Friday, August 31, 2012
What am I?
I will try to engage in a Cartesian-styled process of doubt in order to try and uncover what I am speaking about when I say "I" or "me". Descartes made some very provocative inquiries in his Meditations on First Philosophy, however I don't believe he went far enough. When I ask "What am I?", I can feasibly begin with Descartes' "I am a thinking thing" and from there, ask the question "What is it that is thinking?". The statement "I am a thinking thing" is in itself only a thought being presently entertained by the thing that thinks it, presumably me, and cannot be settled on as a definitive answer to the question "What am I?". To understand what I am, I must move past the idea that I am a thinking thing to uncover what it is that is thinking right now. However, I discover a problem here, that is that any answer to the question "What is thinking right now?" or better put perhaps "What is asking this question?", will in itself only be another thought entertained by that which thinks and asks. So I must here ask this: Is an agent a separate entity apart from its action? Is a thinking thing existent apart from its act of thinking? Presumably we would agree that a thing that moves is separate from its motion, that there is the thing, and then there is its motion. But if we take a car, for example, and it is moving, where could we locate its motion as being separate from the car itself? When the car is moving, it is in no way a different object than when it is motionless; so what is its motion? How can we feasibly argue that its motion is distinct from it? But there must be something we can point to that explains the effect motion has on an object, thus proving that motion is indeed a distinct entity. All that we can say here is that there is a change in location. Besides this, motion has no other effect on an object, from the observable viewpoint. And if we point to a moving object at any given moment in time during its motion, as if we were to pause a video of a moving ball, we only see that the ball is in a different place, and that there is nothing present to be called "motion". The confusion encountered here is akin to the question of whether or not a thinking thing can be said to be separate from its thinking. And yet, to say that I am a thinking thing only would be inaccurate, for it is fair to say that I am an eating and drinking thing, a sleeping and walking thing. To say these activities are of the body only and that the Self is distinct from the body is pure speculation, and cannot be shown to be true. However, for now we will operate with the Cartesian foundation of the Self as a thinking thing. Is the thing that thinks separate from its thoughts? I can only answer yes to this question if I can somehow uncover that the thing that thinks is not a thought. Until then, no satisfying answer will ever be given.
Sunday, June 24, 2012
I've started writing poetry again:
Beneath the far-flung, endless roof of space,
A single hymn is turning in the void,
A chanting coming from another place
Where ancient infant fears are all destroyed.
Arise, you armies of the twilight moon
And carry home the hopeless and afraid
Who all through Life have prayed that Death come soon;
Now lay them ‘neath the Great Tree lest they fade.
Give unto them the Living Water true,
Glowing in the silver shade of night;
Speak unto them the Word that will renew ---
Immortal flower, blossom in the light.
Friday, June 1, 2012
Pointless.. no one reading anyway
The moment I begin to write, I lose the words.. as if they're right at my fingertips and then suddenly they scurry off like mice that want not to be seen. I believe there is a true Home for all of us, whether or not it is the same for each. I am not sure what makes me believe this.. there is a part of me, so hidden and secret that at times I think I am making it up, that really truly feels the truth of this... that there is a Home. Not A home, but THE Home, before my body, before my life, before mistakes, before friends and enemies, before romance, before despair and sadness, even before happiness. I know somewhere in me that there is a Home, a Home that maybe is nothing more than a new and truer way of Being, a new a truer way of seeing and understanding my role as a human being.. my role as a lover and a boy and a man and a son and a friend. But maybe it is none of this.. there is nothing substantial to tell me the truth in this world. There is nothing around me that I can grab hold of and say "See! This is what I mean!", for when I begin to do this, it comes out all wrong, it comes out nonsense, or it comes out in a way that has been done before. God, help me. Isn't that Home? Why have we been taught to fragment and divide and go further into the mind's recesses? Further into the endless branching and sprouting of idea and opinion and position and personality and right/wrong blah blah blah? Is it so hard to see that there is a Light that is illuminating all of this? A Light that makes all things possible and all things knowable? Am I insane? NO! Thousands of years of wisdom and practice and worship and prayer and meditation and reflection and contemplation, all for what? All to be abandoned as fruitless by this generation? In fact, reading over this, it struck me that it is simply absurd to think that I can point to this Light, as it is the Light that illuminates even my pointing! This is what the Zen masters have been saying for hundreds of years, and before them the Advaita Vedanta teachers who said Thou art That! But no one cares. This is stupid.
