Jan, 2018
What is the nature of reality? What is the meaning of life? These kinds of perennial questions have driven this research and writing project since my father passed away five years ago. The death of a loved one is a very common catalyst for self-examination, especially at my age (40-ish), so the introspection that followed was perhaps perfectly predictable. However, the experience itself proved far more radical and life-changing than I ever imagined it would be. My conception of reality changed. My conception of “God” and “spirit” changed. My notion of meaning and purpose changed. To say that I feel “born again” is not inaccurate. Psychologist Carl Jung once described the passing stages of spiritual life in a way that fits with my experience [1]: “we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning—for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.” His point: different stages of life involve different needs and demand different levels of understanding [2]. The Apostle Paul made a similar comment in 1 Corinthians, when he contrasted spiritual “meat” with “milk.” When I started this project, I believed there were fairly simple, straight-forward propositional answers that sufficient religious and scientific study would reveal. Instead I found fascinating and confounding complexity and subtlety. Beautiful paradoxes. “Meat” that was too difficult for my old belief system to digest. So the early stages of this research project turned into an exercise in intellectual annihilation. The destruction of my beliefs in their original form. My scientific and religious assumptions were challenged in ways that I couldn’t resolve, leaving me adrift and isolated, unsure of what to believe. At the same time, I was exploring various ways in which different religious, scientific and philosophical paradigms conceptualize the world. It was like illuminating a room with different colored light bulbs one at a time. Each paradigm presented the world in a new light. The process of simultaneously reading from so many different perspectives and juxtaposing viewpoints over many years created unexpected links and surprising synchronicities. Eureka moments became commonplace. Eventually, an image of reality emerged that resonated with me. It was utterly unlike the fundamentalist Christian paradigm of my youth. It did away with the “scandal of particularity” (that God revealed Himself to just one group in history) that had contributed to extreme cognitive dissonance. At first, it felt like heretical revelation. However, in time, I came to realize that my new perspective was not remotely original. It had been conveyed by countless mystics and spiritual explorers of all traditions (including Christianity) through the ages. Most of my new views have been discussed along the way in various essays and my views continue to evolve every day. One of my earliest convictions remains the firmest: fundamental uncertainty when it comes to propositional human knowledge. Alongside this is a newfound recognition that language itself, and hence logical constructs, are fundamentally metaphorical. Assertions of empirical “fact” are possible, useful, and even necessary, but do not denote literal metaphysical Truth. Rather, they describe relationships between human perception and experience within a conceptual paradigm that strives to achieve correlation and coherence. The paradigm is itself the source metaphor used in the interpretation of experience. My answer to Cartesian doubt is that “Something Exists” [3], with both “something” and “exists” meant in the most ambiguous sense possible. This “Something” is akin to what I’d call “God” [4], the Source of existence. The ultimate mystery. As such, to say “God exists” is more like a semantic tautology for me than an ontological assertion. Though theology and semantics vary, I believe this definition and vision of an underlying transcendent Reality (i.e. “God”) is found across the spectrum of religious experience. The Rigveda, one of the world’s oldest known religious texts says, “Truth is one, though the wise call it by many names.” As I see it, “God” provides the divine ground for all of existence, yet transcends the boundaries of human experience, thought and language, and defies definition. As the Tao Te Ching puts it [5], “The Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao.”
