On 7 April 1844, the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith gave a sermon in which he said this:

Here then is eternal life—to know the only wise and true God—you have got to learn how to be a God yourself in order to save yourself, to make yourselves Gods, to be Kings and Priests to God, the same as all Gods have done…

That is a curious thought. How do we learn how to “be a God”? What does that mean?

This is ultimate question of much of spirituality and religion. Although it may sound blasphemous to some, even most of Christianity agrees that the end goal for humanity is theosis, deification, or divinization, which means to “become God.” The methods and means of doing that seem to be many and much debated.

In my view, practices which help us to transcend our egoic psychological self are those that help us to realize that we are in and of God already, we just don’t know it most of the time. We can’t see it. Our ego blinds us (the veil) to this Divine reality that is already existent all around us and in us.

What does this mean to be “in and of God”? We are miraculous conscious living beings in this vast creation, even living manifestations of this creation that has become consciously aware of itself. We are Being that is aware of Being! That’s remarkable! As the Old and New Testaments declare, even from the mouth of Jesus, “ye are Gods” (Psalm 82:6; John 10:34).

To “be a God” I think means to overcome one’s egoic self and fully realize one’s union with all of creation and reality and then fully embody that union in one’s life, relationships, words, activities, and love, the same as Jesus and Buddha and many other sages (“Gods”) have done throughout history. It means one acts in perfect harmony with creation and nature, being One with all things and Life itself.