Am I the Victim of God?

I think it’s time we cut to the chase here. Come out and ask the real question.

I’ve been teaching for eleven years and I have seen successes and failures in spiritual practice. And this question seems to be the sticking point for many many people. Often times whether or not a person is able to “let go” or “liberate” hinges on how they answer this question.

The assumption is:

The Goddess made me. I suffer. Therefore the Goddess caused me to suffer.

So let’s examine this question in detail and see if we can untie this double bind (a feeling of being pulled equally in two different directions which can have the experience of “being torn asunder.”)

The sentence in question is:

“Am I a victim of God?”

Those who have read my work know that I use “God”, “Goddess”, and “The Universe” (Einstein’s God, is “god is the universe,” aka – Pantheism, he interchanges the two and so do I) interchangeably, so feel free to use the term that works best for you in this examination.

There are four parts to this sentence.

There is a subject “I”

There is a verb “am”

There is an adverb “a victim” (making the verb structure “am a victim”)

The object is “God”

So we will break it further into the three parts:

“I” (subject), “am a victim” (verb structure), and “of God” (object – that which is victimizing).

So, since it’s structured as a question, let’s answer it.

To answer it we will need to know what the truth is of the different components.

So we ask three questions:

“Who or what is God?” (examination of the object)

“Who or what am I?” (examination of the subject)

“How am I victimized exactly?” (examination of the verb structure)

So, let’s start with the first question: “Who or what is God?”

The bible gives God’s direct answers for this as “I am that I am” and “I am the Alpha and the Omega”:

And God said unto Moses, I Am That I Am: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, “I Am” hath sent me unto you.- Exodus 3:14

I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty. - Revelation 1:8

These are the two passages in question, and since God goes on to clarify the second quote with “the beginning and the ending” I’m going to replace the quote with “I am the beginning and the ending.”

Now, I have broken this down in a previous essay, so I will save a deep dive into this and say that if one examines these quotes they will ultimately refine them to “I am all that is” and since the verb tense is the present tense it can ultimately be said to be “I am all that is in the present moment.”

Now that we’ve found God, let’s change our questions to:

“Am I the victim of all that is in the present moment?” and “I am the victim of I am that I am?”

“All that is” (Einstein’s God) is how God defines itself, and God further defines itself as “I am” so “all that is” can be refined simply to “I am.”

Now, the second question: “Who or what am I?”

I have written extensively on this, and so have many other teachers. I will use the essence of the best teachings here to save time:

What we are must not change. It can’t be one thing one day and another another day. We are searching for our “constant true self.” And so when we look for who we are we can’t settle on anything impermanent, because anything that comes and goes can’t be the answer of the question of what is our “constant true self.” And when we look for the unchanging ever present identity, the closest we can find is some kind of conscious awareness of, for lack of a better word, experience. The experiences come and go, and the awareness is constant. Therefore, we conclude that we are not what we experience but the awareness of that experience. We are awareness, awareness that simply is, now. “Is” is another term for “being.” The verb “to be” in the present tense is expressed as “I am.” And so, in the end, what we can say about our true nature is that “I am awareness” or “I am consciousness.”

Since awareness and consciousness are defined as “what is awake now” we can say “we are awake.”

This essentially covers most of the major spiritual teachings in a nutshell.

The terms “awareness” and “consciousness” and “awake” all, when examined become impossible to define and so, to save time I will say that this all reduces to the simple direct truth that all we can prove about the question of who we are is that we are. In essence, we prove, that we can only say that “I am.”

So let’s try this sentence again with these two changes:

“Am I the victim of I am?”

At this point if we aren’t laughing heartily then, I guess, we need further inspection (this sentence is the core of why Hotei laughs at his own thoughts, because he immediately rephrases any mental complaining to this sentence, and when his mind suggests “I am the victim of I am” it’s too funny to take seriously… but I digress…)

Now let’s look at the third question: “How am I being victimized?” by examining the phrase “am a victim”:

So, here is Merriam Webster’s definition:

vic·tim, /ˈviktəm/, noun

1: one that is acted on and usually adversely affected by a force or agent

By this definition there have to be two DIFFERENT and separate objects here. There has to be object number one (the victim) and object number two (the force or agent causing adverse effects.)

But all we have found when we attempted to look into the original sentence’s subject and object was the same “I am.”

This finding of the same “I am” when asking what “everything is” (aka – God) and what I truly am (aka My-Self) is why the teachers that I find the most accurate meld those two findings into one conclusion:

That they are not two separate objects.

This insight, often called “non-duality,” is the core of answering the primary question of the essay. Because if Merriam Webster is accurate, and there needs to be two separate objects to meet the requirement of “victim-hood”, then we have proven victimization to be impossible.

And, if so, we can safely conclude that the answer to the question “Am I a victim of God?” By strict interpretation of the definition of the word “victim,” is: no. No, we are not victims of what is ultimately simply what we are.

We are the universe that is victimizing us therefore we cannot be a victim of it unless we convince ourselves that we are separate from it.

Which, when examined, we can’t be.

Much love to those stuck in this impossible and terribly painful story.