It must be true that God exists. Part 4

It must be true that God exists

Part 4: People ignore the treasure all around them because they cannot believe it is there

In which case, this most wonderful experience, that was outlined earlier, is the natural product of how our minds work. Our minds simply do have the capacity to impart to ourselves these extraordinary gifts of peace, joy and love, of meaning and purpose and of complete reconciliation of all aspects of our lives into one harmonious whole. We should also have mentioned earlier that this experience, which is so beneficially enriching to the individual receiving it, generally also becomes the most powerful generator of compassion for others that humanity has. So, even without the extraordinary concept of God, we have, at the very least, the extraordinary reality of this wonderful capacity of the human mind.

Given this simple reality, it is in itself truly extraordinary that so many people in the modern secular world should completely ignore this reality. The suffering and pain alluded to earlier are just as real as ever, and we see numerous signs of people searching for some sort of assistance to get them through the struggles of life. Yet, having dismissed belief in God as false, they have also completely rejected the transcendent experience of being completely and utterly loved, which is of the very essence of what it means to believe in God. Yet we have also shown that this experience of being completely and utterly loved definitely exists, whether it has anything to do with God or not. How mind-boggling – and mind-numbing – that people should reject the single most powerful source of well-being known to humanity. All sorts of “techniques” to generate peace of mind are tried, such as mindfulness, meditation, yoga (all of them worthwhile in themselves) but held in a secular mindset, they are merely techniques that are not tied into the generator of the healing effect which is the experience of being utterly and completely loved by the person we call God – or by whatever is the alternative explanation for what this experience of being personally loved is.

It is a moot point as to whether this wonderful, life-giving experience could be activated in a merely technical sense. Could a secular-minded person say, “I like the sound of this; I will now meditate on the experience of receiving peace, joy and love until it happens to me”? It may be possible, and perhaps Buddhism is the example of this – though I suspect that Buddhism involves more than simple adherence to techniques. However, as a religious person, I would be perfectly happy to discover that the religious experience is only activated through the exercise of faith, and this aspect requires further thought – especially in the context of helping people to exercise faith when they simply don’t have faith. Perhaps they have tried and it just doesn’t work for them.