized so that men would not unknowingly offend. [...]

[...] It was then, and in the terms of this discussion, that men felt a division between themselves and “the gods,” for it was then that man began to personify the elements of nature.

[...] No god created the crime of murder, and no god created sorrow and pain. [...]

([Florence:] “When I think of the millions and millions of lives that have been sacrificed in the name of Christ, in the name of God, the Jewish slaughtered back in the middle centuries with the—in the Crusades—in the name of Christ. [...]

Do you think that the Son of God could be contained in one frame? [...]

[...] People who profess belief in God often are so... [...] “believe in God?” I considered prayer embarrassing, demeaning... [...]

[...] In your terms you are, if you prefer, latent Gods. [...] It is your own creations and you cannot blame your own creations upon any God or any fact or any predestination. If you want to speak in terms of God, then from that infinite gestalt you receive the energy to create, but because you have free will, you create what you choose and you learn through experience. [...]

[...] What you should say is, “Let the Gods within you get up and laugh and bless yourselves, do than or unto yourselves, treat yourselves like Gods and so, indeed shall you be,” and then run while they boot you out. [...]

[...] It has gotten to the point now where, I get up there and I am already to say, ‘God bless you’ at the end of the service, and I’m almost ready to say  ‘such blessings as I have to give’ and I really have begun to see now, how absurd the whole practice, not that specifically, but the whole rigmarole had been over the years. [...]

([Joel:] “But I wanted to tell them that last Sunday, ‘May Almighty God bless you and I stopped, I smiled.”)

[...] Man cannot mistrust his own nature and at the same time trust the nature of God, for God is his word for the source of his being — and if his being is tainted, then so must be his God.

[...] [They are also told] to pay homage to God. [...] A psychic depression often results, one that is deepened by the Christmas music and the commercial displays, by the religious reminders that the species is made in God’s image, and by the other reminders that the body so given is seemingly incapable of caring for itself and is a natural prey to disease and disaster.

[...] Christianity has conventionally treated illness as the punishment of God, or as a trial sent by God, to be borne stoically. [...]

[...] Christianity, however, officially asks children of sorrow to be joyful and sinners to find a childlike purity; it asks them to love a God who one day will destroy the world, and who will condemn them to hell if they do not adore him.

REINCARNATIONAL CIVILIZATIONS,
PROBABILITIES, AND MORE
ON THE MULTIDIMENSIONAL GOD

[...] It will be called: “Reincarnational Civilizations, Probabilities, and More on the Multidimensional God.”

[...] In a way, they could be thought of now as earth gods.

(10:41.) Their god symbol was a male one — a strong, physically powerful male figure who would therefore protect them since they could not protect themselves. [...]

[...] Jane has been working hard on her God of Jane. [...]

Today, Jane wrote three more excellent little poems, all of which I hope to eventually see published.² I think she grumbled the whole time she was doing them, though, since she kept at herself because she wasn’t working on God of Jane.

[...] Not that anyone knew what cats were, because God hadn’t created any yet. [...]

[...] (Pause.) Science is used to asking quite specific questions, and as Ruburt wrote recently (in God of Jane) it usually comes up with very specific answers—even if those answers are wrong (with some humor).

[...] Children who want to be good, therefore, can unfortunately strive for poor health, in the belief that it is a sign of God’s attention. To be punished by God is often seen as preferable to being ignored by God. [...]

[...] Enter the idea of she starting a false church — heretical indeed — with a false god, Seth. [...]

One of the most disastrous ideas is the belief that illness is sent as a punishment by God.