“An Unexamined Life is Not Worth Living” – Socrates
This process of personal discovery was propelled and accompanied by a series of subject-driven essays. They total almost 100 pages of pretty heavily researched musings. Here’s a one-sentence summary and link to each:
Part One: Into the Rabbit Hole. “An unexamined life is not worth living,” as Socrates said. (May, 2012)
Part Two: What Is Real? All human knowledge is fundamentally uncertain. (Dec, 2012)
Part Three: Biblical Inerrancy. If understood as primarily historical and literal, the Bible does not provide an entirely internally consistent account of either history or doctrine. (March, 2013)
Part Four: That Art Thou. God is both immanent and transcendent to human experience. (July, 2014)
Part Five: Jesus and the Way. Jesus can be understood as the first western teacher of nonduality, fully God and fully man, teaching self-lessness as essential to the “kingdom of God.” (March, 2015)
Part Six: The Self. The “self” is not a discrete or unitary physical or psychological entity. (Feb, 2016)
Part Seven: Knowledge as Metaphor. Knowledge is metaphorical. It is inevitably and necessarily expressed and understood within the framework of a conceptual paradigm. (Feb, 2017)
“He must throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein
I have spent the last five years studying religion, science, philosophy and psychology. It’s been an immersive process that’s involved reading hundreds of books and research articles [6]. Throughout this process, I’ve been amazed by how serendipitously readings have informed research in unexpected and uncanny ways. Obviously, my readings tracked my research to an extent, but what I found most remarkable was how often my unrelated and ancillary readings informed the entire process. This cross-pollenation was consistently illuminating. It truly felt “spirit led,” so to speak. The entire research experience has made me acutely aware that my own interest lies in religious understanding and experience, not scientific knowledge. Albert Einstein once said [7], “Religion without science is blind. Science without religion is lame.” In other words, science winds up providing descriptions without prescriptions, and religion drifts into simple superstition without the corroboration of empirical study. This project has largely focused on how various highways of knowledge and experience interact and intersect. It’s been a mapping process of sorts. My questions and answers have been largely exoteric, that is, outward facing, relating to scientific, philosophical and theological knowledge. My hope has been to orient myself on this map of evidence and worldviews in order to understand how to proceed spiritually. To that end, it’s been incredibly constructive. It seems to me that the nexus where science, philosophy and religion converge is what’s been called the “perennial philosophy,” which Indian scholar Eknath Easwaran summarizes as the view that “1) there is an infinite, changeless reality beneath the world of change (i.e. “God”); 2) this same reality lies at the core of the very human personality; 3) the purpose of life is to discover this reality experientially; that is, to realize God while here on earth.” I would say that to “realize God” experientially is necessarily a mystical endeavor. Ludwig Wittgenstein was one of the most famous philosophers and logicians of the 20th century, yet he wrote that one must ultimately “throw away the ladder” of propositional knowledge and logic upon which we climb in pursuit of ultimate truth, for it cannot answer life’s most profound questions [8]. Knowledge and logic are used to build the “ladder” that guides faith. Without them, intuition and faith run aground on irrationality, but alone, they run into the constraints of logic itself, which is self-referential and incapable of transcending its own limits [9]. I suspect transcendence requires induction, extrapolation and intuition. It requires a “leap of faith.” Indian philosopher Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan writes, “The successful practice of intuition requires previous study and assimilation of a multitude of facts and laws… Intuition is the ultimate vision of our profoundest being. It is expressed and transmitted not by means of precise scientific statements, but by myth and image, literature and art. They are free, flexible and fluid, and bear on their faces the breath of the spirit.” I think my personal journey must move away from the concerns of exoteric reasoning and belief, and towards the esoteric symbols of “inner life.” In this sense, I’ve been strongly influenced by writers like Joseph Campbell, Paul Tillich and Carl Jung. This is of course where all mystics teach that one must find God. Within. From the start of this project, I lacked faith. I needed to study the philosophical and scientific questions before I could commit to internal work or any kind of intuitive “leap.” An amusing paradox arises. Rumi, a thirteenth century Sufi mystic writes [10], “Then the seeker says, If I had known the real way it was, I would have stopped all that looking around. But knowing depends on the time spent looking!” Indeed, without studying as I did, I would never have reached a place where I could discard my studies, and the questions which haunted me for so long (like is reality subjective or objective?) for something more personal.
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.” – Albert Einstein
Socrates once said, “I know only one thing; that I know nothing.” This is sometimes called the Socratic Paradox. As knowledge gains sufficient breadth and depth, it reveals its own dearth. In other words, the more we “know,” the more we realize just how little we “know.” This deeper wisdom of acknowledged ignorance is an unknowing of sorts. The Katha Upanishad says [11], “He truly knows Brahman (i.e. God) who knows him as beyond knowledge; he who thinks that he knows, knows not.” Jewish philosopher and theologian Martin Buber writes [12], “All religious reality begins with what Biblical religion calls the “fear of God.” …It is the essential mystery, the inscrutableness of which belongs to its very nature; it is the unknowable.” Dionysius the Areopagite, a sixth century Christian monk, writes, “the aspirant becomes merged in the nameless, formless Reality …which is beyond all knowing.” This leads to another paradox. “We become more religious in proportion to our readiness to doubt and not our willingness to believe” is how Radhakrishnan phrased it [13]. To transcend our own dogmatism requires a certain inclination towards the mystical. “This transcendence is ultimately experienced as relationship, not knowledge” writes Buber, “for when man learns to love God, he senses an actuality which rises above the idea.” We must escape propositional formulas that are neatly analytical. So often truth is not amenable to propositional assertion. It is living and moving. It is many-layered. It often requires that we embrace paradox by acknowledging and/both, rather than insisting on the bivalence of either/or. This is a defining characteristic of “non-dualistic” thinking, which suggests that truth has different levels, and notions like “true” and “false” only ever apply provisionally and conditionally. This way of thinking takes apparent contradictions as separately valid perspectives within a larger unity. It suggests subject and object are two sides of the same coin, good and bad are intertwined, creation and destruction are recursive, self and other are codependent, and so forth. Buber writes, “the crucial religious experiences of man do not take place in a sphere in which creative energy operates without contradiction, but in a sphere in which evil and good, despair and hope, the power of destruction and the power of rebirth, dwell side by side.” This kind of nuanced view which recognizes opposites within a larger unity resonates with me. I have come to think of the cosmos as fundamentally paradoxical, and transcendent unity as more heterogeneous than homogeneous.
