The question of who we are is the most primary of all that a human being has ever asked. This is because it enquires about the nature of the very self that is asking the question, seeking to identify and understand the abilities by which one could interact with their surrounding environment and with that, participate in the process of life.
Within the question of who we are, another question of who has placed us here is also implied. If we do not know who we are to a point of even asking the question, we would also not regard ourselves as being responsible for being here. The implication would then be that we were placed wherever we happen to be by someone else. In that case, the question of who created us or is responsible for us being here, marked the beginning of our search for our cause- the search for God.
If the search for God were to be successful, we would then ask this being what could be the third most important question of our existence; why we exist at all. The answer to this question is what would then give meaning to the very minds we have; our bodies; people and things in our surrounding environment as well as the things we do or that happen to us.
At the core of all the questions that humanity has ever asked about existence is the need to understand reality enough to exist harmoniously in it. This need is the driving force behind all attempts at learning anything new about our world, and the basis of all human civilization and modern human advancements.
Our quest to find God in order to know ourselves led us to search immediately within ourselves (in our minds and bodies) as well as in our most immediate and very remote environments. We invented tools like the microscope to allow us to see deep within our immediate environment, as well as telescopes for much further realities that we could not interact with physically. Seeing remote things without the ability to interact physically with them created a need for interpretation as a way to establish their meaning.
Among our various things we observed within ourselves imaginations, around us or in faraway galaxies, we came to interpret some of them as being the cause of the various circumstances and realities we were aware of. In that case each of them became a god, or a cause of a specific reality. However, these were not enough to explain the totality of our reality with all the different things happening in it, and for that we sought to find a being who was responsible for all circumstances of life, and beyond whom nothing else exists. This became the quintessential definition of God.
With the title of God defined, every person or perspective that sought to know the being of God created their own equivalent of this title; decided on the domain it has over their perceived reality; defined for themselves the qualities of this being as well as gave it a name they deemed suitable. Before long, every person, culture and religion of the world had their its own equivalent of God, called by a different name, and in many cases depicted in one physical form or another.
Essentially, we all looked at the same reality – the oneness of the reality in which we all exist, but from different points of view, and described what we saw according to what we perceive from each stand point, creating the different Gods that we perceive today as being at the head of the major religions of the world.
Our different views of God resulted into the various beliefs and the deities we created from them. We formed partnerships and communities around the values we have set for these deities. Our influence of each other’s views created an environment where some of these notions became more popular and were regarded as real for all people, resulting in what we now know as the major religions of the world, all of which are simply the more dominant ways of regarding the being of God.
The power of God, as we each came to understood the being to be, related to the power of our believes – the faith we have in who we understand God to be. In that way, the being of God continues to be a subjective experience as embodied by each of the over seven billion inhabitants of our planet.
In our focused attempts to find God, what we failed to realise was that each God we found was only a point of view representing who we believe ourselves to be, projected onto a being that can only be experienced subjectively by anyone who observes it. In that way, our expressions of the being of God are only a projection of who we think we are; hence our projections have the qualities of a man, a woman, an animal, a place and even sculptures, among many others.
In our current beliefs in God, the forms of God we believe in, the power of this God, how immediate or far we perceive this being to be from us, are all a matter of personal belief and preference. Infact, how we have ‘created’ God in our own images is tantamount to how ancient people created and defined their own idols by deciding on their names, their forms, the processes and rituals of their worship, as well as the powers they should possess.
For an idol maker to believe in the independence of the power of their idol, they would have to, at least, forget that they have created it., because for as long as they remembered that they have created the idol, they would continue to realise that there is no power it has that they did not give to it. It is only when we remember that the things we revere are created by us, that we realise that they possess no more than the power we gave to them.