my question is about the need to "divine".

Because that's what spirituality is. It's the search for and exploration of a non material aspect of the universe. Everything from monotheism to ceremonial magic to zen meditation is a pursuit of something intangible.

does this "nonmaterial aspect" need to be divine? The word "god" has an enormous baggage. It's charged and it's not as 'innocent' as you make it to be.

it's more often an organisation of all that's 'tangible'

you'll just end up bored and ignored.

i was, but out of respect for the time you took to write that comment, i went out stared at the stars for an hour, ruminating your comment.

It isn't something you can dismiss as fantasy because fantasy doesn't and can't change anything other than one's imagination.

gods are fantasies that changed the whole world.

But it's the goal. People looking for the divine in themselves and the universe are seeking to be other than "just" a part of material life.

Why?

"Material life" is full of wonders.

can't "people" cherish it without "divine" filters?

The rat race, the grind, the orphan crushing machine, the empty and draining toil that is survival. People want life to be more than that.

If what you call "material life" could speak, what would they say about "what people want"?

There was a praying mantis behind me. I'm surrounded by a dozen spiders. Some others are getting eaten alive while i write these. What do these divine spirits want?

What do they want, those waves crashing at a distance?

Divinity is the opposite of materiality. It's the spark of sentience and sapience.

how did you get there?

Materiality isn't the opposite of anything. You unnecessarily put it there.

Spark of sentience and sapience

:)

You reduce the more primitive drives and embrace "higher" ones that are about being a source of positive change, a source of goodness (though I'm dubious the goodness exists as a discrete face of reality personally).

i'm glad to see that "higher" in quotation marks. You 'nailed' it.

That's why the divine. The divine is just a code word for a better state of being. It's an expression of seeing an underlying connection in all things and venerating that connection.

Let's use another "code word" for it then, if it's "just".

"A better state of being"… "an expression of seeing an underlying connection in all things and venerating that connection." Fine, let's do that without staining it with divinities.

Anyway, with that tangent aside, "when everything is god, nothing is god" is exactly the same thing as "thou art god". When one sees divinity in all things, one realizes that there is no external deity. Thou art god. I art god. My chicken art god. We aren't separate, unfathomably disconnected things, we art one. That's the whole point of it.

"i am god" has, again, some historical baggage, among others.

if it's that simple then why not write "You are your own chicken. Act like it." When you choose to write "you are your own god" in all capitals, that's not as innocuous as you sound it to be.

We aren't separate indeed. We are "one" and an egg.