Friday, December 23, 2011
Death and the Self
I've been thinking a lot about death lately. A nice way to start off a blog post, right? Well I think so. There's so much that can be said about death, and if everyone took a moment to stop and think about their own eventual, inevitable death, I bet that they'd have a lot to add to the conversation. Someone once called death "the great equalizer", and I think that is a pretty damn good way of looking at it, at least with what limited vision we do have from this side of the abyss. Death, as it sits waiting in the corners of everyone's lives to embrace each of us completely, is really the one thing that we - as humans, animals, beings - can honestly say binds us all. Every man, woman, child, girl, boy, republican, democrat, homosexual, heterosexual, Christian, Muslim, Jew, businessman, hobo, good person, or bad person all eventually fall to the ground, lifeless, no trace left. It is the great darkness, so to speak. We watch our peers, our friends, our family, total strangers dropping dead with no explanation, other than "that's the way it has to be".
My interest in the subject lies in the fact that it really is the great question, the philosopher's conundrum, the Mystery. It grips us all at moments when we are alone, and truly alone, when there is nothing within nor without us that can be relied upon, and our own subjectivity drops with a depth unfathomable into unreachable places. Everywhere we look, we only see ourselves, our birth and death and the meaning in between. Maybe some of us haven't felt this way, but regardless, death is what makes us all human, and it will happen to you too!
What a sincere and honest contemplation of death really gives us, I feel, is a good long look at our Self, and by Self I do not mean the Me that likes to play guitar and enjoys reading and sitting in meditation from time to time and loves his coffee in the morning and doesn't like seafood. This is not the Self to which I am referring. No, good readers, what I am referring to is that which doesn't change. Well this may seem odd to some of us, because if we look real real hard, what we see is that we are constantly changing. The me who sits here now writing this is in no way the 9-year-old me that once loved football and wanted to be in the army. In fact, that isn't a me at all anymore, and is more of a him. The point is that the self that we present to the world and to our selves (yes, a contradiction, called self-reflexivity or self-reference), is not really the Self. If indeed we have a Self in the way that most everyone thinks - that is, a single unchanging essence that makes me me - then how can it change? If my most basic and fundamental self-ness were to change, how could I really be the same person? And there is no denying the fact that I am in some way the same person that left my mother's womb 21 years ago.
When we really think about our deaths, what we are contemplating is our selves, or our Self, the part of us which, by definition, does not change. But is there any part of us which does not change? Now of course there have been many answers to that question, but two that interest me are as follows - one, by the Hindus, and two, by the Buddhists. They both have very different answers to this question, but both of their answers, in my opinion, get at the same thing. For one, the Hindus believe there is indeed something that does not change in us. They called it the Atman, or the most basic and fundamental Self in each of us. According to the Hindus, the Atman is inconceivable, untouchable, unchanging, invisible, and as big as the universe itself. This Atman, or Self, at its core, is indistinguishable from the being of God itself. When we die, this Atman lives on, and if one lives a life in awareness of the holy nature of Atman, he is merged with the fabric of God and the Universe, for the Self and God were never separate. This idea of a Self that is beyond conception and knowing is very much like "the eye that sees but cannot see itself", a phrase that expresses what is known as the anti-reflexivity principle. The Self is like an eye that sees all things but itself.
