“Who on Earth do you think you are?
A superstar? Well, right you are!
Why in the world are we here?
Surely not to live in pain and fear.
Why on Earth are you there?
When you’re everywhere.
Gonna get your share.
Well, we all shine on
Like the moon
and the stars
and the sun.
Yeah,
we all shine on
Like the moon
and the stars
and the sun.”
John Lennon
Instant Karma
I recently enjoyed a meal with a dear friend, one of the first friends I made when I moved to Redding thirty years ago. He is my spiritual brother and I am his and we had a misunderstanding a few years ago and I didn’t see him for a little while and I guess that was ok. I do love him though. And he is very opinionated and so am I on certain topics and if we aren’t careful, we can joist like two rams on the steep side of a rocky mountain, recklessly banging our words together. And I love him still.
If there is such thing as reincarnation, I may have crossed paths with this guy sometime in the infinite past. But who knows? I don’t. What I do know is that he’s interesting, intellectually stimulating, sincere, energetic, affable and despite his stubborn moments and judgmental attitudes, one of the most loving, caring humans I have ever met. He has a huge heart, big enough for nearly everyone in his life. And then some.
One of our common threads is our spiritual inclination. In our own way, we have each possessed monk-like aspirations. We have taken our souls seriously and for a time devoted a segment of our lives to its careful tending. Like gardeners, we tilled and weeded, planted and pruned, aerated and amended until we felt we had it right.
And so it comes as a surprise to find him at this late stage in his journey to be reevaluating methods and sums I assumed he had previously calculated and proved. He is now doubting the existence of God and with his fine mind, is finding new ways to dispute, challenge and frustrate those foolish enough to debate him. Like me.
The trouble with atheism I told him is that in order to assert a disbelief in something we call God, we first have to create or define the very thing that we then assert does not exist. We create a concept and then insist the concept we just created does not exist. The whole exercise seems a bit absurd and illogical, especially for people who cling to what they claim to be a rational intellect.
An alternative view suggests the only way to find God, if it exists, is to get rid of it. Entirely and completely. In this respect, I agree with the atheists. Any God that we can conceive of in our mind as a concept is no more God than the word “sugar” is a substance we can spoon into our coffee. We can debate the existence of sweet and sour or we can just suck on a lemon and eat honeyed toast and thereby gain the direct knowledge of sweet and sour. Why argue when we can directly experience and know?
Once we experience the direct knowledge of Reality (God), no arguments can take it away and until we open our minds to the Divine, no words can make it real.
At best an atheist can state that he or she has not experienced anything in this life that convinces them that a concept in their mind that they label “God,” actually exists. Who can argue with that? And why would we want to? Someone who is color-blind might truthfully insist that the color blue does not exist for them. Who can argue with such a claim? And what would be the point? If you never heard music, you might doubt it exists. There would be no need for me to use words to explain music when simply playing Pachelbel’s Canon or Luciano Pavarotti’s Nessun Dorma would suffice.
If you have not experienced the Divine, no words from me or any person would or should convince you that there is such a “thing.” As Eckhart Tolle states, “Only by awakening can you know the true meaning of the word.”
He writes, “Instead of being lost in your thinking, when you are awake you recognize yourself as the awareness behind it. Thinking then ceases to be a self-serving autonomous activity that takes possession of you and runs your life. Awareness takes over from thinking. Instead of being in charge of your life, thinking becomes the servant of awareness. Awareness is conscious connection with universal intelligence. Another word for it is Presence; consciousness without thought.”
At some point, some of us may realize the word God is an obstacle to our understanding of the Divine experience of connection or oneness with the universe. So why not get rid of it? We understand intimately that our thinking self, the part of us that wants to debate the existence of God is “no more than a tiny aspect of the totality of consciousness, the totality of who you are.”
We cannot awaken to our cosmic self until we understand and accept that “Neither concepts nor mathematical formulae can explain the infinite. No thought can encapsulate the vastness of the totality. Reality is a unified whole, but thought cuts it up into fragments.”
Adyashanti writes, “So let us understand that Reality transcends all of our notions about Reality. Reality is neither Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Advaita Vedanta, nor Buddhist. It is neither dualistic nor non-dualistic, neither spiritual nor non-spiritual.
“We should come to know that there is more Reality and sacredness in a blade of grass than in all our thoughts and ideas about Reality. When we perceive from an undivided consciousness, we will find the sacred (God) in every expression of life. We will find it in our teacup, in the fall breeze, in the brushing of our teeth, in each and every moment of living and dying.
“Therefore we must leave the entire collection of conditioned thought behind and let ourselves be led by the inner thread of silence and intuitive awareness, beyond where all paths end, to that place of sacredness where we go innocently or not at all, not once but continually.”
Our thoughts about God or Reality do not affect God or Reality. They only affect us. Our thoughts create our experience of Reality but have nothing to do with what is true or not true. As Zen Master Gensha once said, “If you understand, things are such as they are;
If you do not understand, things are such as they are.”
Perhaps it would help if we stopped denying the existence of an imposter we created in our mind and instead allow ourselves to simply experience Reality, without needing to name it. Perhaps we can address the real problem and quit identifying with our false or conceptualized self, our ego, the small mind that thinks it’s big and believes its own stories. When we finally get quiet, the Silence can get loud and bright and clear. When we surrender and admit we do not know; into that sacred void, a Great Love flows in and removes all doubt and fear.
And then we remember who we are.
Doug Craig graduated from college in Ohio with a journalism degree and got married during the Carter administration. He graduated from graduate school with a doctorate in Psychology, got divorced, moved to Redding, re-married and started his private practice during the Reagan administration. He had his kids during the first Bush administration. Since then he has done nothing noteworthy besides write a little poetry, survive a motorcycle crash, buy and sell an electric car, raise his kids, manage to stay married and maintain his practice for almost 25 years. He believes in magic and is a Sacramento Kings fan.