Over 2500 years ago, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus wrote [14], “Unite whole and part, agreement and disagreement, accordant and discordant—from all comes one, and from one all.” Understanding opposites as a codependent heterogenous unity has freed me from the dissonance of certain conundrums (e.g. where does “evil” come from?), and helped me see through many of the false dichotomies created by classical Aristotelian logic. How can opposites participate in the same whole? How can light be described as both particle and wave? How can God be both three and one? Nowhere are paradoxes more essential than in the language of religion. In the commonly-used dualistic language of Christianity, we “seek” God, “find” Jesus and invite him “into” our heart. There is a separation between God and man built into the language (and backed by certain theological doctrines like original sin and atonement). In the language of eastern religions like Buddhism and Vedanta, there is no separation between God and man. Metaphorically, God is the ocean and we are like waves, or God is the screen on which the movie of our experience plays out. The two cannot be separated. It is only ignorance that veils the eternal presence of God within from our awareness. A few years into this project, I took the eastern view to be “true” and the dualistic ideas of Christianity to be “false.” But I have since come to see them as two different ways of approaching the same paradox. This realization has led me back to my Christian roots. Both approaches can usually be found in both kinds of religious traditions as well. For instance, both Buddhism and Hinduism have sects that are based on the dualistic concept of seeking God as ‘Other’ through love, devoted worship and self-surrender to a reified representation of the Divine. Conversely, there are mystics in the Abrahamic traditions who describe experiencing God (or Christ) within, as though a veil were lifted. Jesus said, “I and the Father are One,” and Paul said “it is not I that lives but Christ that lives in me.” God “lives in” us, as we “live and move and have our being” in God. A much longer essay would be needed to convey the various parallels between the two approaches, but suffice to say I think they both end with the same objective: loss of self (ego) and a sense of unity with God.
“The substance of man is existence.” – Martin Heidegger
In Matthew 6:24, Jesus teaches that “No one can serve two masters… you cannot serve both God and money.” The surrounding verses in chapter 6 suggest that this teaching extends beyond just money to include all of the material and temporal considerations that tend to dominate our attention. I would contend that ultimate meaning cannot be found in material or historical aspirations, objectives, goals or accomplishments. Our pursuit of these common objectives remind me of a dog chasing its own tail. If a dog catches its tail, what is acquired? The start of another chase. It is the continuation of an endless cycle of discontent and desire and more discontent. This is the dukkha that Buddhism asserts is inescapable in unenlightened existence. The hedonic treadmill. As the author of Ecclesiastes aptly observes, “everything is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.” Where then can meaning be found? In Luke 17:20, Jesus teaches that “the kingdom of God is within.” This suggests to me that meaning is found in the non-temporal, the eternal, the changeless, the immortal of “spirit.” Most Christian conceptions of “eternal” and “immortal” that I’ve encountered are fundamentally temporal. “Heaven” is often pictured as a form of indefinitely extended time (“eternity”) wherein one continues to exist as a self-aware participant in “the afterlife.” But like the “bardo” discussed in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, I would contend that any “afterlife” like “bardo” between reincarnations or “heaven” or “hell” as rewards or punishments are no less impermanent if they involve any sense of temporality. Something truly “eternal” can instead be understood as time-less, and “immortal” as no longer attached to the temporal constructs of mind, ego and “self.” It can be taken as the “eternal Now.” It can be understood as the unchanging “I am,” the unchanging screen on which the impermanence of existence plays out. The light that precedes and transcends the sense of waking and dreaming and dreamless consciousness, the formless that precedes and transcends material form. Understood this way, the metaphor of “matter” and physicalism is understood as an “illusion” relative to the unchanging awareness of “I am” which is beyond the contents of action and knowledge. Fourteenth century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart writes [15], “The aim of man is beyond the temporal — in the serene region of the everlasting Present.” Elsewhere he writes, “Time is what keeps the light from reaching us. There is no greater obstacle to God than time.” Hinduism’s Bhagavad Gita says [16], “They are forever free who renounce all selfish desires and break away from the ego cage of “I,” “me” and “mine” to be united with the Lord. Attain to this, and pass from death to immortality.”
