“Good” as a Principle

A beautiful quote from a book I picked up out of my library and started reading. I found this book in San Diego at an antique book shop near the convention center while attending the American Academy of Religion.

“We call good a principle, when it is only our way of estimating the phenomena of life. Think you there is any good where there is no sense to feel? So good and evil, being only our estimate, of that which we sense – it is our product and must belong to us-and we are the principle after all.”

– F.B Dowd, The Temple of the Rosy Cross – The Soul: Its Powers, Migrations and Transmigrations, p. 11

Whenever I speak to people about Religion in general, ideas such as these come forth quickly. The non-dualistic viewpoint of the world attracts me because it makes sense. The dualities created by theology based on only one God, Multiple Gods, or even No God at all do not make sense. To me it is a sense of attribution of labels. What we want to call God is nothing more than ourselves and/in the world. The concept of God is a way to understand who we really are, not what we are not.

Why would we seek to be closer to God if we weren’t interested in who we are as opposed to who we are not? The closer we get the more we realize we weren’t far away at all, in fact, not even a step.