I’m enjoying my new foray into video making on YouTube, but this one I could have taken a bit more time on. I thought of the topic in the morning, shot part of the video at that time as soon as the idea came to me, drew the doodles at work, outlined some notes, then recorded the rest of it after I came home. As a result, I don’t think I explained my thought cogently enough. The guideline I set for myself is it has to be under 15 minutes, so quite a bit of cutting had to be done as well. Sigh.
Anyway, the point of the video is I experienced deity as energy first, not realizing that was deity, and then was first taught personification of deity and monotheism through Christianity when I was nine. For most of my life I’ve been fascinated with religion and mythology, passionately inquisitive of what different people believed about deity.
I recall in high school pretty sure I had cracked the god code through trig functions. No, seriously. I really felt like there was something more to the Cartesian coordinate system, the unit circle, sine wave function, and tautologies, and was trying to reconcile what high school level math I knew with the existence of god.
Going on the law, “As above, so below; as within, so without,” I thought about how the Internet works, which is the basis of what I explain in the video for my conception of deity, how our bodies function (the various internal systems and how they all function separately yet together), our brain, right down to individual cells and neurons.
This exact infrastructure model is also how ecosystems function, and how societies and government operate. It’s how the solar system and what we know of the universe is organized. All of it boils down to a pretty universal infrastructure, and that infrastructure, I believe, is in God’s image, and so yeah, we were made in God’s image in the sense that every facet of our lives, social to biological, is in the image of a monotheistic god principle, dialed in to and part of a central network I called it in my video.
We make up that central network and we are connected to it–both, simultaneously. So we are part of what makes up deity, but deity itself is greater than the sum of its parts because of what collective consciousness can produce. Land spirits, deities that represent specific human emotions or human conditions, deities that represent natural phenomenon, all of what embody polytheistic pantheons are as real as the monotheistic god principle, and are part of the infrastructure. They’re the regional networks that we are first connected to, which then connect to that greater main frame… the central network. 🙂
I do have a funny story I didn’t tell in the video. The one time I got drunk off my ass, I mean it was the most drunk I have ever gotten, was in college, with some friends, and we were in Toronto. Illustrating via a Sharpie marker that I think one of the bartenders handed me and a stack of bar napkins, I was trying to explain the existence of God to a small crowd, in a bar, using trigonometry, algebra, and the Cartesian plane. One of the onlookers, who must have been just as drunk as I was, said to me, just entranced with whatever the heck I was yammering about, “You should start your own religion.”
And I had said back, “I think I should. And the first thing I’d do is buy myself a BMW and make the church members pay for it.” In retrospect, I was an idiot. Ask me the same question today, and I’d upgrade that to a private jet.
I thought I should also give due credit to those who inspired me into creating more YouTube video content. Unfortunately I don’t know the names, so I can’t give full credit. However, it might be easy to trace back the steps. It all started with the #bethewitchychange hashtag movement. Whoever started that is the one to give credit to. That got me thinking about how I can contribute in my own way and “be the witchy change.” From those considerations sprang the “Tinkering Bell” series and now this, “Bell Chimes In.”
“Bell Chimes In” is about discourse, or at least that is my hope and intentions for the video series. It’s about me chiming in on a topic oft talked about, with my own perspective, opinions, or hypothesis, and with that, continuing the conversation on that topic. So I hope you’ll join in.
What are your perspectives, beliefs, thoughts, and hypothesis on Deity?
benebell wen 
One of the best videos I’ve watched in a long time! Thanks!
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I think you addressed the subject well. Thank you so much! As as a child I couldn’t grasp God as being a person, which is how I always heard him spoken about as. (Does that make sense what I just wrote) Well I would say to myself if God made everything then who made him??? So now I believe it is an energy within every living thing plant and animal which directs our way of living, animals know this. That’s why I can get two different weather forecast from the internet and watch the squirrel outside my window and get the right one.
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Haha, my mom was initially drawn to church for the Chinese socialization too. Even though she had a Catholic upbringing, she didn’t become really devout until she experienced a series of prophetic prayer and healing events and became convinced that the Christian God was real and powerful. When I was young, I definitely leaned more toward animistic thinking – spirits in everything. But I was also plagued by terrible nightmares and night terrors in a way my mother never was, so I think that made my outlook on the spirit world different than hers from the outset.
Your idea of a pantheistic network into the God principle is not too dissimilar from the Unitarian faith as I understand it, albeit without the Christian bias/influence. It also sounds like another way of explaining the collective unconscious. Either way, fun food for thought. Thanks for sharing a bit about your spiritual background and upbringing! Always interesting to hear about where others are coming from.
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