As a culture, we have become so enamored with the trappings of material progress, technology and productivity that we have forgotten the much richer prize that is sitting quietly inside our own hearts and minds. Our modern economic engine is built around actively cultivating ego and stoking desire. We seem to have lost our sense of atemporal “spirit,” and our appreciation for inner exploration and the alternate forms of consciousness that played such large roles in developing human spirituality through history. Our cultural rejection of “inner life” is like a treasure box that has been forgotten in the bustle of a party. In Matthew 13, Jesus says, “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy he went and sold all he had and bought that field.” When we directly experience the joy of the “eternal present,” nothing else we could collect or compile can compare. In fact, we’d happily sell all we “have” to rest in just “being.” Fully immersed in the present moment. Unfortunately, we have a culture built around “having,” not “being.” Even in the domain of spirit, we speak of salvation as something to be possessed, not something existential to be lived. But to commit to a life of spirit, I contend one must detach from love of “the world” and the domain of possession. Meister Eckhart writes, “Wouldst thou be free from all grief and trouble, abide and walk in God, and to God alone. As long as love of the creature is in us, pain cannot cease.” Our ego must die to escape the discontent or “grief” that Eckhart refers to. What does this mean? What would it look like? It means letting go of “self,” its desires, and its fixation on the temporal as ultimate. It might be said that “suffering” itself arises through this sense of possession and identification of mind with the body and ego. Perennialist Eckhart Tolle writes [17], “Surrender is the simple but profound wisdom of yielding to rather than opposing the flow of life… so to surrender is to accept the present moment unconditionally and without reservation. It is to relinquish inner resistance to what is.” What “is”? What Exists. God. To surrender to the present moment unconditionally is like, put differently, surrendering to God [18]. This does not mean disengaging from life or even “effort,” but rather, focusing on process and detaching from our fixation on outcomes. It involves seeing subject and object as two sides of the same coin, controller and controlled as different aspects of the same movement. This paradox of acting without attachment to outcome is exemplified by the Taoist notion of wu wei, which translates to “effortless action” or “non-action.” The Tao Te Ching says, “One who lives in accordance with the Tao does not go against the way of things. He moves in harmony with the present moment always knowing the truth of just what to do.” Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience argues for the same sort of “effortless action” in secular terms [25]. He writes, “the joy we get from living, ultimately depends directly on how the mind filters and interprets everyday experiences. Whether we are happy depends on inner harmony, not on the controls we are able to exert over the great forces of the universe… The purpose of the flow is to keep on flowing, not looking for a peak or utopia but staying in the flow. It is not a moving up but a continuous flowing. There is no possible reason for climbing except the climbing itself; it is a self-communication.” The Tao Te Ching says, “Hold to the Tao and all things will follow. The Tao does not act, thus everything is done.” In Matthew 6, right after saying that no one can serve two masters, Jesus says something similar: “Take no thought, saying, what will we eat? Or, what shall we drink? Or, with what shall we be clothed? Your heavenly Father knows what you need, so seek ye first the kingdom of heaven, and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.” The point of these teachings? Place ourselves in harmony with the “will of God” and let go. If we focus on the inner, the outer will take care of itself.
