Bliss
Most people seem to be unaware of the circularity of the question when they ask me if I believe in God: the fact that you have to postulate such a being before you can ask if I believe in it. You have concluded before you start.
Not only assuming the existence of God, but presuming to know what it is, how it thinks, what it wants, and you give it motives, put words in its mouth: it all seems suspiciously like a big ol version of yourself to me.
Let’s be honest, no matter what you “believe,” there’s nothing there. The idea that there is some kind of Designer behind our universe is exactly that: an idea. There is no Being anyone can see or ever has seen. No sensory experience. No evidence. If you believe in a Designer, this is an inner conviction, with deep roots in the plasma of what you want to think is true and your unwillingness to figure things out if it’s not, and cannot be corroborated by anyone. Your ego likes it, and as always, you, and I, take that buzz for objective validation.
I’m not saying there’s not a Designer. It’s just that, for me, the question is intertwined with the nature of reality and the mystery of our consciousness, and is not a separable yes or no question. And I like it that way. I like the open-endedness of reality. Not only do I not want to know the ultimate explanation of everything, I don’t want there to be one. The idea chokes me with claustrophobia. And I would know it was only reducing the irreducible to a bite-sized nugget for the human brain. Whatever path we go down in our attempt to lock things down, we hit a contradiction or conundrum or paradox, and realize that the human mind just ain’t up to it.
Do I believe in the God of the bureaucrats? No.
Does that therefore mean I don’t believe in a Designer? No. So does that mean I do? No. It just means it’s all conjoined in the exquisite puzzle in which we find ourselves.
But a being in the physical shape of an old white guy with a beard on a throne?
No.
The problem is, the bureaucrats have locked down God. As bureaucrats do, they have defined and put up limits and made rules, and presented this to us as givens. No questioning, no thinking allowed.
Bureaucrats would steal from me the most wonderful thing I have: a free, inquiring mind. If this brain isn’t meant to wonder and speculate, then what?
So I do.
I sense something I suppose you could call God, but it is not separate from the universe and the context of the universe, if there is one, but is the universe. We weren’t created by it, we are part of it.
God is infinite possibility, and I think the nature of this unrealized possibility is what we would call bliss, but only because we know what non-bliss is. Bliss is fundamental, not extraordinary, and if we ever get a whiff of it, we recognize it, and want it. There’s no Being sitting around somewhere savoring bliss, but bliss is the foundational state of all. It is the state where nothing has happened yet.
That Possibility doesn’t decide or get bored or lonely or any human thing, it just collapses into reality. How, why, when, where? Unknowable. Any further elucidation of the matter eludes physics, theology, astronomy, or just a guy sitting on a rock. It just happens. Somehow. Saying a Being did it doesn’t answer the question, it just defers it a step. Once Possibility collapses and things happen, bliss becomes a ghost. Maybe, says Wordsworth, we remember it. Maybe since it can’t be empirically described, it is nothing. Maybe it’s just a component of reality, and drives the sense of something missing that pervades human experience. Maybe whatever you like.
The universe unfolds, as we in our lives do. Could it be that reality is only Possibility catching a glimpse of itself in a mirror? And like us is arrested by what it sees? Its exploding into realization is reflected in human artists, scientists, all strivers, undergoing the experience of being a human being. Everybody. And ourselves included, whatever becomes will return to the original state. Possibility. Bliss. Its structure does not survive—it doesn’t even survive while it exists—but maybe its experience does—not in the horizontal way we imagine time enduring, but in the vertical way: the eternity inherent in “is.”
October 23, 2018