Sunday, 24 October 2010

The Godless Moment.

I had an interesting experience at lunchtime. Quite without warning I suddenly felt supremely insignificant. I am nothing. My being is of no consequence. I don’t exist, except as some indivisible contribution to a state of reality that is beyond my comprehension.

It was a good, positive feeling. Freeing. Calming. Real.

In honour of Zhen, for whom I have much respect, I decided to call it my Godless Moment, because if I don’t exist, then any question of a transcendent God becomes completely irrelevant.

It passed fairly quickly, of course. Things like that, things I like to think of as flashes of understanding, flit across the line of my sight so quickly that I have to rely on persistence of vision to decide whether or not they really happened.

Feel free to tell me I’m delusional if you like. Is that a first person pronoun in the last sentence? See – gone already.

2 comments:

Zz... said...

sounds like Buddhism to me! ;)

JJ said...

Indeed. It's the tradition I'm most comfortable with. I don't use labels, though. I suppose it would be broadly true to say that I TEND to view reality like a Buddhist, but I TEND to approach the business of living more like a Taoist. Whatever suits.