“I see nothing but Becoming.” – Heraclitus
What does the “will of God” mean? What is the “kingdom of God” to which Jesus repeatedly refers? My answer to those questions changed radically after studying the Hebrew verb hayah. It is the root verb in both Yahweh and ehyeh (“I am” in Exodus 3:14) [20]. Hayah means ‘to be’ or ‘to exist’ (as ‘self-existent’) in an active sense closer to ‘becoming.’ What hayah suggests to me about Yahweh is a sense of profoundly existential and evolving immanence, unchanging and transcendent in that it is. Is-ness, as Meister Eckhart called it. We might consider it a fundamentally self-aware awareness; the “I am” ubiquitous to the experience of existence. This interpretation of existential ubiquity creates a kind of synchronicity between three major religious mantras: Judaism’s Shema, Om Sat Tat in Hinduism, and Islam’s Tawhid [21]. Transliterated, the Shema (Deut 6:4) reads “Yahweh Elohim Echad Yahweh,” and is usually translated as “The Lord God is One (God).” “Yahweh” refers to the “I am” of Being and Existence, “Elohim” refers to Deity, “Echad” is a compounded form of one (akin to nondualism or Hinduism’s “advaita”), “Yahweh” reiterates the “I am” of Being and Existence. Hinduism uses the mantra “Om Tat Sat,” wherein “Om” refers to the Supreme Infinite Spirit , “Tat” refers to all that is, and “Sat” refers to ultimate Truth. These seem akin to the Sufi rendering of Islam’s Tawhid, “La ilaha ill-Allahu” as “There is no reality but God. There is only God.” I think all three of these major mantras present ways of saying ‘God is in All and All is in God.’ “God” and “All” are not separate. “Everything : One” as Heraclitus wrote. Buddhism and Taoism share this idea of universal unity. The Tao Te Ching says, “the nature of the Tao is infinitely illusive… but at its heart is all being… at its heart is all spirit, and spirit is reality.” As I have come to see it, there is a sense in which God’s transcendence is immanent in all, shining through all appearances, transmuted into all the dynamic and transient activity of temporal existence. One might say existence is the “will of God” taking form. It is the transcendent and formless infinitude of possibility becoming actualized. This is an idea that philosophers like Schopenhauer and Hegel incorporated into their use of “Will” as a cosmic principle. Jewish theologian Martin Buber writes, “The religious reality of the meeting with the Meeter, who shines through all forms and is Himself formless, knows no image of Him, nothing comprehensible as object. It knows only the presence of the Present One.” To me, Christianity brilliantly represents the paradox of “knowing” the unknowable transcendent One. Earlier, I mentioned Heraclitus’s “Everything : One,” which often translated as “from all One, and from One all.” I think Heraclitus provides an essential link between these existential concepts of God and the gospel message of Christianity. Heraclitus was an influential pre-Socratic philosopher, and at the heart of his philosophy is the Logos. In The Logos of Heraclitus, Eva Brann writes [22], “This Logos, which is divine but perhaps not a nameable deity, governs and pilots the cosmos, the ordered world. It does so from within as a Wise Design, a maxim or judgment that it does not have but is. By it Everything, all the things that constitute the cosmos, are unified, put into ordered relations: Everything : One.” The Logos of Heraclitus is characterized by the union of opposites, not blended together, but juxtaposed in creative tension. A unity of opposing constituents. Heraclitus and Jesus use remarkably similar language in describing the confounding nature of Logos [23]. I think the gospel of John appeals to this idea by identifying the Logos as Jesus, the union of God and man, not as a blend, but as fully both. A juxtaposition. A living paradox. A reification of the transcendent. The story of Christ is replete with paradox: the immortal as mortal, unknowable made knowable, formless given form, God and Son of God as son of man, born of a virgin, uneducated sage, innocent yet convicted as guilty, bringing life from death. In the words of Peter Larson, “The life of Jesus is bracketed by two impossibilities: a virgin’s womb and an empty tomb. Jesus entered our world through a door marked “No Entrance” and left through a door marked “No Exit.”” Somewhere along the way, Christian doctrine proffered a dialectical resolution that turned the paradoxes into propositional truths, and lost sight of the underlying paradoxes. The symbolism turned from mystery to dogma. To me, this turn takes away from the remarkable symbolism embodied by Christ as the ultimate symbolic representation of a paradoxical cosmos, and the “mysteries of the kingdom of heaven.”
