What do you think; does everyone on earth deserve direct communication from God or should people be required to search for God themselves?
Curious question! I mean curious that anyone might think it possible a deity would take into consideration morals, virtues, beliefs, or some other human qualities and traits as sufficiently impressive grounds for a deity to decide who to communicate with. Proof we must be so near to being gods ourselves they actually notice things as puny as whether or not we believe in them, right? Pretty heady stuff, I'd say.
Beyond that, is not the question a bit like thinking, when someone tells us that they love us, "I deserve it! I deserve that person's love!" But how can that be so? We interact with a handful or so of people every day, some of whom actually know us well, and yet most of them -- not even the few who know us well -- love us. Then comes along this one person, and all of a sudden, he or she is the first one, sometimes in quite a long while, to notice we in some noticeable way deserve to be loved?
As a fact, I have known people of several different beliefs and no belief at all, of different sets of morals, of different levels of skill and accomplishments, and so forth, all tell me that they have had some kind of encounter with god, and their accounts are in general so equally plausible that I think any notion god picks or chooses to communicate with folks on the basis of their deserving to be communicated with a very lame idea -- maybe even a poor joke.
East and West often ask more or less parallel questions, or hold more or less parallel views about gods, if you think the "West", as including the Middle East too. But the questions can be tellingly different as well. For instance, the West tends to ask, "Can god communicate with you?", or "Has god communicated with you?", while the East tends to ask, "Have you experienced god?". or "Can you experience god?"
In practice, the West most often hears god speak to them, the East most often "experiences" god. But what's the difference?
Basically, hearing god is based on one sense -- our ability to hear -- while experiencing god is, by most accounts, based on all of our senses.
What is often enough experienced might be described this way: Everything one was experiencing a moment before -- sitting on the veranda, watching, hearing, and smelling the rain, feeling a few shivers down one's back, and getting a little bit aware that one's foot under them is falling asleep -- everything one was experiencing in most ways remains as it was. But now there'ssomething different, radically different, happening. The things have not so much changed as how one perceives them has changed One's sense of being a self has dissolved. Consequently one no longer sees the world as divided in any way between what is "me" and what is "not-me". Instead, everything one is experiencing has suddenly come to seem to be united in fundamental, indivisible, but still tangible way.
In the West, god speaks, communicating something of importance, and one goes on to become a prophet. In the East, god does not speak, overtly communicates mostly nothing of importance, and yet is wholly changed by the experience, and goes on to become an enlightened person.
