The God Box

A question I usually confront myself with when assessing my religious views is, “What is my God box?” What is a God box? A God box is an individual’s current image of God and everything that God is.  For instance, a simple example would be a God in a toga, who looks like Zeus and lounges on top of a cloud throwing lightning bolts. This God answers your prayers and controls every facet of the universe. Many of us have shared this God box before.  Another God box would be “God is Love”.  In this image, God is more than just a concrete being. He transcends reality and becomes a concept as well. Depending on how you say “God is Love”, this could be seen as a more mature God box. These two examples are what I meant by  ”God box”.

My God box is constantly under evaluation, constantly evolving. Currently I see God as many things: He is the omnipotent father of all things, He is the historical/spiritual Jesus, and It is a spiritual entity that is nebulous in nature and can only be described by what It is not. This could be referred to as the Trinity. My God box is meshed with the concepts and realities of Allah and Buddha, not because I extract what I like from each religion to make my own “cafeteria-style” religion, but because I see how they are the same.  I say He is Love, but I don’t say it like others usually do. My image of God is One who does not do what you ask of Him. He helps you, but not in the way you often want. His will is beyond our will, implemented on behalf of not only our own sakes but everything else’s.

The best way to describe it is the will of a doctor and the will of a patient. We ask the doctor to cure us of our ailments. He cuts us up, he tears things out, he gives us pills. We go through all this invasive treatment with promise of feeling better… and at the end of the day we still feel nauseous and dizzy. Our sutures burn with pain, our insides are roiling inside of us, and the adverse effects of the medication makes us feel even worse. “How does this make me feel better?” the patient asks. The patient and the doctor shared the same goal in curing an ailment, but there was a difference in wills. The patient’s will was to be comfortable. To FEEL better. The doctor’s was to actually fix the problem. The patient was looking for instant gratification while the doctor was addressing the immediate medical priority AND the long term health of the patient. The doctor’s will may not be immediately inherent, but when you stand back and look at what all is going on and also realize that he is not just diagnosing you but hundreds of others don’t you think that what the doctor provided the patient was ultimately more beneficial than what was asked for? Trying to keep myself from writing a novel of a blog, this is the best I can describe what I see God as right now. There’s so much more to God than what I can describe at any point in time.

That’s what determines the scope of my God box: my ability to intuit God. My God box only exists to break God into digestible, bite-size pieces. It’s like a television, which is only capable of showing you what is able to fit onto film. What you see on the screen implies so much more, but you are not able to experience it in its entirety. As time passes, my God box seems to grow bigger and bigger to accomodate for my rapidly expanding image of God, and with each passing evaluation He becomes harder to contain into a box. My God box becomes more strained as I stretch it out. So what is going to happen when it reaches it’s limit? Is it going to halt in it’s tracks? Or is it going to split at the seams and bottom out? Is it going to be too much for me and I’ll just give up on it all? The problem becomes more than just being able to find out what God is. It also becomes an issue of preparing myself to experience more of what He is. It becomes an issue of my integrity as a vessel for God.

And after all that is said and done, after we have established a God box…what does it matter? What was it’s purpose? All we did was construct an image of Him, we never found Him. Wasn’t the God box constructed to help us see God in His entirety? How does it do that by cutting it into pieces? How does it help us see the big picture when all it is capable of doing is showing us a small window into what God is? How can we know who God is by making up our own idea of Him? One thing we must be aware of when constructing this God box is that what we see in it IS NOT GOD. It is our projections that we place onto what we believe God is. What we see in the God box we are more than willing to name God Himself. As DeMello said in Awareness, “people fall into idolatry because they think that where God is concerned, the word is the thing.” We construct a description of who we think God is then we fall into the rut of worshipping that, forgetting that it was only a guess at who He is. DeMello wrote about how he was confronted by a world-renowned scripture scholar. “It never struck me that I had been an idol worshipper all my life! My idol was not made of wood or metal; it was a mental idol.” DeMello reminded his readers that those that had constructed their own mental idol were the more dangerous idol worshippers because “they used a very subtle substance, the mind to produce their God.”

Maybe I was never meant to contain God in a box. Maybe I wasn’t meant to contain Him within me, this body serving as a Temple. How could all of what God is be within me? Maybe I’ve been using the wrong word this whole time. I’m not a vessel, I’m a conduit. I am a channel through which He flows through. Right now, the God box seems irrelevant. My experience and my ideas of God right now have surpassed any words that I am capable of expressing right now.  Right now it doesn’t feel like I could fit what I’m feeling inside a box and I’m all the better for it.

