If
you take the apparent question of whether “god” exists or not as
an existential question or as an ontological question then then I
suspect that you will be caught in the never-ending, polarised and
irresolvable debate between theist and atheist. Here I am at one
with the Buddhist teaching that there are unanswerable questions.
It
is not a question. It is not provable or disprovable. It cannot be
resolved by any experiment or by any formal method of proof. It is
beyond knowing. It is not a thing of the mind nor can it be captured
by any web of words. It is deeper and is visceral in its
intelligence. It is in how we feel and respond at the very deepest
levels of being. It is when we are stripped totally bare and have no
shield, no defence, no words, no wisdom, nothing more than the very
breath we hang onto - there, that is the point where we touch the
divine.
I
have no wish to characterise the divine or to label it.
Such
things we can experience, but the more we try to tangle them in webs
of explanations, the more we enfold them in doctrine and belief, the
more we wrap them in words like “god”, the more we try to
condition and canalise them to fit in with our systems of belief and
faith then the more we betray them.
Christianity,
Buddhism, atheism, scientific rationalism, realism - whatever and
whichever - these are just the vehicles in which we may travel for a
while on our journey. We should not mistake the vehicle we are
travelling in with the journey that we are making.
That
is the most astonishing journey of all: the journey from our birth to
our death.
And
that journey is but a thread in a cloth woven since the beginnings of
time.
