| Knowing God Spirit of lake harriet | by Lynn Woodland What is God, anyway? That's the ever-present, never truly answered question. How do we even begin to fathom the mystery? Perhaps Gertrude Stein said it all in her poem, "The Pathless Path": "There is no answer. There has never been an answer. There never will be an answer. That's the answer." I think it's the natural condition of the human mind to be frustratingly inadequate to ever fully know the Ultimate Truth, but far too complex to ever stop wanting to. We desperately want to make God comprehensible, to put a recognizable face to the unknowable. The Inscription on a Chinese figure of Buddha, dated 746, puts it succinctly: "The highest truth is without image. If there were no image at all, however, there would be no way for truth to be manifest." In our striving for understanding, we've created countless paths to God in the form of religions and spiritual practices. I imagine each religious path being akin to a picture frame held up against the sky. The sky, of course, is too vast to frame but the act of doing so brings a particular piece of sky into focus. For some, this might show a patch of blue, while others view a dark starry night, rain and lightening, a rainbow or flat, unbroken gray. We're all seeing the truth even when the "truth" appears so contrasting. And as surely as the act of focusing in this way brings us closer to an aspect of God, it just as certainly blinds us to others. So how can we reap the benefits of a spiritual path without succumbing its limitations? Perhaps a start is seeing it for what it is: one of many slants on the truth --packaged, framed and filtered to make it more appealing to some than others. What we see through the frame of our religious path will never be the whole picture. We may have transcendental moments of experiencing "All That Is," but as soon as we try to define what we experienced, we simply construct another frame. So to pursue true knowing we must, from time to time, loosen our grip on our most cherished interpretations and experiment with different perspectives of truth. This, of course, is a tall order. The very nature of focus that each path requires calls forth a heart-felt commitment, a personal investment in "our" truth. Holding our spiritual philosophy lightly is as challenging as not taking ourselves too seriously, or not getting attached, or letting go of "ego," to name a few glib clichés of the spiritual set. All easier said than done. Ultimately, a true desire for knowing, as opposed to a craving for identity, increasingly requires us to embrace paradox, to search for and find coherency in diametrically opposed truths. This juggling of paradoxical realities isn't just a prerogative for spiritual enlightenment, it's a recurring theme in the field of quantum physics. For example, we now know that, at the subatomic level, matter doesn't behave consistently. Instead, it shows statistical tendencies to behave in certain patterns and has the potential to change spontaneously in ways that have no clearly apparent physical cause. What's more, at this quantum level, matter can exhibit the qualities of solid, separate particles and the qualities of unified light waves -- seemingly mutually exclusive realities. The phenomenon of two seemingly incompatible realities coexisting in this way is known as the Principle of Complementarity, first formulated by physicist Niels Bohr, an early pioneer of atomic physics. Physicist Fred Alan Wolf, author of Taking the Quantum Leap, says, "[Complementarity] taught us that our everyday senses were not to be trusted to give a total view of reality. There was always a hidden, complementary side to everything we experienced." Furthermore, "The more we determine one side of reality, the less the other side is shown to us." Juggling such mind-boggling contradictions, whether to comprehend the nature of matter or the nature of God (and is there a difference?) requires a paradigm shift in perspective, which can be impossibly difficult or astonishingly easy. A paradigm shift is hard for someone else to explain to you, but when you've had one, you know it and wonder why you never saw things that way before. Price Pritcett begins his book on personal effectiveness by telling a story that perfectly illustrates the idea of a paradigm shift. He described watching a housefly bashing itself to death trying to get outside through a screen window. All of its limited housefly senses told it that straight ahead was the most direct route to freedom. It could see it, smell it, practically taste it, yet the more it tried, the more beaten and battered it became. If only the fly could have seen the bigger picture it would have been able to turn around in the opposite direction and fly easily through an open door. This is how we often operate in life. We become fixated on the route most obvious to our physical senses or, in the case of religion, the one that most appeals to our personality. We then fall into assumptions that this is not only the best but the only truth. The popular spiritual text, A Course in Miracles, begins with the lesson, "Nothing I see means anything." The second lesson is, "I have given everything I see all the meaning it has for me." The third is, "I do not understand anything I see." These exercises in deprogramming are an essential step in opening to an expanded paradigm of truth. The more rigidly we hold on to our interpretations of life, the more we close off to the multitude of doors beyond our current ability to imagine. It is only through knowing that we know nothing that our minds expand wide enough to embrace paradox, which ultimately leads us to new options. Without this, we become trapped by our attachment to our narrow view. We become like the housefly, trying to fly through a screen window, unable to see that if we turn away from what we think we know and fly in the opposite direction, we'll find an unimagined opening. The following is an exercise that may help you free your mind from its rigid grooves to find the open doors lying just out of sight. Exercise: Freeing Your Mind Step One: What are your most deeply cherished truths? Write down everything that comes to mind. Step Two: Review what you've written and ask yourself what "truths" would cause you to feel very defensive if challenged. Step Three: These are exactly the perceptions that need shaking up. The truth that you feel most protective of is showing you where you've become the most rigid and closed. Ask yourself, "What would happen if this were not true at all? What am I afraid would happen if this were not true?" Step Four: Imagine that all you thought you knew for certain is not true. You don't need to figure out how or why this is. Simply play with it as an exercise in imagination. As you release your current interpretations, don't immediately grasp for new ones. Simply let your mind open and allow yourself to be confused. This process is much like letting your eyes go out of focus so that you are seeing the color, form and the big picture of the world around you rather than the details. Imagine that, even in the midst of confusion and not knowing, you're safe and at peace. Step Five: Do some imagining, perhaps in writing, about what positive new options become possible if all that you thought was true isn't. If nothing comes to you, then go back to Step Four and let yourself continue to live in the not knowing. As you do, give special attention to relaxing into this place of ambiguity. Cultivate a feeling of faith that positive new, unimagined doors are opening. Let go and let your mind be boggled. Out of this soft, fuzzy state, don't be surprised to find new awarenesses arising, options appearing where there seemed to be none, and a paradoxical sense of peace that comes as the security of knowing the answers gives way to a sure knowing of how little we know. Attend a Sunday Service with Lynn Woodland at Lake Harriet Spiritual Community every first Sunday at 10:30 a.m. For information on her upcoming events this month, including the Fall Equinox, see her ad in this issue or visit www.lynnwoodland.com Lynn Woodland is a writer, teacher and Ministerial Guide at Lake Harriet Spiritual Community. Her popular weekly spiritual empowerment group meets Tuesday nights and has been ongoing since 1987. To find out more about this and other events, see her ad in this issue or www.lynnwoodland.com. Copyright © 2004 Lynn Woodland |
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Sept 2004 |
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