What Is God? Who Is God?
God is the nature we exist in, a force of love and bestowal. Kabbalists write about it, “There is none else besides Him,” due to it being the single force within which we exist, and this force wants us to become like itself.
We can somewhat compare it to dough. Imagine God, or the Creator, as the dough, and we are in the dough, like raisins. These raisins need to dissolve into the dough, to become like it, even though they remain as raisins throughout the process.
What does this transformation signify? The raisins represent our egoistic nature, i.e., that we are tiny egoistic dots that wish for self-benefit at every moment within the nature of the dough, which represents the nature of God or the Creator, an opposite nature of bestowal. Therefore, if we perform an act of bestowal toward our surroundings, toward each other, and eventually toward the Creator, it means that we are as one.
We then reach the state of oneness with God, adhesion with the Creator, balance with nature: by reaching “love your neighbor as yourself” among each other, we also arrive at the state of “love the Creator, your God.” That is, both the dough and the raisins become as one. This is what we need to do.
It is the purpose of creation. We are constantly evolving to that final point, and we will need to either voluntarily wake up to align ourselves with nature’s goal and plan, or experience our further development under the so-called “evolutionary steamroller.” The force of the dough — God, the Creator, Nature — presses the raisins so that they feel bad if they do not start the process of connecting among themselves and with the dough, requesting and inviting its force of love and bestowal into their connection.
How Do You Know if You Are Getting Closer to God or Not?
How do we examine ourselves to check whether or not we are coming closer to God? Also, what do we examine ourselves in relation to?
In our world, we were given the ability to feel our egoistic attitude to others, naturally wishing to initially benefit ourselves, and at their expense, if necessary.
Do we then want to use others for self-benefit alone, or do we want to use ourselves to benefit others? It can be one or the other.
In other words, by examining ourselves in this way, we will sustain ourselves.
How, then, do we use what is inside of us right now to benefit others? At every given moment, our lives need to be a gradual correction of becoming more and more like the Creator — a pure attitude of love and bestowal — until we completely and fully observe the law of “love your neighbor as yourself,” i.e., with our entire heart and mind.