The Parting Glass.

This my hundredth post and I feel in need of a hiatus. I have one thing left to say at the moment; apart from that, I feel devoid of anything else to say or display. I intend to continue watching other people’s blogs, but my own is taking a break. For how long, I don’t know. Many thanks to all the lovely people out there who I don’t intend to lose touch with.

.............................

It’s a question that’s often asked; and, for me at least, it’s one of the most difficult to answer: ‘Do you believe in God?’

The first problem is that it’s a loaded question. People in the west generally have an image built on exoteric Judaic conditioning. The image varies slightly, but it’s usually based on the concept of God as an individualised Being, living in heaven and functioning more or less as a sort of super human. We are made in His image, says the Old Testament, and the agents of the various churches find it convenient to encourage a simple, literal translation. And so the question people are really asking is ‘Do you believe in my version of God?’ Inevitably, the first response has to be another question: ‘Which version of God do you mean?’

The image given in the Old Testament is actually quite unpleasant. He’s vengeful, vindictive, partisan, insecure, and makes his favour conditional upon being worshipped. The image we get from the New Testament is quite different. He becomes a caring, kindly father figure who gives his love unconditionally and ‘sacrifices his only son’ for the sake of humanity. This latter claim never made any sense to me, but I see now that it echoes the Abraham story and is a useful construct to bolster the messianic credentials of Jesus. What interests me more is the fact that those few accounts of Jesus’ life that the early Church fathers permitted people to see – the canonical Gospels – tell us that Jesus explicitly preached against the edicts of the Old Testament God. So, apparently, we already have two different versions of God. There are others.

You don’t have to move too far from the mainstream Judaic tradition to encounter the Gnostics. In their doctrine, the Creator God is the bad guy: a selfish, ambivalent character who made man to fill the role of plaything; a pet to be kept in ignorance of its true origin and potential aspiration, so that it will forever serve his vanity. The serpent in the garden, far from being the evil one, is actually the saviour of mankind – none other than Sophia, the ‘mother’ of the Creator God, who sees her son’s creation and takes pity on it. When she gives humanity the knowledge of good and evil, she is giving it the means to raise itself out of slavery. Go further to the east, and the Vedic tradition has a view of God that is considerably deeper and more complex again. They make the unknowable more accessible through the emanations that make up the lower Hindu pantheon. Ironically, the Christian West interpreted this as polytheism and inherently evil, when it is actually a more sophisticated representation of monotheism being presented by an inherently more spiritual culture.

So, to come back to the question: yes, I do choose to believe in God, but my understanding of It has no form. The problem for me is that I’m currently living in a human body, and my attempts to understand things still insist on going through the process of logic, which is a function of the brain. I strongly suspect that the whole of material existence is just one level of illusion, and because the brain is itself material, it is incapable of looking beyond its own limitations. I have a high IQ, but that means nothing when it comes to trying to understand God.

The closest I can offer myself is the idea that God is somehow the essence of everything that truly exists. It is anything but ‘a Being.’ It is simply ‘Being.’ The two are as unalike as can be. Maybe it’s the Universal Consciousness, maybe it’s the Primal Intelligence, maybe it’s the state of unbridled love and perpetual bliss. Maybe it’s all of these things and much more besides. I don’t know, and I don’t claim to know. Whatever it is, though, I further suspect that the core of what I am is a non-individualised part of It. To put it another way, ultimately there is no ‘I,’ as there is no ‘you.’ There is only the Is. It follows, therefore, that the road to spiritual growth, if I should want to attempt it, is not to worship some Being called God, but to seek oblivion as an individualised entity.

The Buddhists teach that there is a God Realm, on which the gods reside. Maybe it was one such god who created what we call the material universe. If so, he would simply be another level of illusion, and my aim should be to rise above it. If I should want to indulge in worship, it would make sense to do so by venerating the essence that lies deep within life. It would make sense to worship myself, in a totally non-egoistical way.

I would find that very difficult to do at the moment, and so I take life as it comes to me. I engage with the illusion by looking for every opportunity to awaken my capacity for love and the perception of beauty. I try to exercise kindness, compassion and respect in all things. I’m far from wholly successful, because I’m still human; but it’s about as close to the meaning of God as I can get right now.