Since your question is inspired by your study of The Master Key System, you might find it helpful to hear what Charles Haanel (the author) has to say about God:

The kind of Deity which a man, consciously or unconsciously, worships, indicates the intellectual status of the worshipper.

Ask the Indian of God, and he will describe to you a powerful chieftain of a glorious tribe. Ask the Pagan of God, and he will tell you of a God of fire, a God of water, a god of this, that, and the other.

Ask the Israelite of God, and he will tell you of the God of Moses, who conceived it expedient to rule by coercive measures; hence, the Ten Commandments. Or of Joshua, who led the Israelites into battle, confiscated property, murdered the prisoners, and laid waste to cities.

The so-called heathen made "graven images" of their Gods, whom they were accustomed to worship, but among the most intelligent, at least, these images were but the visible fulcrums with which they were enabled to mentally concentrate on the qualities which they desired to externalize in their lives.

We of the twentieth century worship a God of Love in theory, but in practice we make for ourselves "graven images" of "Wealth," "Power," "Fashion," "Custom" and "Conventionality." We "fall down" before them and worship them. We concentrate on them and they are thereby externalized in our lives.

The Master Key System - Part 17

So, as far as the word "God" is concerned, it basically depends who you ask and at what stage in their life you ask them :)

What has happened over many centuries is that the word "God" has become so overladen with people's personal agendas, power plays, dogmas and emotional baggage that it has, to a large extent, become an unusable word.

Probably for that reason, terminology like "The Universe", "The Cosmic", "The Infinite Mind", "All-That-Is", "Source" and a multitude of other phrases has come into use by those who wish to portray a different and more empowering idea than the word "God" currently represents to many in modern society.

So is God and The Universe the same thing?

Yes, for all practical purposes, you can consider it to be so.

The American comedian, Woody Allen, once observed: "Did you ever realize that God spelled backwards is dog?" I'd say that's about as genuinely useful as that word is these days :)

God is the invisible cause of experience. The Universe is a model, a mental map we have of his personality.

No, I do not believe that God and the Universe are the same thing at all.

Picture a raw egg, lying on a plate. The egg white is God, and the yolk represents the Universe. That is more like what I picture as the relationship between God and the Universe. God pervades all of the Universe. It easy, therefore, to substitute the phrases, "Source" and "Universe" for the word, "God". Some people do this, and it sometimes feels as though that is all God is- a Source contained in the Universe. But God is Everything and all things.

It especially important that we understand that God also is within us. If we picture God as being elsewhere, outside of ourselves, then we would have to exist outside of the entire Universe in a place that is "Not-God". There is no such place. One might argue that Hell exists outside of the Universe. But the Bible says that Jesus holds the keys to both Heaven and Hell-i.e., He rules both. The Bible mentions this in Revelation 1:18- see also Psalms 115:3 and Psalms 135:6.

It has become SOP for people to refer to God as "The Source" or "The Universe" here on Inward Quest. I believe we write like this because we do not want to offend people- also, perhaps, we honestly may believe that the Universe is all things.

This simply not so.

Blessings,

Jaianniah

I've always thought Thomas Troward had a good explanation about the difference between the two. In a nutshell, he asserted a difference between God, "the conscious, creative, active principle", (in whose image we are all made, and whose creative faculty we still possess) and the Universal Soul, or Anima Mundi, which was the "receptive" principle. According to Troward, it is the "active" principle (God, and we ourselves) that makes the conscious decision regarding what to manifest (the power of "The Word"), and the "receptive" principle (Anima Mundi, i.e. the Universe) that carries out the process of physical manifestation. The Anima Mundi is impersonal and responds vibrationally to whatever vibration you emanate, hence it is on this level that LOA impersonally operates.

I agree 100% with Stingray about the terminology...today the word "God" has become so muddled, confused, and bound up with competing and contradictory definitions, that more "enlightened" folks tend to substitute the term "Universe." It's kind of like the word "love"...almost everybody has a different definition.

