In its broadest aspect, nature is reality—the world, the ground of being, the nature of existence, the objective, the absolute. And, in turn, life in its broadest sense is nature—not any particular living thing, but the underlying interconnectedness that makes possible every living thing.
Nature is everything that we mean by the divine. Nature is the "creator." Nature is the preserver. Nature is the destroyer and judge.3 And you, like everything else, are an incarnation of nature.
Nature is the measure of all things and the source of all values: true and false, good and evil. Nature is beyond good and evil. Nature contains all that is called good and all that is called evil. But nature, that is to say, life, is the basis of everything that we mean by good. Everything that we desire, everything that we value, everything that we esteem, is so as a result of our nature—and of the natural world and relationships that gave rise to our nature.
To be commanded nature must be obeyed. Every being, action, and experience is the perfect expression of those conditions that created it. You cannot help but worship nature—everything you do makes reference to it.
The God of Tillich or Spinoza, or the Brahman of the Yogis, already admits the point—that what we mean by God is nature. But why call it God at all? The term God carries with it the connotation of a person—but nature is not a person. Nature is everything, and because there is nothing that nature is not, nature has no outside with which to interact. Thus it has no personality, and thus it is not a person. Though thinking of it as a person can, in some ways, be a useful construction.
Nature can have no author or creator—for nature is reality, is everything that exists. Thus any “God” that existed would have to either be synonymous with nature or be an aspect of it—that which transcends reality by definition does not exist.
Nor can anything truly be created, in the strictest sense of coming from nothing. Either something exists in the potentiality of nature or it does not. If it is not possible for it to exist, then not even a God could make it exist. If it is possible for it to exist, then it already exists as a seed within the potentiality of nature awaiting its actualization—its summoning.
The goal of religion has always been to reorient the self-aware organism back to its interconnection with its environment. All organisms seek to integrate with their environment—without this tendency they would die. Within the confines of the city-state, without the experience of ecstatic union with the natural world, this desire often manifests itself as an unrequited love—an empty, unfulfilled longing.
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