who is god? what the text says

here's an alternative reading.


when we read a text ascribed to a prophet, who in turn ascribed it to the living god, we may read it as a statement about god or the prophet. but if we read the text as speaking not about god but rather about our own selves, the meaning and implications of the text radically change. if rather than reading "i am god" as referring to a being other than myself, i read it as referring to myself, "i am god" becomes "i am - god". the text does not just speak to us, it is us speaking in it. 


the text is meant to be received by the reader as an expression of his own self, as though the reader himself has written about himself, and not as a repetition or a conveying of information about facts outside of oneself. if we make the text deeply ours, as ours as an author's own text could be, then it is us speaking in the text and for the text, and no longer just "about" the text. if i am the one the text is speaking of and speaking through, if i am the "i" in the text, then i must affirm and confirm the divinity of each person. mine and your divinity is confirmed in the act of i-thou dialogue, and through that same act of dialogue, we affirm and confirm the divinity of each being, sentient and insentient. 


each of us then is the god the scriptures speak of, and the son and the daughter of god, and the prophet who speaks in the name of god, and the god to whom we pray to and who answers our prayers. the teachings in the texts are a dis-covery of the nature of one's own being, not a discourse on a divine reality that transcends it. the text is us, and it evolves and changes and returns as we do. 


in that sense the actualization of our god-ness is what the buddhists understood a long time ago as the actualization of our inherent buddha nature. the buddha taught that each of us, and each being, is born as buddha nature, and each of us, therefore, is able to actualize our own natures and become buddhas. we become buddhas by the twofold deed of turning away from "it" and turning towards "thou". we can actualize our god-nature, buddha-nature through the deed of i-thou dialogue with all beings, sentient and insentient. baruch spinoza understood this well too when he said "deus sive natura", god is nature. it is in this sense that the principle of dialogical ecology that god is the between of an i and a thou reaffirms that dialogue precedes ontology and theology. as martin buber explained it, "at the beginning it was the encounter"