I also agree that from a practical manifesting standpoint, there seems to be virtually no difference.

However...

I did have one particular experience in my life which impressed upon me the fact that there is an all-powerful, conscious being--a "persona", if you will--who answers to the name God, and appears to me to "bypass" or act in addition to LOA in certain special situations (i.e., when he decides to).

The experience occurred over a decade ago, and I was an Agnostic (almost Atheist) at the time. I'm not ready to talk about all the details here, but suffice to say that due to something I was unwittingly involved in, I found myself shockingly and suddenly assaulted by supernatural forces of a highly malevolent nature. I was at a vibrational low point, and when all other recourses had failed, I cried out in my mind, in desperation: "God, please, make it stop!" (Of course, at the time, I didn't even really believe in God...it was just a last-ditch cry of desperation when all else had failed.) But at that very moment, instantaneously, these negative forces (and their assault on me) vanished. It was as though an army had just been wiped off the map in a microsecond.

There is no way for me to ever prove to anyone else that this actually happened. I am the only one who knows, and could ever know, that it was real.

In addition to my long journey into the world of LOA and manifesting, I have never forgotten this one incident...and that perhaps...in this moment of desperation and supreme need, the Creator (or some powerful spiritual entity/persona responding to the name God) intervened.

Perhaps because of this experience, and other experiences which have also proved to me the reality of LOA and vibration, Troward's explanation always resonated with me--and so I post it here:

It is just here that those who realize the nature of spiritual causation are in greater danger than the mere materialist. There really is an unseen Force which can be controlled in the manner they contemplate, and their mistake is in supposing that this Force is the ulti mate Creating Power.

I daresay some readers will smile at this, and I am well aware that it is quite possible to build up an apparently logical argument to show that what I am now speaking of is a merely fanciful idea, but to these I will not now make any reply the matter is one requiring careful development, and a partial and in adequate explanation would be worse than useless. I must therefore leave its discussion to some other occasion, and in the meanwhile ask my readers to assume the existence of this Force simply as a working hypothesis. In asking this I am not asking more than they are ready to concede in the case of physical science where it is necessary to assume the exist ence of purely speculative conditions of energy and matter if we would co-ordinate the observed phenomena of nature into an intelligible whole; and in like manner I would ask the critical reader to as sume as a working hypothesis the existence of an Essence intermediate between the Originating Spirit and the world of external manifestation.

The existence of such an intermediary is a conclusion which has been arrived at by some of the deepest thinkers who have ever lived, and it has been called by various names in different countries and ages; but for the purpose of the present book I think I can not do better than adopt the name given to it by the European writers of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seven teenth centuries. They called it "Anima Mundi," or the Soul of the World, as distinguished from "Animus Dei," or the Divine Spirit, and they were careful to discriminate between the two.

If you look in a Latin dictionary you will find that this word, which means life, mind, or soul, is given in a twofold form, masculine and feminine, Animus and Anima. Now it is in the dual nature thus indicated that the action of spiritual causation consists, and we cannot eliminate either of the two factors without involving a confusion of ideas which the recognition of their interaction would prevent us falling into.

When once we recognize the nature and function of Anima Mundi we shall find that, under a variety of symbols, it is referred to throughout the Bible, and indeed forms one of the principal subjects of its teaching; but to explain these Bible references in detail would require a book to itself. In general terms, however, we may say that Anima Mundi is "the Eternal Feminine," and the necessary correlative to Animus Dei, the true Originating Spirit. It is what the mediaeval writers called "the Universal Medium," and is that principle which, as I pointed out in the opening chapter of this book, is esoterically called "Water."