Anger Vs. Drama

My philosophy group was having a discussion over How to Be An Adult by David Richo, PhD. I have yet to read this book, and I’m not in a big hurry to read it any time soon, but the topic of anger and how it differs from drama surfaced. What is this difference?

From what I understand, drama is linked to past experiences. For instance, a man might be sensitive to the word “whipped” or “tool”. If he is associated with either of those words, he may blow up because of his severe aversity to those words. This may  be due to a previous relationship or experience where he felt like he was being used. He may have been in a relationship where his opinion was void and his partner made all the decisions, and any similar situation may remind him of that negative relationship. Thus, his expressed anger would be a reaction to that past experience, not a present situation.

When a person feels offended or slighted due to a perceived similarity to this past experience, they manifest aggressive or passive aggressive behaviors. Aggressive anger is where you are considering your own feelings but are inconsiderate of others’ feelings when expressing your own. Passive aggressive is slightly different from aggressive in the fact that the passive aggressor is too afraid to address the other person for fear of a confrontation.

Drama is an exaggerated and inappropriate reaction towards a percieved offense, often fueled by an underlying fear that can be tied to a past experience. Once this reaction is expressed there is still a negative residue left behind, otherwise known as a grudge. The dramatic person chooses to hold on to the past experience because he or she feels that there is a payoff for holding on to it. Example: I could choose to hold onto my middle school years, a time when I was constantly bullied, because I believe that by holding onto it others would feel guilty for me and show me pity. I would be considering pity as a surrogate for love. My payoff would be that pity/love.

If I had dropped that drama, if I stopped referring to my middle school years, what cause would I have to be angry? Holding onto my middle school experiences produces unnecessary anger. That is what I understand drama to be.

Anger, on the other hand, I believe to be severely misunderstood or at least in need of redefining. I believe anger is anchored more in the present than drama. Anger, to me, is a feeling that expressed assertively. That means, the person who feels offended expresses his anger appropriate to the action that offended him. In expressing his anger, he is considering himself but considers the feelings of others while expressing his own. I believe expressing anger is necessary because each person has the right to consider his own needs and wants. A person is not wrong for asserting their own rights.

Once the anger is expressed, it dissipates for good. There isn’t any ill will to hold on to. It’s in the past, and is no longer applicable to present situations. Isn’t that a beautiful thought: living in the present? Living in the past or dwelling on the future only brings up drama and anxiety. Do you need either of those to improve your quality of life? What benefits are there to dropping these frivolities?

On Nonduality

I was rereading Being Peace by Thich Nhat Hahn with my philosophy group when a friend of mine posted to our email listserv about her confusion over the concept of self-compassion in nonduality in response to Hahn’s quote, “If you cannot be compassionate to yourself, you will not be able to be compassionate to others.”  Here was what she had to say:

To me, compassion requires a separate entity that acts as the object receiving the compassion.  I looked up the definition, and compassion is ’sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress together with a desire to alleviate it.’    Compassion comes from compati, meaning ‘to suffer with.’  But if there are not two, there can be no ‘with,’ there is only one ‘nondual’ thing, and that is everything; therefore compassion and sympathy are impossible.

And here was my response:

I think you saw compassion as distancing because the definition used the word “sympathy” as opposed to “empathy”. Whereas empathy is where you feel what the other person is feeling, investing themselves in you, sympathy implies at least some degree of objectiveness or disinterestedness. It is my impression that the accuracy of words is something that is important to you right now. I.e. there is a difference between the words “beautiful” and ”pretty”. If my supposition is true, then that could be a big factor as to why you can’t fully make the concept of nonduality your own. Here we have a concept called nonduality claiming that we only perceive that there are dichotomies, and we are working on dichotomizing the building blocks of communication: words.

Even though I don’t fully grok nonduality, myself, I’ll try to explain what I can understand about it. I think what the concept of nonduality is trying to say is that we are not different from each other, we are not separate. However, we do not exist as one being. We are all connected. We are part of a cycle. Each individual is not separate; he is part of something bigger. He is part of a circuit that could not exist without him. He can not exist as his own separate entity, because if the circuit cannot exist without him, likewise he cannot exist without the circuit. So we do not exactly exist as one; we exist in relation to each other and all compose a sum greater than its parts.

