A comedian once said the surest way to keep the seat beside you empty was, when asked if it was taken, to answer: “Nope, just me and God.” Guaranteed that the interloper will keep moving, joked the comedian.
Only it’s not really a joke, is it? God has become the crazy uncle we keep hidden in the attic.
It’s not so much that God has gotten a bad rap, it’s that humans – and in this case, religious and secularist humans – have ruined God for the rest of us.
These days you can pretty much talk about anything – sex, death, you name it – except God.
Mention the G word around the religious types and you’re likely to be waterboarded with their version of the one true God. Mention it around the secularists and you’ll be written off as a simple-minded fool.
Ironically, the secularists and religious are equally miserable these days, both increasingly panicked about the state of the world and what should be done about it. One group puts all its faith in humanity to fix what, um, humanity keeps doing to itself; the other keeps waiting – 2,000 years and counting – for Jesus to come back and fix things (or Allah to smite the unbelievers, and so on).
Changing Labels
The first time I mentioned God during a hike with my son, I was careful to preface it (as I so often do in this blog) with the caveat that I wasn’t discussing the God of any particular religion. You’ve got to do that kind of thing lest you want all the preexisting concepts to rise up and spoil things.
I’m talking about the God of the mystics, I said, the God within you, the God masquerading as trees and soil, streams and rocks, you and I. This is the God of direct experience, the one that precedes thought (and is hidden by thought).
There was no interest in indoctrinating my son. What could I possibly teach him? Instead, I wanted him to be wary of indoctrination, to forget what the religious and secularists alike were trying to teach him. Like urging a child to wash his hands during flu season, I wanted him to avoid being infected by all the agitated minds out there.
“Well what do YOU think God is?” he asked.
“I don’t think you can possibly put it into words,” I said. And by way of illustration, I reminded him of the ‘tree experiment’ we once practiced, the one where I asked him to fix his gaze on the Canadian maple in our front yard and then to gradually drop every label that sprang to mind. No maple, no tree, no thing. Nothing. “Now,” I asked, “what is that?”
You can do this with anything – a tree, a dog, the face gazing back at you in the mirror.
What I wanted my son to see was that all of the world’s agitated minds – billions of them – either embracing God or rejecting God – are themselves the problem. The mind’s job is to process, label, and then store that information. Once something is labeled and stored away, it doesn’t get revisited. This process helps us move through the world of trees and people. But it also effectively kills them.
Words Fail
Eating my morning grapefruit one day, I was again reminded to drop the label. To reconsider the thing on my plate and ask, “What IS this?” (This is not unusual, by the way. It’s the very same Advaita practice that urges one toward self-inquiry, to constantly ask, “What am I? Who is this doing X, Y or Z?”
And so as best I could, I dropped the labels and simply gazed down at my half-eaten fruit. And then something wonderful happened.
The more than I gazed at it without labels, the more mysterious and beautiful it became until there was an experience I can only describe as, what, exactly? Love? There was simply this exquisite appreciation for this unnamed thing and its temporary role in the universe and, by extension, its reminder that I was the very same ‘thing.’
Words, of course, fail. But then, that’s the point.
A short while later my wife came down and I watched her move about the kitchen and I again did my best to drop all the labels that had accumulated over the years. Again, something remarkable. What is that feeling? Compassion, love, connection, Oneness? And the moment a label rises up? The experience is ruined because ALL of THAT is confined to that one, leaden concept.
Words are the killers of things. Because they aren’t just labels, are they? They’re also judgments. This is hot, this is cold, she is fat, he is stupid, God is Christian / Muslim, God is for the simple-minded / superstitious. And once a judgment is rendered, it’s difficult to overcome.
I’ve yet to come across a mystical teaching that didn’t include, right at the start, the edict to drop our judgments. This notion is perhaps best captured in the very first sentences of The Great Way:
The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. When love and hate are both absent, everything becomes clear and undisguised. Make the smallest distinction, however, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart. If you wish to see the truth, then hold no opinions for, or against, anything. To set up what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind. When the deep meaning of things is not understood, the mind’s essential peace is disturbed to no avail.
Hsin Hsin Ming
When we drop the labels and the judgments that come with them, something beautiful happens. Something that transcends words and all the gobbledygook that comes with them.
I think this is why Jesus, in the Gospel of Thomas, said: “Know what is in front of your face, and what is hidden from you will be disclosed to you.” He didn’t mean to know its label, its human interpretation. But to look at it with new, non-judgmental eyes and see what it shows us.
So maybe the next time you eat a grapefruit or gaze at your mate, drop the labels, forget your judgments, and marvel anew at what is in front of your face.