Now, the Buddhists went about this in a very different way. The Buddhists claim that there is no thing anywhere that is unchanging. That goes for any conception of a Self that is above and beyond change. The Self and the world are made up of totally dependent and constantly changing phenomena that have no real essences. When you die, you merely die, every part and parcel of "you" and a new "you" is reborn, a you that has nothing to do with the present "you" and shouldn't even be rightly called "you". There is no Self, and any conception of one is just that - a conception, based on unsubstantiated fantasies.
However, understanding how these two seemingly opposing ways of reconciling the problem of Self are really one and the same could give us a more clear picture of what death means to the Self, whatever that is. I would argue that, where the Hindus offer a concept of the Self that is above concepts and which is fundamentally YOU, the Buddhists sought merely to make that concept no longer a concept, but a reality. To realize Atman, according to the Hindus, is to realize the fundamental unity of Self and God, relative and absolute. The Buddhists, by cutting out the concept of Atman and asserting the emptiness of everything, really just united You with your Self again. If You are your Self, why is it that you speak and think about yourself as if it is something that you can know or think about. How can you think about you? Likewise, how can an eye see itself? Well, what the Buddhists really did was show us that the eye is always seeing itself by just being an eye. Likewise, we are always united with our most fundamental Self by just being. There is no need to conceptualize. And the fact that we think we can conceptualize accurately about ourselves is a laugh! It's like how we look up into a clear night sky and see the Milky Way streaking brilliantly across the black. Well, we shouldn't really point to it and say that we see the Milky Way, because we are the Milky Way. We are in it! We could just as well point at the ground and say "There's the Milky Way!". And so, our Self is what we always are, no trying or searching or thinking necessary. We see all things, and by just seeing, we are always seeing ourselves.
So what happens when I die? What will really happen on that fateful day when I finally realize that it's my time? Maybe I won't be so lucky as to die naturally. But even so, I must die on some day, whether it be tomorrow or 60 years from now. Either way, it will happen in the blink of an eye. What will happen to my Self? Here's what I say: Nothing. Nothing happens. Ram Dass says "Dying is like taking off a tight shoe". As simple as that. Nothing fancy. Meister Eckhart, in some much more beautiful way, said the following: "The only part of you that goes to Hell is the part of you that you cannot let go". If we let go of our ideas about ourselves, then there can be no part of us that will suffer when we die. Death will be like passing through a doorway. So simple, and so fast.
But hey, maybe I'm all wrong. We'll see when the Reaper comes!
My interest in the subject lies in the fact that it really is the great question, the philosopher's conundrum, the Mystery. It grips us all at moments when we are alone, and truly alone, when there is nothing within nor without us that can be relied upon, and our own subjectivity drops with a depth unfathomable into unreachable places. Everywhere we look, we only see ourselves, our birth and death and the meaning in between. Maybe some of us haven't felt this way, but regardless, death is what makes us all human, and it will happen to you too!
What a sincere and honest contemplation of death really gives us, I feel, is a good long look at our Self, and by Self I do not mean the Me that likes to play guitar and enjoys reading and sitting in meditation from time to time and loves his coffee in the morning and doesn't like seafood. This is not the Self to which I am referring. No, good readers, what I am referring to is that which doesn't change. Well this may seem odd to some of us, because if we look real real hard, what we see is that we are constantly changing. The me who sits here now writing this is in no way the 9-year-old me that once loved football and wanted to be in the army. In fact, that isn't a me at all anymore, and is more of a him. The point is that the self that we present to the world and to our selves (yes, a contradiction, called self-reflexivity or self-reference), is not really the Self. If indeed we have a Self in the way that most everyone thinks - that is, a single unchanging essence that makes me me - then how can it change? If my most basic and fundamental self-ness were to change, how could I really be the same person? And there is no denying the fact that I am in some way the same person that left my mother's womb 21 years ago.
