The following is an excerpt from a free book called Greater Community Spirituality. Read the entire book here for free. This is from the first chapter called “What Is God?“

IN THE GREATER COMMUNITY, GOD IS KNOWLEDGE. In the Greater Community, God is experience. In the Greater Community, God is the communication of profound insight and recognition from one to another, permeating all manifest life. This comes into being in the realm of your experience.

God seems like different things to different people and to different races of beings in the Greater Community, but the essential experience that ignites the desire for God, the awareness of God and the relationship with God is the same everywhere. This religious impulse, the impulse towards union with God, is universal. Though it seems remarkably absent in some cultures and aberrantly expressed in others, the impulse is the same. What God is must be expressed in terms of your range of experience and your capacity for experience. In the Greater Community, God is so total and complete that any definition would always falter and fail.

Therefore, let us say that God is the experience of total relationship. You can experience this for a moment here and there and for longer periods should you prepare in The Way of Knowledge. This is an experience which can both be translated from one world to another and shared and demonstrated from one being to another, bypassing and transcending all divergences of race, culture, temperament and environment. This is God. God for you is God in action. God for you is an experience that is unlike any other experience in life, yet this experience gives meaning to all of your other experiences.

In the Greater Community, God is complete. In your world, God is a God of your world, a God of your race, a God of your history, a God of your temperament, a God of your fears and aspirations, a God of your great heroes, a God of of any your great tragedies, a God that is related to your tribe and your time. But in the Greater Community, God is so much greater, so complete—beyond the definitions of any race, beyond the history of any race, beyond the temperament, fears and aspirations of any race, beyond the grasp of any individual or collective philosophy. And yet, you find God in a pure impulse, in a timeless moment of recognition, in the desire to act beyond the sphere of your own personal interests and motives, in the recognition of another, in the motive to give, in the inexplicable experience of affinity. These are translatable. This is God in action. For you, this is God.

You must think of God now in the Greater Community —not a human God, not a God of your written history, not a God of your trials and tribulations, but a God for all time, for all races, for all dimensions, for those who are primitive and for those who are advanced, for those who think like you and for those who think so differently, for those who believe and for those for whom belief is inexplicable. This is God in the Greater Community. And this is where you must begin.

To believe in the God of the Greater Community is too great an attempt because you will realize that your race is small and the universe is great. Here you will be focusing on a God not of your world and of your time but a God of all worlds and all times. What kind of theology or philosophy can embody a God of this magnitude? What kind of human speculation and human ethics can encompass a God so complete as this?

Yet your theology of God must be the theology of God’s work in this world. And if it is true, accurate and beneficial, it must focus on the experience of Knowledge. Knowledge is the beginning of religion. Knowledge is the completion of religion. Knowledge is the evidence of God and the evidence that you are a part of a greater life beyond the limits of your time, beyond the boundaries of your race and beyond the confines of your present intellectual ability. Here there is no creation story. There are no heroes. There is no end of time. There is only the total experience of relationship, which is the experience of Knowledge and the experience of God.

What is a human religion without a creation story, without a hero to worship and without a culmination of human experience? What human religion can focus on a God of this magnitude, whose sole interest is not your world alone, whose sole concern is not your daily experience, whose awareness is so complete and whose beneficence blesses those who are so unlike you? What then is the model for human behavior? What is the basis for ethics or morality in a God of the Greater Community? For this you must venture beyond a childhood religion and a child’s needs. You must venture beyond the need only for rules and regulations and fantastic stories that are barely believable. You must enter into the experience and the Mystery of life, which is the doorway to God, which is at the very heart of your life and contains the very purpose for your coming here that is unique to you but which you share with all life.

In Greater Community Spirituality, there are no heroes. There is no creation story. And there is no culminating experience to bring an end to the difficulties of corporeal life. So, what is religion without these things? These things are tribal in nature. And you are not alone in the Greater Community in wanting them, in establishing them and in holding to them. Everywhere where religion has taken root and has found expression, races have based their practices and their understanding on their own time, their own history and their own temperament. But beyond this is the experience of God. Beyond this is pure spirituality. This is what you must seek now, for human religion can never embody a God of the Greater Community. So inexplicable this is because it transcends your requirements for the Divine. Therefore, you must find another way, a more mature way, a more complete approach, a true preparation.

The rest of this chapter is freely available here.