“Savor the Unflavored.” – Tao Te Ching
What does all this mean? How then shall we live? That was the question Christian apologist Francis Schaeffer asked in a book that deeply impacted me as a teenager. I think it’s the most pressing question one can ask after this kind of spiritual inquiry. Meaning would seem to be found in the eternal, immortal realm of “spirit,” yet all of human life is experienced as temporal, fleeting and impermanent. This is the timeless philosophical debate of essence (spirit) versus existence (matter). The Tao Te Ching addresses this paradox: “these two things, matter and spirit, so different in nature, have the same origin. This unity is the mystery of mysteries, and the gateway to spirituality.” The Isha Upanishad [24] says “To darkness are they doomed who worship only the body, and to greater darkness they who worship only the spirit… They who worship both the body and the spirit, by the body overcome death, and by the spirit achieve immortality.” What does that mean? In other words, “the body” represents existence by which we “overcome death” since death is akin to non-being or non-existence, and by the “spirit” we touch an essence which transcends the impermanence of existence to “achieve immortality.” I think it also reflects another paradox: the timeless and temporal must be juxtaposed to preserve the meaning of either. We need both. There is even a typical progression. In youth, we focus energies on establishing our existence through passions, hobbies, career and family. In midlife, we tend to withdraw from the “external” that dominates youth to explore “inner” meaning. Ideally, we achieve a level of spiritual maturity through which we “die to self” and are “born again” to an individuated integration, wherein the “inner” truths find expression in “outer” experience. This is the ubiquitous lesson of the monomyth that Joseph Campbell called the “hero’s journey.” The timeless (“spirit”) finds expression in the temporal (“material”), and the temporal finds meaning in the timeless. By centering our heart in the timeless and eternal realm of “spirit,” temporal existence regains its meaning, not for its historical merit or as a means to an end, but for its existential splendor. It is the stage on which the eternal plays out. It is the will of God taking form. In a sense, existence is its own reward. Experience itself is the gift. Martin Buber writes, “The ‘way of God’ is by no means to be understood as a sum of prescriptions for human conduct, but rather primarily as the way of God in and through the world… it is at the same time the way of salvation of men since it is the prototype for the imitation of God. Similarly, the Chinese Tao, the ‘path’ in which the world moves, is the cosmic primal meaning (and) at the same time the perfection of the soul.” He continues, “Meaning is to be experienced in living action and suffering itself, in the unreduced immediacy of the moment.” There a Buddhist saying: “Samsara is Nirvana.” In other words, the mundane and impermanent (samsara) is not different than enlightenment (nirvana). A Zen koan says, “Before enlightenment: fetch water, chop wood. After enlightenment: fetch water, chop wood.” Nothing changes (externally), but everything changes (internally). “Savor the unflavored,” is how the Tao Te Ching puts it. I love that. To me, this expression captures the essence of finding mindful joy in every moment. Even the mundane. Especially the mundane. Each moment of existence is to be savored for whatever it is. This existential advice appears as far back as the ancient epic of Gilgamesh. It appears in the first century BCE with Horace’s carpe diem. It can be found across religious and philosophical belief systems. The importance of transcending the trappings of ‘self’ and its desires has been taught across time and culture by everyone from Buddha and Jesus to Marcus Aurelius and Meister Eckhart and Arthur Schopenhauer. There is a boundless peace and exhilaration to be found in this naked awareness and appreciation of existence for its own sake, and there is plenty of modern psychological evidence to support this idea [25]. In spiritual terms, this idea of self-transcendence in the “flow” of an “eternal now” opens the door for all experience to be understood as fundamentally divine; pain, suffering, and even death included. Unfortunately, the idea of living in the moment is dismayingly new to me. I have seldom been one to inhabit my own life in the moment. Hopefully that is changing. To understand God as immanent in existence now, and to understand existence as fundamentally divine has brought me into a clearing that feels like the end of this project. And very much the beginning of something new. I have come to imagine the experience of existence as an invitation to play, to savor the flavors of experience without attaching to them, beyond “good” and “bad,” desirable or undesirable. The Tao Te Ching says, “the wise person lives without effort in his daily life. He practices a wordless doctrine. Good and bad come to him and he refuses neither.” This approach helps us recognize that every moment is a gift from God. “One who knows the truth that underlies all things lives in this world without danger. To him, every word reflects the universe. Every moment brings enlightenment.” I think life is like a rushing stream. It is not meant to be held, for there is nothing to hold and no one to hold it. It is a wash of experience. In the words of Rumi, “This dance is the joy of existence. I am filled with You (God). Skin, blood, bone, brain, and soul. There’s no room for lack of trust, or trust. Nothing in this existence (mine) but that existence (Yours).” “That art Thou” as the Upanishads put it. All is in God, and God is in All. What of morality? How then shall we live? I think this worldview implies a moral imperative. The Isha Upanishad says, “When a man sees God in all beings and all beings in God, and also God dwelling in his own Soul, how can he hate any living thing? Grief and delusion rest upon a belief in diversity, which leads to competition and all forms of selfishness. With the realization of oneness, the sense of diversity vanishes and the cause of misery is removed.” Such harmony is seldom seen in our “fallen” world because, in the words of the Dalai Lama [26], “what lies at the root of our unenlightened existence is our fundamental misconception of the ultimate nature of reality.” The trappings of self, and the impression of separateness from both each other and from God. I don’t propose that my views represent any kind of ultimate metaphysical Truth. I maintain that existence is fundamentally unknowable, mysterious and paradoxical. I see the religious understanding I’ve expressed here as a metaphorical insight about experiencing existence. It is just a metaphor, but one that resonates deeply with me. More importantly, I’d say God is not a matter of intellect, but of heart; not a matter of theory, but of practice. God is not defined, but experienced, and religious truth is experiential knowledge, not intellectual knowledge. Now comes the more meaningful challenge of turning what feels like spiritual insight into the habituated practice of a more mindful and enlightened existence.
