Breaking Free of Belief

                                                                        Courtesy of Google Images



For awhile I lived a very comfortable religious life. I believed I had some sense of experiencing God.  Experiencing God was that warm fuzzy feeling one felt during worship, or maybe praying with others or during a good sermon. That was the extent of what I felt experiencing God amounted to. I was perfectly comfortable living out taught beliefs.

There came a time after I had incorporated meditation into my spiritual disciplines and began to really encounter the presence of God within that I no longer found these taught beliefs and doctrines fitting in with my sense of what I was beginning to feel was true. I struggled to find ways to incorporate them in the new paradigm I found myself merging into. I tried rationalizing and twisting them almost beyond recognition in order to conform. But it was to no avail. The pursuit amounted to being as futile as trying to jam the wrong puzzle piece into the wrong space. They just wouldn't fit.

The struggle to believe in my presupposed ideas based on the doctrines I was ascribing to and their conflict with the truths I was receiving was becoming the source of my Undoing.  This  process was suffocating me spiritually to the point where I was ceasing to find life, light and meaning in my beliefs at all. I could just see walls, like those of a prison, hindering the full view of which I had only caught glimpses of through moments of meditation. Walls, that had to come down.

I realized I wasn't after hollow doctrine. I was after truth and thirsted to experience that truth firsthand. I wanted God, not man's words about God, to reign in my heart. Contemplative prayer and other forms of meditation allowed me to realize that that was truly possible. I would, however,  have to let go of all that I once held dear in order to find the greatest treasure of all buried within my soul: God Himself. I would have to sell all of my land just for that one field where I knew the treasure to be buried and then spend the rest of my efforts in separating dirty ego from divine Self in discovering it.

Imagine God being like a powerful river swiftly flowing. It was as if I was relying on people's interpretations of the river and merely viewing it from a portrait that they had painted of it. And then, still more, reviewing charts regarding the facts that defined it. Memorizing the rules that determined its nature and the outlines of its topography and where one could swim, where one couldn't and who was allowed to swim. The problem was, there was no swimming going on at all.

It's as if I stood by the bank one day realizing the beauty and reality of the river and decided that rather than studying it from afar it'd be tons more fun to just jump in and let it carry me away, becoming one with it's flow and rhythm.  My experiences of meditation up to that point had gotten my feet wet. Now I wanted to saturate my soul as well.  I wanted no more barriers between myself and God and at last decided it was time to strip myself of the dogma that clothed my sense of what was real spiritually and take the plunge into the swift waters. Doing so has released in me the sense of merging into the great I Am and given me glimpses of what it's like to live in the great We Are. Not fully, but enough to know it's possible. There are still rocks I reach out and cling to in desperation, as I feel truth sweeping me in its current and my own inner insecurities resisting it, trying to slow it down because it's all so much to process in one experience.

There are a lot of analogies that use the illustration of the river to symbolize truth, reality and God. Just the other day I was having a conversation with a friend regarding the truth and how it cannot be contained only experienced. The book I am currently reading, "The Wisdom of Insecurity" by Alan Watts, illustrates this idea perfectly.

"You cannot understand life and its mysteries as long as you try to grasp it. Indeed, you cannot grasp it, just as you cannot walk off with a river in a bucket. If you try to capture running water in a bucket, it is clear that you do not understand it and that you will always be disappointed, for in the bucket the water does not run. To "have" running water you must let go of it and let it run. The same is true of life and of God."  

                 ~ Alan Watts, "The Wisdom of Insecurity", p. 24

For so long I hadn't just tried to "capture truth in a bucket" but I allowed it to be served to me on a platter. Served to me in the form of other men's words and visions about God without experiencing my own.  I had to  learn to surrender myself to God and the process of understanding unhindered by labels and superficial rules. I had to trust my own inner voice and not the voices of others. I felt my subconscious beckoning me to cease my struggling and to flow with the current and not resist it. For God is the current itself, the ever changing flow of what Is.  

Alan Watts talks about the law of reversed effort and how when we struggle against the water we sink but when we stop struggling we float. Finally, when I stopped struggling to cling to my preconceived notions of belief, trying to fit them in to interpret my experience, I rose to the surface of the water I had been submerged in and my spiritual lungs began to fill up with the air they so desperately needed.

Watts explains the difference between faith and belief in this passage:

Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would "lief" or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth  on condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith us the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.

                                  ~ "The Wisdom of Insecurity", p. 24

Sometimes an awareness of reality's purely unknown and bottomless depths breaks upon my consciousness and I literally laugh. I laugh because I don't know. There's so much I don't know!  There's a sense of freedom and joy in this seemingly hopeless condition because it's not hopeless at all when one really looks at it. In this condition is the reality of the freedom to admit ignorance and not be bound by the illusions of knowing.  It's the only way to experience hope in its truest form. How can you have hope without freedom? Belief binds. Faith in the experience frees one to plunge into the infinite void of God. To experience and explore all possibilities and not be bound to just one. There's a deep sense of  freedom in knowing that I am not bound by things that hinder me from exploring that unknown chartered territory that is God.

 The Tao te Ching puts the condition of not-knowing in this way :

 Not-knowing is true knowledge. 

Presuming to know is a disease.

First realize that you are sick, 

then you can move towards health.

To me, that means that we have to realize the full magnitude of what we don't know in order to really begin our journey into discovering what there is to know. One has to recognize the need to make new discoveries when on the spiritual journey or he isn't on a journey at all but has pitched a tent along the wayside. Of course, in this pursuit for God and truth one shouldn't have such an open mind as to let other false truths akin to those that have already been dismissed to filter in. We need to use spiritual discernment and critical thinking to separate the wheat from the chaff. We need to allow the light of God within us to shine through and dispel the darkness of that which hinders our view of the Divine. George Fox, the leading founder of the Quakers, used verses from scripture to teach that that eternal light is within us all. It is our teacher along the way. Fox said that, "people had no need of any teacher but the Light that was in all men and women".

 Zen master Shunryu Suzuki once said, "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's there are few."  I began my pursuit to discover God's truths with my ideas and philosophies bound in a neatly wrapped package. I figured I would go about learning and discovering God but within the confines of certain parameters. My search for encountering and exploring the Divine has burst open that package and dispelled my once held myth that God could ever be categorized. I feel more a beginner now to the process than I did from the very beginning. And I'm okay with that. To me it confirms that my compass is pointed in the right direction.

 

Thoughts? I'd love to hear them. Please leave them in the comments section!