Thoughts On Belief
Here is something I shared with a dear friend who said it was helpful in her journey to discover her own spiritual truths. She graciously allowed me to share it with any of you who may find it helpful.
There is no absolute truth in science or mathematics. Or if there is, I can't find it. But there is a five book mathematical treatise on an effort to exhaustively define the term "one." In physics, the most solid of the sciences, we are wrestling with the reality that likely 95% of the universe is made up of "dark matter" and "dark energy." More importantly, the laws of matter conservation are not maintained on a quantum level. Things do just appear and disappear.
But that's completely irrelevant to your current internal struggle. Which I did myself, by the way. I think Descartes is interesting in that he made both the philosophy "I think, therefore I am" and the Cartesian plane we use in mathematics. One man impacted both areas.
For me, I've never found Descartes’ thought to be terribly persuasive of my existence. Hume argued that everything is relative. Nietzsche argued that God is dead. All of these arguments have been done before (all is vanity). But I found myself moving rapidly away from the modern philosophers when I realized that Nietzsche ended his life insane and modern philosopher Foucault ended his life as an S/M fetishist in San Francisco. So philosophy didn't have any of the answers I wanted for my life.
In science and mathematics, we have a relevant model. Newtonian physics applies relatively well to almost all our daily encounters. Very few of us are zipping about at near the speed of light. So Einstein's theories aren't very useful. But...Einstein is right and Newton is wrong!
True. But it mostly doesn't matter. Most of life can be lived as if Newton is right. Just as most of life can be lived as if we aren't mostly dark matter, and most of life doesn't require that we do/don't believe in God.
I can hear you questioning that. Two Zen monks are talking. "Is there heaven?" asks one. "If there was, what would you do?" says the other. "I'd want to do good things for others and help people so I could get into heaven." "What if there wasn't?" "Well, I'm a kind person, and if this is all we have I'd want to do good for others and help people." "So why do you care?"
More importantly for you right now, the Buddhists have a saying: "Find the Buddha, kill the Buddha." As soon as someone finds a teacher, a teaching, a state of mind they think is the Buddha, they need to reject it completely (no teacher killing is actually involved). Only in that rejection can they grow to see the Buddha within themselves.
Ah, hippie relativism. Let me ask the question about relativism. If you're in Ecuador, and you want to talk about waiting without hope for God, how can you talk to them? The Spanish word for waiting and hoping is esperar. They don't have a word to describe what you're trying to get across. So you'll have to make something up, which won't be exactly right, but will get across the point you're trying to make. Later on, other people might reject your explanation as incorrect. If you're a prophet, they might even start killing each other over the definition. But it was a BS definition, which served to help the people you were talking to. Was it BS? Yes! Was the truth behind it BS? No.
What if the true state of God is beyond us? Not even Moses was allowed to fully see him. God is like the sun, you can't look directly (or understand fully) or you'll be blinded. So we all have been given different lenses to see God. Some of our lenses are science and mathematics. Some are religious. Some are in our children's eyes. Are some/all the lenses BS? Yes! Is the underlying truth? No.
As I travel through life, I'm left with the sense that change happens. What was true is no longer true, and the nature of the underlying truth needs to be renegotiated in a changing world. Not that it changes, we change. Thank God we change, because it gives us hope that one day even these broken vessels will be worthy of what God has given us. But who or what God is appears to change as we change. Different aspects now appear, when you're a child, a teen, an adult, or a parent. For me as a child, the idea of "lovingly changing a poopy diaper" would be hysterical. But I remember doing just that. As an older parent, I'm sending my son to Ecuador, which feels exactly like sending my baby out into the jaws of the world. A large part of me still remembers that his foot was no bigger than my thumb (now he wears size twelve shoes).
Is it all BS? Yes. Is there still an underlying truth? Yes. Where is it? We do not have the words for it, we do not grasp it fully. We see it in the corner of our eye, and it is clearly evident.
Huh? In Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a philosophy teacher goes insane trying to lock down the concept of "quality." He could read it, show it to his students, they could all agree on the relative quality of something in comparison to something else. But sometimes quality resided in quick, perfect action. Sometimes it required careful planning. Sometimes it seemed to exist in chaos, sometimes in order. As it progressed, he found he had less and less to go on. Then he discovered the Tao. Which describes the same concept he had been trying to grasp. “The Tao that can be named is not the Tao.” Literally blew his mind.
