"God". What does that mean?
Here is a trio of three interdependent questions: Do you believe in God? Do you not believe in God? Do you not know whether to believe or not believe in God?
Each one of these is a mind construct presented as language. Why call them mind constructs? Why? Because they fall wide of the mark with regard to being pertinent questions. They are structured solely of unexamined assumptions of the mind. To answer them on their own terms produces neither insight, understanding, knowing or being.
You may, or may not, insist that believing, benefits the one who believes. But despite the sacrosanct glamour of that as an idea, believing something, is a tendency to choose to assume, which is a movement of the mind. A mind construct.
Certainly, believing something, will colour your experience, and give a sense of refuge you think of as yours, or ours. But it won’t serve as enquiry into knowing, or being. It will terminate it. Because, in surrendering to the apparent refuge of an idea, you surrender your ‘presence’ to an assumption of the mind, which, by its nature, neither wishes to, nor knows how to reverse the process.
When we start with a readymade conclusion, such as: the existence, or non-existence of an unknown, called diversely a “God”, the conclusion is, literally just that, the end of enquiry. Without enquiry having taken place.
So let’s look at the conclusion in question.
What known reality does the word refer to?
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Unless we have experience of that which a word refers to, it is dishonest to use it. Isn’t it curious, how we say “God”, and not, “a god” This is so with anything habitually taken to be self-evident, such as: time, myself, good and bad. It also implies universality, that is, particularly in this instance, that there is not more than one. Hence the capital letter.
Imagine fighting over the right or wrong of the many language equivalents of the name of this planet. No need to imagine. It’s a bit like what we do, isn’t it? Perhaps it’s called Babel, or Babble. If we must refer to something of which there is one, and only one, or to be metaphysically exact, not two, we can only be referring to that which is infinite.
Anything less is a thing among things, and not omnipresent, transcendent, or all inclusive.
The infinite, how can I honestly use the word? That which encompasses all of the relatively little we think we know of the universe. The physical and the non-physical. The macrocosm and the subatomic microcosm.
All energy and patterns of interrelatedness, invisible, omnipresent, neither fully fathomed or understood, or, as yet even dreamed of.
Because the only one that is not two, is everything and infinitely more. Forever in all directions, inward, outward, and on frequencies imperceptible to possible perception.
“Everything”, is here assumed to be infinite because, what we call finite, means measurable boundary. And for that to be so, there is inevitably more, beyond and around, giving the finite its clear definition. Finite has non-finite as its context to exist as such. The two are really not two.
After every limit, there is more. Without which, a limit couldn’t appear to be. No form without space, no space without form, without end, or beginning. Their mutual interbeing is not two.
There is no word to inclusively define this, obviously. Words distinguish apparent parts, and this, which is infinitely whole, has no separate parts. It is transcendent of thingness: not a some-thing. How, in honesty, can I use the word “everything”, which is simultaneously no-thing, without claim to experience of what it refers to? How? Simply because, there is absolutely nothing I can do, nowhere I can go, to be separate from it, in any degree.
We are it!
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To acknowledge the obvious or apparent truth, that everything, together, as All That Is, is omnipresent everywhere forever, and think that you are separate from it, is nonsense, illusion, even madness. While there is no such thing as a separate thing, please follow this through.
The distinctions labelled by language as me and you exist by virtue of one-another and are called “we”. One “me” and many “yous” for each the same. A “we” is an “it”. Inseparable from the infinite it. We are it. It follows that the infinite we have called God is not other than what we are.
When you defer to a higher something, you define what you are, as lower and forever separate. And that’s what we do, living as the illusion of language. That is: this/that, me/you, to infinity.
The sometimes reported experience we have repeatedly called a God experience, is just this: Not two.
There is no path to what you are. You can’t be better in the future. Simply because, the concept, “future”, is not something that you/here, can be in. You can’t make a belief, or a “will be” out of what already is. Yet oddly we do. By ignoring what is, in preference for a spell-bound language definition of a separate self moving from a past to a future. That is to say: memory here-now, and, hope and fear here-now. Me as mere thought, defined by “was” and “will be”. Separate from it all.
Instead of seeing, that for there to be a transcendent everything we are one-with, it would have to include a potential of denial of itself within itself. Otherwise it wouldn’t be a transcendent everything. The attempt of denial we call evil.
See it as a simple signpost. This way; what is, eternally. That way: futile denial and illusory separation. This is not two. It’s the illusion of two.
Ultimately, how can you give a name to that which is outside of, and inclusive of all classifications? Names are only a this as distinct from a that. A convenient but misleading “as if”, and not a reality.
The Zen master, Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, put it simply, subtly, and unequivocally, when he said: “Everything is God, and, there is no God”.
Only mind empty of itself, has no obstruction to this being so.
”Be still and know that I am God”, is not referring to two of anything. Neither a you, nor a God.
Martin Law
celestial rose
by martin rainbowmaker
February 2007