Notes:
[1] Modern Man in Search of a Soul, by Carl Jung
[2] I now see why Carl Jung, Richard Rohr, and many others have portrayed the second half of life as profoundly different than the first. Hindu sages break the path of life into four stages, wherein man seeks four things: the first two are called the Paths of Desire (pleasure and ambition: serving Self), the final two are called the Paths of Renunciation (community and enlightenment: renouncing Self). The key idea is that they proceed in order. Until we realize pleasure cannot satisfy, we focus our energy there. With this satiated, we can move on to ambition.
These are material concerns that generally take up the first half of life as we sample various kinds of experience and seek the security of achievement and accomplishment. Then we are ready to move onto something larger than ourselves. We are ready to sacrifice personal pleasure and ambition for community. Finally, that sense of community expands into a sense of universal community. Oneness with All. Enlightenment. In Hinduism, this process is imagined to play out over countless lifetimes, but the same pattern can be seen in a single life. Think of it as akin to a fractal pattern, repeating itself at different scales. Within a single lifetime, we observe how a child (or “childish” adult) seeks thrills and pleasure. “Maturation” involves developing knowledge and a rational understanding of the world, accruing accomplishments, building a family, and seeking security. But as life experience gathers, contradictions and paradoxes appear, at first in isolation, then eventually in abundance. We are forced to either embrace paradox or ignore large chunks of experience. The more spiritually “mature” view requires embracing these types of paradoxes in an ever-widening scope of understanding. This widening of perspective allows the third stage of community building, associated with religious teachers and elders, and political leaders. And perhaps, finally, enlightenment for those who continue stripping away ‘self’ even from the scale of community and beyond.
[3]: I am certain that there is something rather than nothing in my experience of the world. Even my experience of “nothing” is something. With eyes closed, my visual field is speckled with grainy incongruities. Even ‘silence’ has a frequency. Water has a taste. In Buddhism, “emptiness” is not nothingness. It is more like unlimited but unactualized potential. It is better understood as the absence of explicit form. In the metaphor of science, it may be considered akin to Zero Point energy. It is the infinite background from which form emerges. One might say emptiness is the substance of form and form is the shape of emptiness. This formed emptiness comprises my experience.
[4]: This provides me with a strange and surprising downstream realization: though I am skeptical of all human knowledge and consider all truth fundamentally uncertain, there is no escaping my experience that Something exists, even if I cannot define or describe or know the metaphysical nature of that ‘Something’ with any certainty. The experience of something as Existence also matches my definition of God. So, while I would deny claims to any certainty in human knowledge, I would say that my experience of God is an Absolute Truth. It is tautologically so. God is defined into existence because God is understood to be Existence. To me, to deny God is to deny Existence. So, while I am agnostic regarding all human ‘knowledge,’ I would say I have a definitionally gnostic awareness of God (not to be mistaken for knowledge of God).
