A description

I believe God can be described as Intelligent Loving Conscious Energy.

- Alex Strachan, Gabriola Island, May 2026

Energy because everything that exists must come from a source.

Conscious because awareness does not arise from things that have no awareness, no matter how they are arranged.

Intelligent because the patterns we live inside are too precise to be accident.

Loving because across cultures and centuries, the wisdom traditions agree on this when they describe what they encountered at the source.

I had been working with the phrase Intelligent Energy for some time. When I came across the words of Dr. Bernie Siegel, I saw what was missing.

Bernie S. Siegel: To me, God is an intelligent, loving, conscious energy and why do I say that? Well you need energy to create. You have to have a source. It's undifferentiated energy which has intelligence or it couldn't create.

Dr. Siegel spent his whole career as a surgeon working with people who were dying, and he did not arrive at this definition by sitting and thinking about it, he arrived at it by watching, over all those years, what actually helped people live and die well. That matters to me, because these are not the words of someone doing philosophy, they are the words of someone who was in the room.

When I read what he had written, the fit was immediate, the word I already had and the three I had been missing, and I have not been able to improve on it since. Each of the four is carrying something the other three cannot carry on their own.

A way of living

If God is loving conscious energy, the question becomes how to live in alignment with that.

I came to three words. The order matters.

Respect

First.

Without respect, everything else is performance.

For most of my life I tried to love before I respected, and I could not understand why it kept failing on me. Respect means seeing the other person as fully real, their own person with their own life, separate from whatever I wanted them to be, and that turns out to be far harder to actually do than it is to nod along with. You cannot skip past it and land on love. You land on something else instead, something that calls itself love and is not.

Listen

Second.

Without listening, the respect stays in your own head and never reaches the other person, and the love is mostly something you are imagining about them.

To really listen is to be willing to be changed by what the other person tells you, and most of what we call listening is just waiting for our turn to talk, myself as much as anyone. It is rare, and I do not think you ever finish learning it. I certainly have not.

Love

Third.

Love is what becomes possible when the first two are real.

Love that skips the first two words is just sentiment, a nice feeling you have about a person rather than something they can actually lean on. Love that has come up through respect and listening is the thing every wisdom tradition keeps pointing at when it talks about the highest practice, and it is the only kind that holds when loving someone costs you something.

I worked these three words out in my own life before I understood what I had. They came from trying, failing, and trying again. What I know about respect, listening, and love I learned from my ex-wife and from AA. I offer them not as someone who has mastered them, but as someone who has needed them.

If God is intelligent loving conscious energy, then to respect, listen, and love is to participate in what God is. The rest is detail.