When we really think about our deaths, what we are contemplating is our selves, or our Self, the part of us which, by definition, does not change. But is there any part of us which does not change? Now of course there have been many answers to that question, but two that interest me are as follows - one, by the Hindus, and two, by the Buddhists. They both have very different answers to this question, but both of their answers, in my opinion, get at the same thing. For one, the Hindus believe there is indeed something that does not change in us. They called it the Atman, or the most basic and fundamental Self in each of us. According to the Hindus, the Atman is inconceivable, untouchable, unchanging, invisible, and as big as the universe itself. This Atman, or Self, at its core, is indistinguishable from the being of God itself. When we die, this Atman lives on, and if one lives a life in awareness of the holy nature of Atman, he is merged with the fabric of God and the Universe, for the Self and God were never separate. This idea of a Self that is beyond conception and knowing is very much like "the eye that sees but cannot see itself", a phrase that expresses what is known as the anti-reflexivity principle. The Self is like an eye that sees all things but itself.
Now, the Buddhists went about this in a very different way. The Buddhists claim that there is no thing anywhere that is unchanging. That goes for any conception of a Self that is above and beyond change. The Self and the world are made up of totally dependent and constantly changing phenomena that have no real essences. When you die, you merely die, every part and parcel of "you" and a new "you" is reborn, a you that has nothing to do with the present "you" and shouldn't even be rightly called "you". There is no Self, and any conception of one is just that - a conception, based on unsubstantiated fantasies.
However, understanding how these two seemingly opposing ways of reconciling the problem of Self are really one and the same could give us a more clear picture of what death means to the Self, whatever that is. I would argue that, where the Hindus offer a concept of the Self that is above concepts and which is fundamentally YOU, the Buddhists sought merely to make that concept no longer a concept, but a reality. To realize Atman, according to the Hindus, is to realize the fundamental unity of Self and God, relative and absolute. The Buddhists, by cutting out the concept of Atman and asserting the emptiness of everything, really just united You with your Self again. If You are your Self, why is it that you speak and think about yourself as if it is something that you can know or think about. How can you think about you? Likewise, how can an eye see itself? Well, what the Buddhists really did was show us that the eye is always seeing itself by just being an eye. Likewise, we are always united with our most fundamental Self by just being. There is no need to conceptualize. And the fact that we think we can conceptualize accurately about ourselves is a laugh! It's like how we look up into a clear night sky and see the Milky Way streaking brilliantly across the black. Well, we shouldn't really point to it and say that we see the Milky Way, because we are the Milky Way. We are in it! We could just as well point at the ground and say "There's the Milky Way!". And so, our Self is what we always are, no trying or searching or thinking necessary. We see all things, and by just seeing, we are always seeing ourselves.
So what happens when I die? What will really happen on that fateful day when I finally realize that it's my time? Maybe I won't be so lucky as to die naturally. But even so, I must die on some day, whether it be tomorrow or 60 years from now. Either way, it will happen in the blink of an eye. What will happen to my Self? Here's what I say: Nothing. Nothing happens. Ram Dass says "Dying is like taking off a tight shoe". As simple as that. Nothing fancy. Meister Eckhart, in some much more beautiful way, said the following: "The only part of you that goes to Hell is the part of you that you cannot let go". If we let go of our ideas about ourselves, then there can be no part of us that will suffer when we die. Death will be like passing through a doorway. So simple, and so fast.
But hey, maybe I'm all wrong. We'll see when the Reaper comes!
Sunday, October 23, 2011
The First Post: G-O-D and Our Big Ideas
I'd like to begin by saying that I am completely new to this seemingly well-established blog scene, and so the fact that I am writing this under the notion that other people will be reading it makes me feel kind of funny, though not in a bad way. Truth of the matter is, nobody will very likely see this except close friends, and even then, I shouldn't let the idea of someone reading every word of this affect what I say and the way I say it. So on that note, let's begin.
