Just a Little Faith

Do I doubt the existence of God? Well the short answer is, "No!" 

Before getting hung up about what Holy Scripture and the Church claim God to be, where might we find this much argued about entity? Now already I have jumped ahead of myself. What about all those people who are outside the Church? What about all the atheists who do not believe? I suspect that many non-believers, a term that seems to be less raw and vaguely non-specific than 'atheist', find themselves in that state because they already have certain ideas about what God is, or is supposed to be, ideas that do not match up to their wishes and expectations. As I have said before, a study of the Old Testament God might, with some justification, lead one to suppose that God is the ego writ large across the cosmos. Faced with that definition of God, I would willingly join the side of the unbelievers and other atheists.

All my experience tells me that God, or whatever this inner Presence is that I choose to call God, is to be found way down inside myself, at a much deeper level than my ego. It seems to me that at the very least, God may be seen as that which exhibits a healthy impulse towards a restorative balance, countering the essentially divisive nature of the ego. Thus God is neither the property of any particular religion, sect or group, nor something that fits comfortably in any individual's handbag or wallet. The difficulty that arises here is that we are capable of experiencing great and sometimes frightening power in our inner lives, power that refuses to be tamed and made into a docile pet, yet at the same time being impossible to define.  And with true human genius, we all too often deny what we do not understand. Give it another name and the problem goes away. Simple really, except that the problem, if problem it is, does not go away. Acceptance, even as a working hypothesis is, apparently, far too difficult a task to consider.

As time passes it becomes ever more difficult for me to remember the mindset in which my ego-consciousness was my only reality. From my present standpoint, within the womb of eternity, I see that that earlier mindset was only ever one part of what I am, a part that seemed to be set inflexibly in stone. And for all its arrogant displays of power, it was always the very minor part. Ultimately, I came to see that my perceived reality was unreal, and that indefinable third dimension of my being which made me whole, and which I had blatantly ignored for so long, was in fact my inner, and only true, reality. Yet there is still a link, an almost invisible umbilicus, that connects my reality to my unreality. One day that link will end, but not yet, not quite yet. The final breaking of that link, or the dispensing with the need for a link within a greater oneness, is an adventure which still awaits.

Why am I here? What is my real purpose in life? That is a question which I answered, at least in part, in an earlier post, "The Chalice". But is that the whole story, or does that requirement 'to love one another' feed into a hierarchy of purposes? It is said, and can be demonstrated well enough through the laws of thermodynamics, that the universe is in a state of increasing entropy. Put simply, the universe is running down and will end its days in a cold-death. But there are two sides to every equation. Where has all the indestructible energy gone in this cold end-universe? I would like to say 'quite simply', except that the processes are 'quite complex', in the conversion to enthalpy, an ever-increasing complexity.

There must be limits to the degree of complexity that can be attained in the physical universe. The laws of physics indicate that there are limits on what can be considered as viable living creatures.  But here we are dealing with the physical; what of the psycho-spiritual universe? It would seem that there are no discernible limitations on the complexity of Mind, on that ultimate process of becoming. It is there that perhaps I come closest to a concept of God, a self-active blueprint of what might be, or of what could be. Whatever may lie ahead, I for one have only just begun that journey. 

Perhaps a little faith in the possibility of something greater, something worth working towards, is one place to begin, for is not faith a part of the spectrum of love? And is not love the needful goal of all sentient existence? Is it perhaps that love is the means, the finger that points towards an as yet unknowable Reality?