But we each do need a functional name for this indescribability, and God is the name that feels the most warm to me, so thats what I use. I feel they are all equal because they are all equally adequate and inadequate descriptions of the indescribable. I have nothing against any of these terms. For this same reason, when I pray, I do not address my prayers to The Universe, The Great Void, The Force, The Supreme Self, The Whole, The Creator, The Light, The Higher Power, or even the most poetic manifestation of Gods name, taken, I believe, from the Gnostic gospels: The Shadow of the Turning. I need a proper name, in order to fully sense a personal attendance. But that That feels impersonal to mea thing, not a beingand I myself cannot pray to a That. Alternatively, I could call God That, which is how the ancient Sanskrit scriptures say it, and which I think comes close to the all-inclusive and unspeakable entity I have sometimes experienced. Saving for later the argument about whether God exists at all (noheres a better idea: lets skip that argument completely), let me first explain why I use the word God, when I could just as easily use the words Jehovah, Allah, Shiva, Brahma, Vishnu or Zeus. And since this is the first time I have introduced that loaded word GOD into my book, and since this is a word which will appear many times again throughout these pages, it seems only fair that I pause here for a moment to explain exactly what I mean when I say that word, just so people can decide right away how offended they need to get.

What happened was that I started to pray. But I share it here because something was about to occur on that bathroom floor that would change forever the progression of my life almost like one of those crazy astronomical super-events when a planet flips over in outer space for no reason whatsoever, and its molten core shifts, relocating its poles and altering its shape radically, such that the whole mass of the planet suddenly becomes oblong instead of spherical.

This part of my story is not a happy one, I know.

Eat pray love for free