The idea to make this came about last night, actually, during a conversation with a friend about his own blog (and once I get more hip to this blog thing, I'll figure out how to link his site here). This particular individual used to be a fairly devout Christian, hailing from the land of milk and honey: Texas. Coming to college in Vermont, he's given up his evangelism for a more "rational" approach to life, i.e. Atheism. His blog mainly deals with questions of faith and the religious mindset as he sees it from his perspective (and thanks to his Christian background, he is what I'd like to call a "knowledgeable Atheist"). The argument made in his blog and during the course of our conversation was that unerring faith in a God-figure is simply unsubstantiated, doesn't make sense. And of course, being the contrarian that I am, I felt a kind of discomfort when I tried to land on that conclusion as my stopping point. To understand where I'm coming from, let me give you some background:
I was raised in an Episcopal household, the majority of my family being relatively involved in the Church-life. Both my father and mother, as I grew older, became increasingly involved in that scene, and when I reached the proper age, they began sending me to youth group. Now, like I said, I've always been the kind of person that finds some point on which to disagree, no matter where I am. So, as my parents urged me into the kind of life that so many young people my age were embracing pretty wholeheartedly, I instead pushed back. I didn't take to the youth group "lifestyle" - a bunch of early-teens who somehow felt totally cool with the idea of falling on their knees in divine worship. I felt like an outsider there, needless to say. So I finally ditched that once my parents gave me permission to decide for myself. What made it worse was that, because my folks were so involved in that whole thing, and because I once was too, people from the Church would always be asking about me, asking when I'd come back to youth group, asking why I never came to church. Meanwhile, I was never home. I was off with my friends playing loud music in basements, smoking pot, and involving myself in all manner of delinquent activities. It was at this time, with the aid of marijuana and other such "poisons" that I discovered for myself an authentic sense of the "religious" or "mystical" experience. I put those adjectives in quotes because I know that for so many people, drug-induced experiences are not authentic experiences, nor is the knowledge taken away from them. My feeling on that matter should be clear already. I was a changed person, and I found myself willingly picking up books about Buddhism, Hinduism, mystical Christianity, and so on. So, I found myself in a strange dilemma. On the one hand, my parents and a whole slew of folks down at the local church were waiting for me to "see the light", while on the other hand, I almost felt like I had, in a way. But, again, being the contrarian that I am, I rejected what I found to be such a "restrictive" spiritual path, and continued to study, on my own time, the wisdom of the Ancients.
So here I am, close to graduating college with a degree in philosophy and religious studies, and I still can't confidently put into words my feelings about God. One thing I've learned for sure here in college is that it's much easier to feel like you know what you're talking about. It makes life so much simpler when you feel like you understand it, when you have a solid belief (whether that belief is scientifically substantiated or not) about the life you're living and where it's going. On the one hand, all the people I know that are devoted Christians, that tell me that they know in their hearts that Christ died for them, they seem happy. They seem like they've got something figured out. At the same time, the people that I've met in my life that don't believe in God, that are pretty damn sure that there's no bearded man on a cloud recording our every misdeed (and I see what they mean), they too seem like they've got something figured out. As for me (and I don't want to sound like I'm complaining or pitying myself, because that brings up all kinds of questions about the Self and who I am, and I've yet to really feel good about that one either), I've never been able to feel confident about either position, God or no-God. Where does this leave me? Well I've noticed for one that it leaves me in a place of not being very contributory during those big deep God-conversations that college student like to have. Perhaps one way I could reconcile that is by taking the time now to try to put into words my feelings about God. Here goes:
First off, assuming there is a God, I don't think God is a man. I don't think "he" has any human qualities whatsoever, and would be better referred to as an It. Even then, placing a discriminatory designation such as "it" on something that is always referred to as infinite, omnipresent and eternal kind of seems like trying to fit the ocean in a teacup. If one is to try to understand what the concept of God really means, one has to inquire about its genesis as an idea (pun intended). What was it that that first human being really experienced when he or she came away with an understanding of an underlying Power, a Force prior to any created thing? One must really examine the institution of religion itself to really understand what God is. As human beings, the most complex creature on the planet Earth, we have created these different paths, religions, all of which are centered around the search for and the