Mere Belief

“Know thyself, and thou shalt know the universe and its gods…”

~ The Oracle at Delphi

 

I recently taught a class on the subject of religion and spirituality.  It was a small group of adult students – eight of them, to be exact – and the discussion soon became heated as each person strove to assert their beliefs and counter the dissenting views presented by others.  I concentrated my efforts on mediation, interjecting with the occasional pointed question to spur my students to explore the areas of their belief that they had not yet taken the time to consider.  It was a morning of intense self-discovery, leaving everyone (including myself) mentally exhausted but nevertheless wholly pleased with the results. 

 

It was not until the end of the class that one of the students asked me, “What do you believe?”  With the lunch hour rapidly approaching, and the students eager to leave the class but still waiting to hear my answer, I replied with a succinct summary of my beliefs.  It was not until later that I realized that what I had spoken of were the beliefs that lie at the very core of my being, the undiluted essence of what I am willing to live for and fight for and die for.

 

I thought it appropriate to leave a record of those beliefs here, since they form the foundation upon which I build my life – including my search for Truth.

 

To put my beliefs in the smallest terms possible:  I believe in God but not religion.  The religions of the world are like the four blind men who discovered the elephant…

 

“This is a wall,” said the one touching the elephant’s flank.  “No, this is a snake,” said the one touching the trunk.  “Don’t be stupid, it’s a tree,” said the one touching the leg.  “You’re all wrong, it’s a broom,” said the one touching the tail.  And the four blind men argued and fought and eventually decided that it was a good time to start killing each other.  So they did.

 

The lesson is, of course, that if the blind men had only taken the time to share their views, they might have come to an understanding that they were each touching a small part of a single larger creature, and thus discovered more about the whole elephant.  Religions are like that – blind, stumbling about in search of God, and fighting over whose view of God is the best one.  Perhaps if everyone stopped arguing long enough to start collaborating, we might end up with a better idea of what God is like.

 

No, let me rephrase that.  Everyone must stop arguing and start collaborating before we can make any progress in knowing about God.  Ultimately, any deity worth worshipping must be greater than the human mind can grasp.  If you can define and label a deity, if you can place the divine in a tidy little box, how deific or divine can such an entity really be?  To be divine is to be more than human, and to be more than human is, by definition, to lie outside of human understanding.  The Tao Te Ching says, “The name that can be named is not the Eternal Name.”  It is impossible for us to know all there is to know about an entity that is infinite and eternal, but if we share our ideas, we’ll at least be that much better off.

 

And yes, I do believe in God.  Forget the images and ideas of God that you’ve had put in your heads by churches or laboratories, mosques or the media; that’s what I’ve done.  Consider only this:  that out of all the vastness of time and space, there may be an entity that is great enough to span it all, who philosophers call the Unmoved Mover.  Whether this entity created the universe or not is irrelevant; whether this entity is benevolent or malicious or simply indifferent is also irrelevant.  Consider only that there may be an entity as far above us as we are above simple bacteria, that there may be no other entity greater than this.  That is what God is to me – the greatest entity in all of time and space.  Everything else is hearsay.

 

It is the knowledge of this entity that is the fundamental object of my search for Truth.  That’s why I spend my time questioning everything, including people in authority – especially people in authority – to discover the absolutes that exist before people came and confused everything with rumors and labels and categorizations.  And while the knowledge of an infinite God must also be infinite, and my quest may never be fulfilled in this life or the next, I would still pursue it anyway.  Enlightenment is in the journey.

 

You may question why I choose to believe in God to start with.  After all, it is impossible to either prove or disprove the existence of the kind of ‘greatest entity’ that I have described.  And you would be right; I have no evidence that such an entity exists…  but then again, the amoebas wouldn’t have much evidence that humans exist either. 

 

So in the end, it all comes down to faith.  I believe that there is a God.  What you believe is not my story to tell.