What's This?

Good Morning Everyone,


Monotheism, the belief in one God, is a ubiquitous belief in the West. I said in an earlier post that it was a cultural belief and, as such, forms part of the sociologic fabric of our lives. Yet, we rarely address this belief. Its rather like a "fact" held, but without a serious discussion of the fact's perimeters. There is a cultural assumption that we all "know" what "one God" means. Yet, in truth, we do not.

God is so diversely understood as to render any one understanding of Him/Her/It virtually meaningless in terms of consensus. This is partly due, I think, to the fact that we assume so often we each "know" what the other means when we refer to God, but also I think, to a real unwillingness to explore the topic. We prefer, in a sense, the anthropomorphized version of God so deeply ingrained in our consciousness and pervasive in our religious literature.

Zen demands us to ask, "what's this" at every turn in our conscious life. So when a contemplative student of whatever faith tradition approaches God in whatever context, he or she must first address the question, "what's this" before he or she can go any further.

So, what is God?

You see, immediately we are cast in a different dimension of understanding. No longer are the "he's and she's" of God appropriate.

I suspect God is a meta-label for what is infinitely out of our cognitive grasp. We might in the new age say God is universal energy, the stuff of life, but this would exclude God from matter. We might say, God is infinite love, but then we must understand love on such a cosmic level that the individual must be essentially meaningless, and therefore, the very word is rendered meaningless itself.

Historically, God was understood as either transcendent or immanent, that is, wholly other or completely present. Some might say God is both simultaneously.

Buddha argued that the very question was not helpful. He argued that the existence, non-existence, or shape and form of God was ultimately unknowable, and therefore a distraction from the Great Way.

When we understand God to be the absolute of Big Mind and the Relative of Small Mind, in the Zen context of understanding Non-duality and Duality, we get a somewhat different picture, however.

Letting go our grasp, opening our mind's eye to see the universe as it is, rather than as we would wish it to be, or as we think it is, takes us right to the question, what's this?

It is not the answer so much that is important, its not even the actual question, per se, but what is most important is our attitude toward our life and to the universe around us.

This leads us ultimately to the fact that we cannot really know God in the cognitive sense, but rather only in the experiential sense. We can know God through our experience of opening the hand of thought as Uchiyama-roshi elegantly phrases it. What we "know" is not a concept, not a static positivistic label, but rather, the universe itself. open and immediately present in our lives.

Be well.