understanding of a principle that is fundamental and prior to Life itself, prior even to the material world around us. What is more, just about every "path" that can be called a religion makes the claim that it is the only true way to this Principle. Each religious institution orbits around that Principle, although it is described very differently by each, yet aren't all things described very differently depending on what corner of the globe you find yourself? I have heard a few nice analogies for this. Everyone on the Earth must drink water. Here in America and other English-speaking countries, we all know it as Water. Yet, if you find yourself in another part of the world, it is called Wasser, or Acqua, or Wai, or Voda, or Vatten, or Eau. If an English speaker found himself in France and demanded a cup of WATER!, he would be looked at like a lunatic. It is not that these people don't drink water, or don't understand what water itself is, they just refer to it as something else. Likewise, the vast array of different religious paths have arisen out of deep cultural heritages that influence almost everything that we understand today about different religions. The fundamental question, however, is this: what is it that all of these religious paths are trying to find their way towards? The Buddhist calls it Buddha-nature, Christians call it the trinitarian God, Muslims call it Allah, Jews call it Adonai, Hindus call it Brahman (or any of the other hundreds of names given to the principle of Creation and Destruction). The list goes on, and we, being creatures defined by culture, are sure that God is a man with a son named Jesus. But this story has been replayed countless times in the cultural imagination of humanity - the idea that we are beings destined for communion with a Force greater than ourselves if we can only widen our view to see it.
So what is God? I don't know. But one thing I think I can be certain of, if nothing else, is that whatever God really is cannot be defined and conditioned by cultural influence, cannot be succinctly delineated with a word. Trying to do so, like I said, is similar to scooping up water with a teacup and claiming to have the ocean. For me, the great search that every individual must come to terms with should not be limited by name and form, cultural tradition and the preconceived ideals contained therein; rather that search should be defined by an effort to understand That which comes before everything.
The idea to make this came about last night, actually, during a conversation with a friend about his own blog (and once I get more hip to this blog thing, I'll figure out how to link his site here). This particular individual used to be a fairly devout Christian, hailing from the land of milk and honey: Texas. Coming to college in Vermont, he's given up his evangelism for a more "rational" approach to life, i.e. Atheism. His blog mainly deals with questions of faith and the religious mindset as he sees it from his perspective (and thanks to his Christian background, he is what I'd like to call a "knowledgeable Atheist"). The argument made in his blog and during the course of our conversation was that unerring faith in a God-figure is simply unsubstantiated, doesn't make sense. And of course, being the contrarian that I am, I felt a kind of discomfort when I tried to land on that conclusion as my stopping point. To understand where I'm coming from, let me give you some background:
I was raised in an Episcopal household, the majority of my family being relatively involved in the Church-life. Both my father and mother, as I grew older, became increasingly involved in that scene, and when I reached the proper age, they began sending me to youth group. Now, like I said, I've always been the kind of person that finds some point on which to disagree, no matter where I am. So, as my parents urged me into the kind of life that so many young people my age were embracing pretty wholeheartedly, I instead pushed back. I didn't take to the youth group "lifestyle" - a bunch of early-teens who somehow felt totally cool with the idea of falling on their knees in divine worship. I felt like an outsider there, needless to say. So I finally ditched that once my parents gave me permission to decide for myself. What made it worse was that, because my folks were so involved in that whole thing, and because I once was too, people from the Church would always be asking about me, asking when I'd come back to youth group, asking why I never came to church. Meanwhile, I was never home. I was off with my friends playing loud music in basements, smoking pot, and involving myself in all manner of delinquent activities. It was at this time, with the aid of marijuana and other such "poisons" that I discovered for myself an authentic sense of the "religious" or "mystical" experience. I put those adjectives in quotes because I know that for so many people, drug-induced experiences are not authentic experiences, nor is the knowledge taken away from them. My feeling on that matter should be clear already. I was a changed person, and I found myself willingly picking up books about Buddhism, Hinduism, mystical Christianity, and so on. So, I found myself in a strange dilemma. On the one hand, my parents and a whole slew of folks down at the local church were waiting for me to "see the light", while on the other hand, I almost felt like I had, in a way. But, again, being the contrarian that I am, I rejected what I found to be such a "restrictive" spiritual path, and continued to study, on my own time, the wisdom of the Ancients.
