I ask, "Do you worship? Who or what do you worship? Are you immortal? Do you have a soul?"

Zohar answers, “You ask what we worship, bit I ask you this; ‘What do you worship?’ You tend to personify your deities, giving them human characteristics like ‘consciousness’ or ‘wisdom’ or ‘power.’ Paul, you are thinking of a song by your late Janis Joplin. Recall the lyrics here.”

I recall the lyrics:

"Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz?My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends.Worked hard all my lifetime, no help from my friends,So, Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz?

"Oh Lord, won't you buy me a color TV?Dialing for Dollars is trying to find me.I wait for delivery each day until three,So, Lord, won't you buy me a color TV?

"Oh Lord, won't you buy me a night on the town?I'm counting on you, Lord, please don't let me down.Prove that you love me and buy the next round,Oh Lord, won't you buy me a night on the town?’

 Personal note: I think Zohar has a sense of humor.

 Zohar continues, “That song’s view of God is a primitive conceptualization. Does God require acts of veneration and contrition to curry divine favor? Do you need to beg God for forgiveness? Do you pray that God will change His or Her mind about something? Do you fear death, and the mystery that lies beyond the vail, and worship to avoid hell? These all posit a god with a consciousness, a thought process, an emotive process, and even a personality that are all too human.

“You can take one simple step to get away from such gross personification. That step is to conceptualize God as principle. That is, God is not all knowing, God is the principle of knowledge itself. God is not all powerful, God is the principle of power itself. God is not all loving. God is the principle of love itself… Thinking thusly will get you a step closer to the reality of what we hold sacred.

“We are not immortal, though it has been a long time since one of us has died. We do have souls. We consider ourselves each to be a cell in a greater organ, and an organ in a greater body. We do not worship the greater body as you think of worship. We recognize that we are just cells, and as such, will serve out a course of time and then die, to be replaced by a new, fresh version of ourselves. A death for use is a moment of elevation and integration to the higher realm of the God, or the whole-body consciousness that is unfathomable to the individual cells. 

“We do not worship, but we align ourselves with the Way of God, sometimes called the Tao, to flow with it and not in opposition to it. As such, we do what you might call ‘contemplative service’ necessary to balance and align ourselves. As the Master said, ‘not my will, but Thy Will be done.’ As a cell in your gut has no ability to understand that its purpose in the body is to generate a sugar molecule that will be sent via the heart to the brain so that you may have this thought, so too are we like individual cells, unable to know the Mind of God (if God is said to possess a mind). We see God’s Will in the Wu Wei of the Tao, and that we hold sacred.

“In the last analysis, you must judge our motives not by the way we communicate, but by the truth in the words we speak.”