You are looking for the quality of God in your life. Part of that journey is rejecting others’ definitions, because they are not your definitions. But you don't get to make up your own definition. It's not relative, it's absolute. There is only one way for you to be fully you, to fully express the quality within you. Gandhi said it right, he said that when you know who you truly are, you no longer have any choice in what you do.
But asking yourself who you are is like trying to define the concept of one, to discover the nature of dark matter, to corner God on a mountaintop and see him/her/it clearly. First, it's a different journey, and not the one you need to complete. Douglas Adams pointed out the universal answer was "42," because we didn't understand the question (a famous atheist, by the way).
If you did corner God on a mountaintop, and saw the absolute truth fully, you would - by definition - be insane. You would perceive a reality that none of the rest of us see. And you would see it so clearly that you would be unable to see why we wouldn't agree with you. Say that the absolute truth is all about living like a squirrel? Maybe it is. But even your kind, loving husband is going to drag you down from your tree by the third day.
For those of us who want to help others, it is the journey into ignorance, into the depth of our own unknowing, that is helpful. I don't want to hear about how you sang a song once and Jesus has been your buddy ever since. I want to hear about how you struggle, because it reflects my struggle. We are all alone, but we are on a common journey between ignorance and oblivion. Making contact with one another, reaching out, is the universal absolute truth. But the only way to do that right is figure out your personal truth, which is going to be a lot of picking and choosing bits of the Bible that speak to you. (Seriously, do you know anyone who is truly moved in the spirit by the begat sections?) Yes, it's going to be relative, but more important it's going to be unique. Because God doesn't have any interest in you becoming your neighbor or your church deacon, or anyone else. What's the point of that?
At the same time, you can't avoid your truth. Every time you run, it will get shoved back in your face. Lessons you avoid keep coming around. Over and over again. I think the idea of reincarnation is really a concept that should be applied to our current lifetime. If you don't resolve an issue, you will recreate that situation again later on in your life in an attempt to ultimately resolve it. I see this on a personal level, on a community level, and on a national level. We just keep repeating our unresolved history.
Or, we live in a meaningless, random world. OK. That doesn't really do anything for me. If someone says it to me, I think the proper response is to smack them. Because if it doesn't matter, none of it matters. But as soon as anything matters (hunger, going to the bathroom, getting smacked) then we have world full of meaning.
I hope this helps you clarify your own journey.
Here is something I shared with a dear friend who said it was helpful in her journey to discover her own spiritual truths. She graciously allowed me to share it with any of you who may find it helpful.
There is no absolute truth in science or mathematics. Or if there is, I can't find it. But there is a five book mathematical treatise on an effort to exhaustively define the term "one." In physics, the most solid of the sciences, we are wrestling with the reality that likely 95% of the universe is made up of "dark matter" and "dark energy." More importantly, the laws of matter conservation are not maintained on a quantum level. Things do just appear and disappear.
But that's completely irrelevant to your current internal struggle. Which I did myself, by the way. I think Descartes is interesting in that he made both the philosophy "I think, therefore I am" and the Cartesian plane we use in mathematics. One man impacted both areas.
For me, I've never found Descartes’ thought to be terribly persuasive of my existence. Hume argued that everything is relative. Nietzsche argued that God is dead. All of these arguments have been done before (all is vanity). But I found myself moving rapidly away from the modern philosophers when I realized that Nietzsche ended his life insane and modern philosopher Foucault ended his life as an S/M fetishist in San Francisco. So philosophy didn't have any of the answers I wanted for my life.
In science and mathematics, we have a relevant model. Newtonian physics applies relatively well to almost all our daily encounters. Very few of us are zipping about at near the speed of light. So Einstein's theories aren't very useful. But...Einstein is right and Newton is wrong!
True. But it mostly doesn't matter. Most of life can be lived as if Newton is right. Just as most of life can be lived as if we aren't mostly dark matter, and most of life doesn't require that we do/don't believe in God.
I can hear you questioning that. Two Zen monks are talking. "Is there heaven?" asks one. "If there was, what would you do?" says the other. "I'd want to do good things for others and help people so I could get into heaven." "What if there wasn't?" "Well, I'm a kind person, and if this is all we have I'd want to do good for others and help people." "So why do you care?"
More importantly for you right now, the Buddhists have a saying: "Find the Buddha, kill the Buddha." As soon as someone finds a teacher, a teaching, a state of mind they think is the Buddha, they need to reject it completely (no teacher killing is actually involved). Only in that rejection can they grow to see the Buddha within themselves.
