God Beauty Perfection Love
Divine Synonyms
I thought we could expand on our Divine Synonyms by listing synonyms for them. It’s proving to be more difficult than I’d expected…
- God : The divine, transcendence — the connectedness of all creation within which we all exist, can experience, can become consciously connected to, can become a giving part of.
- synonyms : enlightened, eternal, transcendent, divine, universal life force, world spirit, world soul, sacred, the Dao (my thesaurus lists no synonyms for Dao!), harmony (in its theologic sense, eg: harmony of the spheres), grace (in the spiritual sense), spirit realm, the beloved. (Whenever we experience reverence, or awe, or we sense deeply that which is greater than ourselves, we are experiencing something divine, or transcendent. Note that none of these synonyms necessarily imply or infer a God, or Gods)
- Beauty : A way of perceiving — how we apprehend and express the various manifestations of that perfect creation
- synonyms : grace (as in, say, dance, or elegance), harmony (harmony in form, musically), melifluous, melodious, concinnity
- Perfection : A state of being — when we directly experience that perfect creation, recognise our essence as being part of it.
- synonyms : ideal, integrity, transcendent, sublime, ripe, immaculate, summit, paragon, impeccable,
- Love : A state of giving — when we feed our perfection back into creation as energy, as compassion, as a blessing, as unconditional love, as loving kindness.
- synonyms : harmony (as in being in harmony with another being), loving kindness, passion, wonder, abandon, giving, surrender
See Peter’s comment below for additional discussion.
As I said elsewhere, this is a great idea, Staci. Moreover, I think you’ve made an excellent start. Some notes…
I love the way you sense the Divine Synonyms, as Tweet has so deftly and wisely named them. (The girl of few words strikes again with piercing “concinnity” — great new word, Staci…I had to look it up!) That sense helped me see each synonym in a new light, helped me distill each into its essence.
God: the perfect state of all creation within which we all exist, can experience, can become consciously connected to, can become a giving part of.
Beauty: A way of perceiving — what we perceive as various manifestations of that perfect creation
Perfection: A state of being — when we directly experience that perfect creation, recognise our essence as being part of it.
Love: A state of giving — when we feed our perfection back into creation as energy, as compassion, as a blessing, as unconditional love, as loving kindness
Another way: All existence is in Harmony. When our ability to perceive harmonizes with divinity, we perceive the divine. When our being harmonizes with the divine, we experience our own divinity. When our sense of connectedness to all things harmonizes with divinity, we love without need, we love divinely.
In short: The Divine, God, is the harmony in all existence; Beauty is how we percieve The Divine; Perfection is how we experience The Divine; Love is how we express The Divine.
I’ve been uncomfortable with Perfection as a synonym…have been thinking, perhaps it should be Harmony instead, though that didn’t sit right either. Seeing Harmony distributed through all quadrants of the divine…something clicked and I understood why Perfection is the right word, though rapture works as well. I understood that Harmony has a special place and meaning for each synonym.
I’m not certain I would have seen all this without your synonyms, Staci. Or, for that matter, without the weekend of reconnecting, or the chaos that preceded it. All this came to me as I wrote it. I had no idea this would be so fruitful as I sat down to respond to it. So, thank you.
Some additions and other notes…
For God…
Add: infinite (which coincides with the sense of eternal)
For Perfection:
rapture: brilliant addition
For Love:
I’ve been uncomfortable with including “passion” and the like, due to their association with Dukkha. Passion, being impermanent, is a state of bliss which we cannot always experience, and therefore a source of loss and longing. However, it is not passion itself which is dukkha, but the longing and loss we can feel when our desire for passion is not fulfilled. When we recive, offer and experience passion, love, ecstacy, we receive, offer and experience divinity. When passion is expressed as a need, is demanded, or expected, or even devalued, that it becomes Dukkha, even to the point of being hurtful to others.
Heh . . . usual wordy self. Enough for now. I have some transcribing to do!
Thank-you, both of you.