“The real power of Buddha was that he had so much love. He saw people trapped in their notions of small separate self, feeling guilty or proud of that self, and he offered revolutionary teachings that resounded like a lion’s roar, like a great tide, helping people to wake up and break free from the prison of ignorance.”
Note: This post is categorized in "EMDR & Recovery" because it was written during the EMDR process. It is also categorized in "Escape Route" because it touches on the concept of "God."
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The title of this post might be confusing because I don’t really have a conception of God - God is what’s left when all conceptions are gone. Maybe this makes me an atheist or an agnostic - I’m not really sure, but I’m not picky about labels.
Most of my friends know I'm sort of Buddhisty. I guess I just believe in awareness, reflection, honesty, kindness, and a bunch of metaphysical crap...but mostly, I try to engage in activities that arrest my negative or grandiose thoughts. What’s left, once my mind is still, is a total acceptance of the way things are and the natural beauty of being alive. Revisiting this meditative place over and over again - this fulfilling space beyond mental commentary - has allowed me to become a reasonably happy human being who can love people and appreciate being one with Life.
The Tao Te Ching - as translated by Stephen Mitchell - truly brought me home. It gave me a foundation upon which to heal from past spiritual abuse. When I use the term God today, I am not referring to an anthropomorphic power or personified diety. I am referring to the egoless Life Force that glows from within each of us, but is also beyond all of us. It's truly nameless; sometimes I call it:
Life
Silence
Energy
Connection
Collectivity
Impersonal Beauty
Truth
Love
The Infinite
The Way
The Great Dance
Reality
The true Self beyond the self
Being
Presence
Nature
The Process
Spaciousness
The Happening
The Unseen
Oneness
Some could also call it science. Here is a drawing I made that might simplify the idea:
I cannot get my head around the idea that there's a god with a specific micro-agenda for my life...that's way too GeorgeOrwelly for me. Rather, I'm comforted by imagining I'm a small drop of water in the ocean of Life's grand evolutionary journey...my job is to flow with the current. If God (Nature) is a poet, then we are a letter within a word within a phrase within a stanza. And there are books - hundreds of volumes of books - in this ever-exanding library of poetry...but even this idea is limited. Maybe one could say: if God is a great dancer, we are not "little dancers" - rather, we are being danced.
The Bhagavad Gita - another book that "brings me home" reads:
Just as, in this body, the Self passes through childhood, youth, and old age, so after death it passes to another body...the presence that pervades the universe is imperishable, unchanging, beyond both is and is not: how could it ever vanish? These bodies come to an end; but that vast embodied Self is ageless, fathomless, eternal...It was never born; coming to be, it will never not be.
Birthless, primordial, it does not die when the body dies...Just as you throw out used clothes and put on other clothes, new ones, the Self discards it's used bodies and puts on others that are new. The sharpest sword will not pierce it; the hottest flame will not singe it; water will not make it moist; wind will not cause it to wither. It cannot be pierced or singed, moistened or withered; it is vast, perfect and all-pervading, calm immovable, timeless.
It is called the inconceivable, the Unmanifest, the Unchanging. If you understand it in this way, you have no reason for your sorrow." (Stephen Mitchell's translation, 2.12 - 2.26, chopped up into paragraphs by yours truly)
So this thing I call God - It's both everything and nothing at the same time. And my inability to describe or grasp it - well, that's just fine with me.