Throughout my youth I was an agnostic - I did not know what to think about God. Was there a god or not? I simply did not know. It took a mystical experience - a direct personal encounter with God - to convince me that God is real. I cannot deny that experience even as I continually question the nature of that God which was revealed to me.

Why I question the nature of that God (why I do not believe God is a "person")

Initially, I assumed that God is what I had been taught God is: a personal god, a supreme being, sort of a superhuman person with a mind, a conscious awareness, emotions and desires in relation to what people do (i.e., God is often pleased with us or angry with us, God has certain things "he" wants us to do and not do).

But, after some time I began to question whether what I had learned from other human beings was actually the true nature of that which we call "God". I gradually began to suspect that God is actually less and less like a mere person. After all, God is supposedly so high and mighty, so much more than we can even begin to imagine, imagining that God is like us seemed like limiting the nature of God.
I suspect that the reason we envision God as a super person is because we are persons, not because God actually is a person. In other words, we project our own personhood onto this thing we call "God".

But how, I wondered, is it possible to have a "personal relationship" with an impersonal Ultimate Reality? Again, I think the relationship can be "personal" because we are persons. It is human beings who bring the personality into the relationship. "God is Love" says the scripture. Yes, my mystical experience was the feeling of being loved and accepted unconditionally. But "love" is an abstract concept, a feeling. God may be Love, but God is not the lover. Love is not a person. People love us and this is an experience we all know from the childhood love our parents give us. So, when we feel loved and that feeling is not generated by any human person around us we may wonder where it comes from. We can only imagine love coming from some person who loves us. So we imagine this unexplained feeling of being loved comes from some invisible super "person" and we call that person "God". But are we just projecting our familiar experience of love from other people onto this new kind of loving experience? I think it is a distinct possibility that this is what we are doing.

I also think it rather presumptuous of human persons to imagine that God is like a human person, just bigger and better. One of the earliest Greek philosophers (Xenophanes) observed that "if oxen and horses could talk and draw they would tell us that the God is an ox or a horse." I think he has a point there: our mental image of that which we call "God" is colored by our own image of ourself. After all, the scripture does not say "God is created in the image of man" it says "man is created in the image of God". That does not mean that God is like us so much as that we are like God!

Although I do not doubt that there is Something "out there" which we can label "God" if we want to, I do not pretend that my limited human imagination can even begin to envision what that "Something’ is really like. I'm not even sure it is "out there" rather than "in here" - in the very depths of our own being. Whatever and wherever we think God might be, I am sure that vision is not accurate.

Why have I never questioned that there is just ONE Ultimate Reality? 

My reasoning is that everything is a part of something larger:

• electrons and protons and neutrons are part of ONE atom
• many atoms make up ONE molecule
• many molecules make up ONE compound
• many parts make up ONE cell
• many cells make up ONE organ in our bodies
• many organs make up ONE body
• many people make up ONE family
• many families make up ONE village
• many villages, towns, and cities make up ONE county
• many counties make up ONE state
• many states make up ONE nation
• many nations make up ONE world
• many planets make up ONE solar system
• many solar systems make up ONE galaxy
• many galaxies make up ONE universe
• and, by definition, there IS just ONE UNIverse (otherwise we'd all it a "multiverse")

So, ultimately, everything that is, ever has been, and ever will be, is all part of THE ONE (everything in creation is part of the Creator). Carl Sagan used to say "we ARE star stuff". Well, I like to think, we are GOD stuff! Everything is part of God and God encompasses everything. If anything were NOT one with God then there would be MORE than one reality in the universe. If we truly believe that God is all powerful, and singular, then logic would suggest that we cannot really believe that anything that is not God exists entirely apart from God. God is self-sufficient but nothing else is. Everything else depends on God for its existence, for even coming into being in the first place. We are a part of God the way our cells are a part of us.