Thou Art Salty

I wrote this in response to a post by QuakerK on "How We Imagine God." I've been wanting to post something like this, anyway, so...

I think of God as the ocean, ourselves as the waves. This is an Eastern analogy, but has correlates in Christianity. We are in God and God is in us. It brings to life Jesus' prayer in John that we understand our oneness with him, God and one another. (Why don't I ever hear the radio preachers talking about that?)

It also deals with a problem we sometimes have with a notion that "thou art that." We don't want to say that "I am God" because that sounds megalomaniacal. But the real intent of "thou art that" is that thou art the wave -- not the whole ocean, but arising from it (or created by it, if you will) and wholly inseparable from it. The ego or "self-will" is nothing more than the mistaken notion that we are stand-alone entities, the real "doers" existing independently of the divine whole.