[5] The Tao Te Ching, by Lao Tzu
[7] Quantum Physics and Ultimate Reality: Mystical Writings of Physicists, by Michael Green
[8] Tractatus Logico-Philosophus, by Ludwig Wittgenstein
[9]: The limits of logic appear on two fronts. One is that logic is fundamentally tautological. It is a symbolic system designed to maintain certain perfectly coherent relationships. However, this internally coherent system correlates imperfectly to the world we experience when mapped. This attempt at mapping the world to logic was the great effort undertaken by the likes of Bertrand Russell, and ardently pursued by the likes of (the young) Wittgenstein, Frege and Carnap as logical positivism, which remains one of the most epic failures in the history of philosophy. It turns out symbolic language doesn’t map to experience. Which leads to the second front, in which logic finds itself in good company. The impression of ultimate truth in both math and classical physics has proven faulty when inspected to its foundation. In Principia Mathematica, Bertrand Russell hoped and believed mathematical systems could provide foundational truths, but a few years later, Kurt Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems showed that any non-trivial mathematical system either includes some non-truths or excludes some true statements. In physics, the inevitability of determinism in classical physics (“Laplace’s Demon”) gave way to the probabilistic nature of quantum physics. In each of these fields, something that seemed universally true as a foundational Truth (logic, math, physics…) proved to be constrained and untrue at some point.
[10] The Essential Rumi, by Rumi
[11] The Katha Upanishad
[12] The Eclipse of God, by Martin Buber
[13] The Idealist Life View of Life, by Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
[14] The Fragments of Heraclitus, by Heraclitus
[15] Sermons of Meister Eckhart, by Meister Eckhart
[16] The Bhagavad Gita
[17] The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle
[18]: One might say that fighting against what “is” is a form of fighting against God. Many predestination Christians might agree.
[19]: Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Performance, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
[20]: The verb hayah has been formative to my interpretation of what we mean by “God.” In Exodus 3:14, God is said to identify Himself as ehyeh asher ehyeh (“I am that I am”). However, ehyeh is sometimes interpreted as ‘I will be’ (as in ‘I will be what I will be’). This is because in Hebrew the verb hayah does not mean ‘to be’ in the passive sense, but rather in an active sense closer to becoming. The Christian theologian Watchman Nee wrote an insightful commentary on the word, asserting that “Generally, hayah is used for dynamic categories or conditions, and not as a static linking word. What kinds of conditions were generally considered dynamic? The answer is simple. Any condition that is not static, any condition that has changed, is changing, or will change, was thought of as being dynamic.” Think about this alongside the common theological view that God “does not change.” Consider the paradox. God is often understood as a sort of transcendently perfect Being with a particular permanent unchanging essence, but what hayah suggests to me about the God of Judaism is a profoundly existential and evolving immanence, unchanging only in that it is. It is also striking that this immanent Divinity is often described in the first person. Etymologically, “Om Tat Sat” also relates to the English “Him That is” that is an older translation of Exodus 3:14. It is more commonly translated as “I am that I am.” Hinduism’s Bhagavad Gita says, “I am the Self in the heart of every creature, and the beginning, middle and end of their existence.”
[21]: Using this metaphorical understanding of God as Existence Becoming also casts the Old Testament into a very different light. It offers a solution to the paradox created by verses like Malachi 3:6 (“I, Yahweh, do not change”) and verses like Amos 7:3, 7:6, Exodus 32:14, (‘Yahweh repented’ (changed His mind)). It also offers a solution to the “good” and mystifyingly “bad” deeds (Numbers 31, for instance) done “by” God. It may suggest these stories are not moral lessons, but the existential lessons regarding the unfolding of Existence experienced as its myriad of forms. By changing the metaphor we associate with “God,” we alter the definition and meaning of “God”. Incidentally, I think this approach also works very well in making sense of Ecclesiastes 12:13-14, the final verses, which can be understood to suggest God is in every action, both good and bad.
[22]: The Logos of Heraclitus, by Eva Brann
[23]: In On Nature, Heraclitus writes, “To this Logos which I unfold, although it always exists, men make themselves insensible, both before they have heard it and when they have heard it for the first time. For notwithstanding that all things happen according to this Logos, men act as though they had never had any experience in regard to it.” In Matthew 13: 13-15, Jesus says something strikingly similar regarding the Logos (the “seed” in a previous parable, identified as such in Matthew 13:19). “Because the knowledge of the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them… This is why I speak to them in parables: “Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand.”
[24]: Isha Upanishad, by Unknown
[25]: There is plenty of research to corroborate the teaching that life lived in the “eternal present” is experienced as most precious. Researcher Matt Killingsworth notes that, more than any other consistent variable, happiness is most closely correlated with being “in the moment”: https://www.ted.com/talks/matt_killingsworth_want_to_be_happier_stay_in_the_moment?language=en
[26]: Illuminating the Path to Enlightenment, by Dalai Lama XIV