It is not the Originating Principle itself, but it is that principle through which the Originating Principle operates. It is not originative but receptive, not the seed but the ground, formative of that with which it is impregnated, as is indicated by the old French expression for it "ventre saint gris," the "holy blue womb" the innermost maturing place of Nature ; and its power is that of attracting the conditions necessary for the full maturing of that seed with which it is impregnated, and thus bringing about the growth which ultimately culminates in completed manifestation.

Perhaps the idea may be put into terms of modern Western thought by calling it the Subconscious Mind of the Universe; and if we regard it in this light we may apply to it all those laws of the interaction between conscious and subconscious mentality with which I conclude most of my readers are familiar.

Now the two chief characteristics of subconscious mind are its amenability to suggestion and its power of working out into material conditions the logical consequences of the suggestion impressed upon it. It is not originative, but formative. It does not provide the seed but it causes it to grow; and the seed is the suggestion impressed upon it by the objective mind.

If, then, we credit the Universal Subjective Mind with these same qualities we find ourselves face to face with a stupendous power which by its nature affords a matrix for the germination of all the seeds of thought that are planted in it.

Looking at the totality of Nature as we see it the various types of life, vegetable, animal, and human, and the evolution of these types from earlier ones, we can only come to the conclusion that the Originating Mind, Animus Dei as distinguished from Anima Mundi, must in the first instance see things generically, the type rather than the individual, much as Plato puts it in his doctrine of architypal ideas, and so the world, as we know it, is governed by a Law of Averages which maintains and advances the race whatever may become of the individual.

We may call this a generic or type creation as distinguished from the conception of a specific creation of particular individuals; but, as I have explained more fully in my book, "The Creative Process in the Individual," the culminating point of such a generic creation must be the production of individual minds which are capable of realizing the general principle at work, and therefore of giving it individual application.

• Thomas Troward, Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning, pp. 312-315

It is hard to give a better answer than stringray but I will add that "god" is just a word. You did not specify what your definition of god is. In my opinion the universe is a physical construct. If we ever uncover a metaphysical component then you could say god is a part the universe and I'm sure many people will do that if the day comes.

Everything is God and God is everything, but to call anything God belittles God.

Example, you are your body and your body is you, but would someone talk to your toe as if it were you?

It is true both are you and you are both however it seems a little demeaning and disrespectful to talk to your toe as if it were you.

This is how I see the relationship of God and the universe, furthermore universe implies outside space. It does not imply inside of us as the closest place we can find God.

as we try to name Him we
limit His essence into words
describing what we can percieve
and then some imagination.

he believes the power of
infinite mind and what
manifests from It are
connected but not the same

all that exist the universe is God you see it all around you. that is the body of God.as for is spirit it exist in the eternal now from the beguinning to the end.in the kingdom of light. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ7pSQCE22I every one of those small light is one of your brother or sister and the main light in the middle is god. your spirit is made in is image and you have a physical body. i am in god and god is in me. jesus said it him self: Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the miracles themselves. http://bible.cc/john/14-11.htm On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you. http://bible.cc/john/14-20.htm

now you can more understand the word of jesus. "Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world. http://bible.cc/john/17-24.htm His disciples said to him, "Show us the place where you are, since it is necessary for us to seek it." He said to them, "Whoever has ears, let him hear. There is light within a man of light, and he lights up the whole world. If he does not shine, he is darkness." Jesus said, "If they say to you, 'Where did you come from?', say to them, 'We came from the light, the place where the light came into being on its own accord and established itself and became manifest through their image.' If they say to you, 'Is it you?', say, 'We are its children, we are the elect of the living father.' If they ask you, 'What is the sign of your father in you?', say to them, 'It is movement and repose.'

http://gnosis.org/naghamm/gthlamb.html

if you take the narrow gate and are born of water and spirit you will go above to the kingdom of light: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDiZjbx5GJU

There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever. http://bible.cc/revelation/22-5.htm

In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful

Say: He is Allah, the One and Only; Allah, the Eternal, Absolute; He begetteth not, nor is He begotten; And there is none like unto Him.

(The holy Quran)