Ah, hippie relativism. Let me ask the question about relativism. If you're in Ecuador, and you want to talk about waiting without hope for God, how can you talk to them? The Spanish word for waiting and hoping is esperar. They don't have a word to describe what you're trying to get across. So you'll have to make something up, which won't be exactly right, but will get across the point you're trying to make. Later on, other people might reject your explanation as incorrect. If you're a prophet, they might even start killing each other over the definition. But it was a BS definition, which served to help the people you were talking to. Was it BS? Yes! Was the truth behind it BS? No.
What if the true state of God is beyond us? Not even Moses was allowed to fully see him. God is like the sun, you can't look directly (or understand fully) or you'll be blinded. So we all have been given different lenses to see God. Some of our lenses are science and mathematics. Some are religious. Some are in our children's eyes. Are some/all the lenses BS? Yes! Is the underlying truth? No.
As I travel through life, I'm left with the sense that change happens. What was true is no longer true, and the nature of the underlying truth needs to be renegotiated in a changing world. Not that it changes, we change. Thank God we change, because it gives us hope that one day even these broken vessels will be worthy of what God has given us. But who or what God is appears to change as we change. Different aspects now appear, when you're a child, a teen, an adult, or a parent. For me as a child, the idea of "lovingly changing a poopy diaper" would be hysterical. But I remember doing just that. As an older parent, I'm sending my son to Ecuador, which feels exactly like sending my baby out into the jaws of the world. A large part of me still remembers that his foot was no bigger than my thumb (now he wears size twelve shoes).
Is it all BS? Yes. Is there still an underlying truth? Yes. Where is it? We do not have the words for it, we do not grasp it fully. We see it in the corner of our eye, and it is clearly evident.
Huh? In Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a philosophy teacher goes insane trying to lock down the concept of "quality." He could read it, show it to his students, they could all agree on the relative quality of something in comparison to something else. But sometimes quality resided in quick, perfect action. Sometimes it required careful planning. Sometimes it seemed to exist in chaos, sometimes in order. As it progressed, he found he had less and less to go on. Then he discovered the Tao. Which describes the same concept he had been trying to grasp. “The Tao that can be named is not the Tao.” Literally blew his mind.
You are looking for the quality of God in your life. Part of that journey is rejecting others’ definitions, because they are not your definitions. But you don't get to make up your own definition. It's not relative, it's absolute. There is only one way for you to be fully you, to fully express the quality within you. Gandhi said it right, he said that when you know who you truly are, you no longer have any choice in what you do.
But asking yourself who you are is like trying to define the concept of one, to discover the nature of dark matter, to corner God on a mountaintop and see him/her/it clearly. First, it's a different journey, and not the one you need to complete. Douglas Adams pointed out the universal answer was "42," because we didn't understand the question (a famous atheist, by the way).
If you did corner God on a mountaintop, and saw the absolute truth fully, you would - by definition - be insane. You would perceive a reality that none of the rest of us see. And you would see it so clearly that you would be unable to see why we wouldn't agree with you. Say that the absolute truth is all about living like a squirrel? Maybe it is. But even your kind, loving husband is going to drag you down from your tree by the third day.
For those of us who want to help others, it is the journey into ignorance, into the depth of our own unknowing, that is helpful. I don't want to hear about how you sang a song once and Jesus has been your buddy ever since. I want to hear about how you struggle, because it reflects my struggle. We are all alone, but we are on a common journey between ignorance and oblivion. Making contact with one another, reaching out, is the universal absolute truth. But the only way to do that right is figure out your personal truth, which is going to be a lot of picking and choosing bits of the Bible that speak to you. (Seriously, do you know anyone who is truly moved in the spirit by the begat sections?) Yes, it's going to be relative, but more important it's going to be unique. Because God doesn't have any interest in you becoming your neighbor or your church deacon, or anyone else. What's the point of that?
At the same time, you can't avoid your truth. Every time you run, it will get shoved back in your face. Lessons you avoid keep coming around. Over and over again. I think the idea of reincarnation is really a concept that should be applied to our current lifetime. If you don't resolve an issue, you will recreate that situation again later on in your life in an attempt to ultimately resolve it. I see this on a personal level, on a community level, and on a national level. We just keep repeating our unresolved history.
Or, we live in a meaningless, random world. OK. That doesn't really do anything for me. If someone says it to me, I think the proper response is to smack them. Because if it doesn't matter, none of it matters. But as soon as anything matters (hunger, going to the bathroom, getting smacked) then we have world full of meaning.
I hope this helps you clarify your own journey.
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