Still a non-theist?

 I was asked the question whether I was still a non-theist?

You said, quite rightly I think, that my understanding is somewhat Taoist. Naming the nameless is to damage and limit: it is also an arrogance. Being open to the profoundness of what is - to the naked force of being - and knowing that you cannot know - that is fundamental. Imagining that we can have a transactional relationship with the totality of being is delusional: reality is remorseless. In the preciousness and precariousness of life we find the divine light. The spark that ignites the transmutation of the inert into the vital: the promethean fire that burns through us all. Minding, nurturing and guarding that light, both in ourselves and in others, is the function of religion.

So, am I still a non-theist?

Escatalogical faiths versus karmic faiths

The monotheistic faiths offer a static view of the human's position in life. The task is to avoid becoming tarnished with sin. We starts pure[ish] - original sin aside - and, only if we proceeds blamelessly throughout life will we have succeeded. We must preserve the innocence of childhood in our minds and lives. The development of all adult characteristics is a deterioration from this paradigm state. As of necessity we will become defiled by developing into adulthood we must throw ourselves upon the mercy or grace of the deity as our only hope of not suffering eternal punishment.

Buddhism and Taoism by contrast are developmental. One grows with experience. One learns the path and trains the inner and outer being, honing them to greater degrees of perfection. We are all Buddhas becoming, if not in this life, then in the next. We are seekers after enlightenment, both separately and collectively. For the Taoist it is the white haired sage who is the epitome of attainment. He has shaped and honed his being until, being totally at one with the Tao, he becomes an immortal.

The life that is living you

The life that is living you is older than you, it has lived many lives before, passed on through generation to generation. Consider well its past and all the lives it has lived before it came to live you.

Ask what of it will pass on beyond you? Ask what of it radiates out from you?

Knowing this is to know that you are merely its guardian, its custodian, its keeper; it is on loan to you just for now from this planet that has let you be born and has sustained you through every breath you take.  

The Quickening of its Beat

From the silence grows the words. Observe the silence deeply, let it culture in you what it will. Before the first word there was what? Silence? Or is there just silence about what there was? And after the last word what? Silence? Or just silence about what there might be? The knowing that is deeper will not let us say, cannot be shaped and packaged into words, will not conform into thought, is not of the mind or of conception, is of the heart alone and is no more than the quickening of its beat.

Just maybe you might feel the same too?

Why I am a unitarian*:

Because of the connectedness that underlies all things.

Because of the inseparability of the material and the divine.

Because seeking and not knowing is the path.

Because all paths are as one path.

Because of the partiality of any understanding.

Because of the inexpressibility of the truth.

Because of the life-light that burns through all people.

Because of the understanding that goes beyond words.

Because of the peace that passes all understanding.

Because of the temporarily of the self.

Because of the temporarily of humanity.

"We are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically and to the rest of the universe atomically" Carl Sagan

http://bit.ly/cDZhrY

 * unitarian with a small capital, not Unitarian with large one, because the word denotes a way of seeing our place in the universe and not the membership of a particular faith group - as admirable, or otherwise, as their beliefs may be.

"if I had not the body, what great calamity could come to me?"

... 及吾無身 ，吾有何患？
(Tao Te Ching - 13)

It is an odd trick of language and of logic to separate the "mind" from the "body". It is the body that is alive, that feels, that experiences; the nervous system and the central nervous system are simply parts of the means by which it does so - and the "mind" is an "illusion" created by the functioning of those systems. Our intelligence and our meaning gymnastics should recognise their visceral roots - the body is indeed precious for that is what we are, a conscious, feeling, sentient body.

No body => no being. 

So, yes, "if I had not the body, what great calamity could come to me?" - or joy or anything, come to that!

Let life flow through you moment by moment, breath by breath, heart beat by heart beat.

Falling through time

I am no more than a bundle of absurdities falling though time and laughing.

Each breath

Drink each breath for they are all that we have.

What are we?

What are we but a bag of skin and bone burning with the fire of life for a while as it passes its way through us from the beginning of time to who knows where.

Sort of tantric

Thubten Yeshe:

..each one of us is a union of all universal energy. Everything that we need in order to be complete is within us right at this very moment. It is simply a matter of being able to recognize it. This is the tantric approach

David Gordon White:

... the universe we experience is nothing other than the concrete manifestation of the divine energy of the Godhead that creates and maintains that universe, seeks to ritually appropriate and channel that energy, within the human microcosm, in creative and emancipatory ways.

Only take away the intentionality of "the Godhead", or its existence as something other than the energy that flows through time, that was and is everything. Our wonder to be open to it, to be the witnesses of this dance of the divine, to feel its spark, its heat flowing through us. To know that we are no more than the dust given shape and form by it. For a while to be its eyes and ears, to be its body and senses, to dance its joys and to shed its tears.