Sounds like you might be meditating. Not a bad thing.Imwashingmypirate wrote: ↑Fri Mar 29, 2024 6:34 pmInteresting post.
I personally don't have a vision of what God looks like and I don't feel I have a general assignment of what God is like. I know we talk about God's love and all that. But deep down, I worry because I'm not entirely sure that God is anything like what Earthlings teach. When I pray, I pray out but I'm not really sure where it's going and I just hope that whatever is out there or within me hears it with the intent I send it. I fall asleep 99 percent of the time. Then spend the morning worrying and have to finish my prayer and apologise for falling asleep. I've connected prayer to sleep and find that if I don't pray I find it much harder to sleep as if prayer leads me to the neural pathways that sends me to sleep.
When I was about 22 (a good 5 years or so after leaving the church), I remember praying for an answer to a question, and the question was immediately answered. It occurred to me that maybe god (when I still had a hazy notion of a god) was our own brains answering the questions asked it. It was the first time I ever found a practical use for prayer (I was praying at the suggestion of a book I was reading at the time, not because I kept praying after becoming "inactive").
Now asking myself questions is just a habit because I know that asking the right questions primes your brain for the right answers. Many times, when I'm working through a problem, I might start an e-mail to someone with my current questions, and end up never sending the email because the simple act of articulating the problem in words helps lead to the solutions I'm seeking.
So, I have had the experience of thinking that god was a part of my brain, or existed in people's subconscious somehow. I've dabbled in ideas about a collective consciousness (as an objective, external thing, as opposed to the more sensible way that phrase is interpreted). I've thought all kinds of things about the supernatural when I was younger. All of them have left me wanting.
What I am sure of is that most people don't give their own imaginations nearly enough credit.