Of God's Realness

Life can feel enliveningly real or witheringly fake. Dreams can seem more real than waking life, but most we sense correctly as fabrications of the sleeping mind. I say there is an unseen organ of the soul that senses the realness of things and that communicates it's findings to the heart through the glow of meaningfulness. In the drift of depression, this organ goes blind, and our only touchstone to meaning becomes the void of meaning's absence. In that full-filling feeling some call enlightenment, the organ is sharpened so finely that all phenomena feel fully real, fully meaningful. 

I've puzzled long over what belief is. I decided it's the name we give to realness when its attached to ideas. Notice when someone says they "can't believe what is happening," they don't mean to say they deny the facts but that they have no sense that the idea of the thing is real. Our sense of reality or unreality does not hinge on facts.

Sensations of realness are unreliable narrators to the true events of the world. In fact, I don't believe them to be a function of reality at all, but a function of attention. The more we attend to an idea as real, the more our sense of its realness grows, nourishing our sense that life is meaningful. The more we attend to an idea as unreal, the more our sense of its unreality grows, and at times this can threaten our sense that life itself is meaningful. If one focuses on fantasies long enough, one can sense the reality of any number of gods.

What then could be said of God to assuage my skeptic soul? 

Nothing, if not for beauty. 

Ideas are portraits that we can sort by raw aesthetic appeal as much as by any other quality. What I call God is whatever idea stands atop my pantheon of beauties, beckoning my gaze. As I attend to the most beautiful idea, the realness I sense in its (and all) beauty grows. So seek beauty to fill life full with life!

And I pray for a shapeshifting God. May my attention to beauty wander so wide that an equanimous realness compresses my pantheon of beauties until all hierarchy succumbs to its warmth, until the focus of my worship widens to embrace the Godliness of life.