A description of God and a way of living.
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.
Dr. Siegel spent his career as a surgeon working with people who were dying. He came to this definition not from philosophy but from clinical experience — from watching what helped people live and die well. That gives the four words a different weight than if they had come from a metaphysician.
The fit is precise. Energy. Conscious. Intelligent. Loving. Each word does work the others cannot do alone.
A way of living
I came to three words. The order matters.
First.
Without respect, everything else is performance.
For most of my life, I tried to love before I respected, and I did not understand why it kept failing. Respect means seeing the other as fully real — their own person, with their own life, separate from what I want them to be. You cannot skip this step and arrive at love. You arrive at something else that wears love's name.
Second.
Without listening, respect is theoretical and love is projection.
To listen is to be willing to be changed by what the other says. Most of what we call listening is waiting for our turn to talk. Real listening is rare, and most of us — myself included — have to keep learning it.
Third.
Love is what becomes possible when the first two are real.
Love that skips respect and listening is sentiment — a feeling about someone rather than a relationship with them. Love built on respect and listening is the thing every wisdom tradition is pointing at when it speaks of the highest practice.
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.