god is reality

Einstein once said that if he believed in God, it would be Spinosa's God. This God is not a bearded father in the sky, nor a divine engineer standing outside the universe and designing it from afar. No, for Spinosa, God is reality itself. His question was simple but radical. Why do we assume that the creator, the cause, must be separate from the creation, the effect? Why do we think the source of reality exists somewhere outside of it? Spinosa argued that all things, trees, thoughts, people, they don't exist by themselves. Rather, they depend on other things, are shaped by other things, and can only be understood through other things. But if everything depended on something else, then what is the ultimate thing all of this depends on? He called that deepest reality substance. Something that exists in itself, depends on nothing else, and is the foundation of everything. And if there were many separate ultimate foundations or substances, none of them would be truly ultimate. So, Spininoza concludes, there can only be one infinite substance, and everything that exists is an expression of it. That for him is God. Not a being outside nature, but the living reality of nature itself. In a sense, everything is God, including ourselves. The roaring waves of Bry Loce, the brilliant Mapuche greeting the beagle hundreds of years ago, the penguins standing militarily to greet the dawn, the laugh of friends, John Denver's voice, the bodily heed rising above the apartments of Buenosiris. Even my emptiness, my inquate yearning to be seen or connected or loved, all belonged to the singular unfolding reality. Was this a reality that was indifferent to my suffering?