So here I am, close to graduating college with a degree in philosophy and religious studies, and I still can't confidently put into words my feelings about God. One thing I've learned for sure here in college is that it's much easier to feel like you know what you're talking about. It makes life so much simpler when you feel like you understand it, when you have a solid belief (whether that belief is scientifically substantiated or not) about the life you're living and where it's going. On the one hand, all the people I know that are devoted Christians, that tell me that they know in their hearts that Christ died for them, they seem happy. They seem like they've got something figured out. At the same time, the people that I've met in my life that don't believe in God, that are pretty damn sure that there's no bearded man on a cloud recording our every misdeed (and I see what they mean), they too seem like they've got something figured out. As for me (and I don't want to sound like I'm complaining or pitying myself, because that brings up all kinds of questions about the Self and who I am, and I've yet to really feel good about that one either), I've never been able to feel confident about either position, God or no-God. Where does this leave me? Well I've noticed for one that it leaves me in a place of not being very contributory during those big deep God-conversations that college student like to have. Perhaps one way I could reconcile that is by taking the time now to try to put into words my feelings about God. Here goes:
First off, assuming there is a God, I don't think God is a man. I don't think "he" has any human qualities whatsoever, and would be better referred to as an It. Even then, placing a discriminatory designation such as "it" on something that is always referred to as infinite, omnipresent and eternal kind of seems like trying to fit the ocean in a teacup. If one is to try to understand what the concept of God really means, one has to inquire about its genesis as an idea (pun intended). What was it that that first human being really experienced when he or she came away with an understanding of an underlying Power, a Force prior to any created thing? One must really examine the institution of religion itself to really understand what God is. As human beings, the most complex creature on the planet Earth, we have created these different paths, religions, all of which are centered around the search for and the understanding of a principle that is fundamental and prior to Life itself, prior even to the material world around us. What is more, just about every "path" that can be called a religion makes the claim that it is the only true way to this Principle. Each religious institution orbits around that Principle, although it is described very differently by each, yet aren't all things described very differently depending on what corner of the globe you find yourself? I have heard a few nice analogies for this. Everyone on the Earth must drink water. Here in America and other English-speaking countries, we all know it as Water. Yet, if you find yourself in another part of the world, it is called Wasser, or Acqua, or Wai, or Voda, or Vatten, or Eau. If an English speaker found himself in France and demanded a cup of WATER!, he would be looked at like a lunatic. It is not that these people don't drink water, or don't understand what water itself is, they just refer to it as something else. Likewise, the vast array of different religious paths have arisen out of deep cultural heritages that influence almost everything that we understand today about different religions. The fundamental question, however, is this: what is it that all of these religious paths are trying to find their way towards? The Buddhist calls it Buddha-nature, Christians call it the trinitarian God, Muslims call it Allah, Jews call it Adonai, Hindus call it Brahman (or any of the other hundreds of names given to the principle of Creation and Destruction). The list goes on, and we, being creatures defined by culture, are sure that God is a man with a son named Jesus. But this story has been replayed countless times in the cultural imagination of humanity - the idea that we are beings destined for communion with a Force greater than ourselves if we can only widen our view to see it.
So what is God? I don't know. But one thing I think I can be certain of, if nothing else, is that whatever God really is cannot be defined and conditioned by cultural influence, cannot be succinctly delineated with a word. Trying to do so, like I said, is similar to scooping up water with a teacup and claiming to have the ocean. For me, the great search that every individual must come to terms with should not be limited by name and form, cultural tradition and the preconceived ideals contained therein; rather that search should be defined by an effort to understand That which comes before everything.
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