In terms of an analogy, a picture I get of the compassion/nonduality complex is like the body. The heart pumps oxygenated blood to the extremities of the body. From the cor of the body to the fingertips and toes. Like compassion, the heart is affecting something beyond itself. It is supplying oxygen rich blood to the limbs. However, it must also supply oxygen to itself (coronary arteries). If it cannot supply oxygen to itself, how can it supply oxygen to something distal to itself? You must start at the center before you can radiate out. This applies to both the heart and compassion. Furthermore, on the theme of “oneness”, the heart and limb vascularity are both apart of the same system, connected in a continuous loop….I’m not too happy with my own analogy but I think it does its job well enough.

On another, complementary level the dichotomy of self/nonself does not exist in the concept of nonduality. Having said that, reevaluate what TNH said: “”If you cannot be compassionate to yourself, you will not be able to be compassionate to others.” Also, with the concept of nonduality, does the dichotomy of duality/nonduality exist?

Personally, I just can’t make this concept mine at this time, and I’m fine with that. I think I resent the concept for reasons I’d have to sit down and think about, and I’m not about to make something I resent a fundament of my life. I’m not going to try to make it mine because Thich Nhat Hahn said I should. I might never make it mine, but if I do one day, I will make it mine because I chose to, not because a monk, regardless of his wisdom, told me to do so.

What is Truth and What is Theory?

Ok, I lied. I forgot I had a couple of journals saved as drafts. This one is from about two weeks ago.  ***WARNING: Amber Spyglass Spoiler*** You have been warned.

The funny thing about fact is that it’s only accurate when it comes to wordly things, but how many facts do we know when it comes to spirituality? I can’t think of any off the top of my head. Yes, we share similar experiences, but similar experiences are correlations. They do not prove causation.

The Amber Spyglass by Robert Pullman

I’m writing this because I just finished reading the Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman. There is a part where the ghosts of the dead are all sent to limbo instead of heaven. Heaven exists, but there is a power struggle happening and pretty much nobody is making it past the “pearly gates”. One of teh main characters possesses a knife that can cut into other alternate universes. He cuts into the land of the dead and crosses the river Styx. He then opens up a portal back to the land of the living on the other side. Ghosts that pass back into the land of the living disintegrate into particles and become part of everything else: the trees, the grass, the air, the ocean. They feel everything at once.

It was a lot like my current definition of nirvana. The best way to explain my definition is through analogy. The traditional idea of nirvana is to snuff out the flame of the candle of your soul. My definition is to have the candle consumed in a conflagration of fire. Better put, it’s like saying that your soul was a shot glass full of water. If you dumped that shot glass into a fish tank full of water, the water molecules that you were composed of would still be there, but now they’re a part of the entire fish tank. They are part of everything else now.

I was going “Yes!” the whole time. “Ahh! This is so beautiful! How can something so profound be a work of fiction!?” And then I realize: how can something so profound as what I believe in NOT be a work of fiction? Pullman came to the same conclusion in a young adult book that I’ve been working at in real life. It brought to light the possibility that I can’t really prove that anything I believe is right.It could merely be a work of fiction. There is no incontrovertible evidence for what I believe in, yet there seems to be a right and wrong in religion.

Christianity, for example, has “facts” to prove its own legitimacy. There is an “authority” that we can refer to in Christianity itself: the Bible. There are doctrines, creeds, historical evidence. Using these as sources of reference, we can establish accepted standards in Christianity. But really, what sound basis are these facts built upon? One has to exercise at least a little bit of faith for those facts to be  legitimized. You have to trust that what the Bible tells you is true. I was under the impression that facts should be able to stand on their own.

I’m not trying to attack Christianity, but I’m bringing this up because I find a lot of Christians that are so cocksure of themselves, of how Chrisitanity, how religion is supposed to be. My most recent example of this was the Lutheran Bible Study. They seem to have all the answers. We were given a list of guided questions at the study, but it really irked me that the vicar had a list of answers. “The Bible says so, so it is true”. “The Bible told us to, so we must do it.” That really gets under my skin.

I want to figure things out, I really do, but I don’t really believe that all my searching will actually direct me to a concrete answer. All I can do is better define what it is I’m searching for. All I can really do is refine my results. Right now I don’t think the truth I’m looking for is attainable, but I’m fine with that. I’m fine with having to answer my own questions. I’m fine not knowing whether those answers are right. Continuing the search gives me something to do with my life.