Since I resigned from the Triratna Order five years ago, there has been, and still is, a process of quiet and slow reassessment of where I stand on some issues. I have to let go of habit and sense what is buried beneath. And sometimes I have to prompt or provoke by reading material that is not within my usual Buddhist bubble. So these things lie in pending trays. I practice within loosely and imprecise parameters. Though I've been a practicing Buddhist for over thirty years, I find that, actually, I don't have a clearly defined standpoint on God, to exist or not to exist? And in the greater picture does that really matter?
The value of something should probably not be judged through the lens of its institutional framework or past actions. Religions, Science, Politics - bad things are frequently done in their name. The fruit of anything will go rotten eventually. Just look at our present government. The speed of decline depending upon its internal or external ethical health. Things naturally lean towards arche decrepitude over time. Which is why there is often the urgency to instigate a revival or reform. Things become perverted through the imposition of doctrinal orthodoxy. What do you find if you return to a religion's first principles, and avoid getting caught up in these pre-established doctrinal standpoints or the rigidity of a dogma frozen into certainty of belief? What is it that they originaly put there faith in?
Atheism, it seems to me, simply replaces one self congratulatory and self righteous religious certainty, with another more secularly based one. Factual rectitude used as a blunt and dogmatic instrument of imposing a conformity. To be rational god damn you! As if putting your faith in anything should be based on the expert analysis of data. When there is insufficient data on anything, it doesn't necessarily mean you must infer its not true. There is simply not enough known to say one way or another. In science things are being inferred from absence all the time, particularly on a theoretical micro level. Whether one responds to lack of data by saying it does or does not exist, is at this point, and in both these cases, entirely a matter of what you put your faith in. Where and how will you find an ultimate answer that will satisfy you? In the meantime you act provisionally, continue to practice and experiment.
If you want life to existentially conform to precise predictable formulas then so be it. But, if anything sets my ears to a beware alarm its the crowing triumphalism of a prominent atheist. As if belief in divinity was just some autumnal detritus that should easily be swept away to make way for the crisp pure white snow of winter's rationale. There can be coldheartedness in this messaging. Like the school bully who snatches your ball away from you, using size or strength of view to taunt and tease. I don't appreciate the delivery of the message, because it comes wrapped in an egotistical conceit, of an obsession with the certainty of certainty itself.
The message has so much more value than its messenger. My not liking the way the postman delivers the letters does not change what is contained within its envelopes. Is my not liking the messenger really about my not liking the message? But an unpalatable message presented unpalatably, does that ever convince anybody? Is it that I find dogmatic certainty inherently unconvincing, whether that comes spoken in a religious, scientific or political tongue. I don't buy into that certainty. The sweeping nature of it feels misplaced. Where is the place for doubt, for uncertainty, for the unknown wrapped around in the humble cloth of faith?
Unknowing, should not be thought of as empty. What is unknowable is potent, filled with ideas, images, inspirations, feelings, impulses and intuitions. Its not a void, but a place where certainty is avoided. The place of not knowing can be an invigorating creative space to stand in. Full as it is with an overwhelming number of potentialities. If we start snatching at them, trying to capture them in prose, a poem, a piece of music, or in paint, the excitement diminishes the more we turn that unknowing into a known entity. The best poetry hovers in the space between unknowing and knowing, leaving our imaginations unsettled and questions unanswered. We capture only glimmers. Faith is a practice of how you live positively within that state of unknowing.
Nick Cave suggests that whether you are in search of a divinity or awakening - 'it may actually be the doubt, the uncertainty and the mystery that animates the whole thing'. So wondering where I am with all of this, is not some personal failing, it may be just the point of it. Its not about pinning yourself down to firmly concrete and immovable beliefs, but being willing to simultaneously inhabit absence and presence, belief and disbelief, of knowing surrounded by a mist of not knowing, of god looked at through a mirror where no god can be seen. As Dogen expresser it - Realisation is the state of ambiguity itself.' ? The vagueness is where everything settles in the end
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