Lately, in my nightly meditation, I returned - as I, and perhaps most of us sometimes do - to asking myself one of the abiding, persistent and nagging questions of our human life. Namely, Why does God permit suffering?; Why, in tandem with love, mercy and compassion, does the Divine seem to exhibit - permit - such a capacious cruelty, barbarism and unhappiness in and between his beloved created beings? Why does God at times seem so utterly callous? And it came to me, suddenly, with the bewitching, bewildering and bemusing force of genuine meditational insight that, in some sense at least, the reason God permits our suffering is that He is, somehow, not aware of it.
This idea struck me immediately as both strange and exciting; in the midst of meditation, I was puzzled and confused by such a plainly peculiar proposition and, naturally, asked for clarification. Then began the first of two experiences of what I call, humourously, "streaming meditation": meditation characterised by rapid and fulsome streams of information that I was hard put to keep pace with and sorely tempted to slow down, the better to comprehend its import and deeper meaning. What follows is the edited content of this "streaming", transcribed as accurately as possible after each meditation, and expanded little more.
In addition, and in the spirit of dialogue-cum-collaboration I am increasingly finding invaluable and delightful, I have included the response to my work of Michael T Vecchio, a dear cyber-friend whose own posting in repsonse to mine on Comsciousness is required reading for all Spiritech afficionadoes; my interjections to his own are earmarked by italics. Finally, please bear patiently with my stumbling attempts to understand and present what are highly esoteric ideas; my style tend to the prosaic, for which I apologise, and I do hope my style does not too adversely obscure the content.
Part One by Jeremy S Gluck
One possibility I received is that God is the Void, is what lies beyond all dualities; an incomprehensible, unreachable yet pervasively present reality underlying all. And out of this Void, this Divine Void, comes the first and last duality: Light and darkness. And then, by implication, good and evil, the mortal awareness straddling intuition and conscience with which we identify what is Godly (good) and evil (the inverse of life). In our mortal, ego-grounded consciousness, we exhibit habits of judgement; this judgement is, while being a function of awareness and consciousness, indicative of the absence of Light. Indeed, judgement is a denial of Light, because in embracing and endorsing judgement from the ego in any form, we are turned to darkness. In the fullness of the Light, there can be no distinctions between good and evil; all is absorbed into its brightness and channeled into the Void whose guardian and interlocutor both our God is. God seems callous and vengeful, displaying at times nearly a child-like capacity for mindless meanness. Is it the case that the curiousity of the Divine - like that of a child's - outweighs its caution?
The key to this and other questions lies in seeing the importance of the final emptiness and nothingness of God, illustrated in many venerated teachings, old and new. For the ancient Hindues the path to God was possible to tread by continually negating that not of absolute reality, saying "neti neti" - "Not this, not that" until the final Truth revealed itself. In the same way, using koans to break through duality and illusion to Truth, the Zen monk grapples heroically with enigmatic statements intended precisely to induce the "neti, neti" state of mind. And Krishnamurti, one of the century's spiritual titans, endlessly emphasised the efficacy and importance of "negation" as a means to realisation.
The path leads through negation, because God is not Presence, but absence. The absence of all illusion reveals, startlingly, that God is not a something but a nothing. Of course, God has a "something-aspect", which is His creation, but all our ideas of Presence, the One and so forth end, finally, in that capacious Void whence God and all else came, comes, and will always come. All ends in emptiness; there is no One, much less two (duality) or three (trinity). This does not deny us our faith, however. On the contrary, for me this realisation only intensifies my love for the Divine, because it makes God comprehensible as a Being from whom we are very much imaged. And it makes me appreciate the very humility of God, and His vulnerability. Perhaps it also explains how Jesus Christ, in His mortal aspect, has been signified as "the Son of Man", a classic mirroring whereby the actual "Father of Man" - and here I mean as the Christ principle - is made flesh and becomes Man's son, and thereby Man's junior: "the last shall be the first" and many other scriptural quotations can be re-evaluated in this Light to great benefit. In a way, I suppose, God is playing a game with us, a game played with mirrors. Mirrors reflecting Light at us, mirrors reflecting our Father principle at us as our "Son", and so on. This playfulness of the Divine is often noted by the Hindus and Bhuddists - not so much, sadly, by Christians - and actually fills me with a bubbly sense of the absurd. "The Divine Comedy", indeed! In His humility, God has created a theatre of such surpassing logic yet abusrdity, perfection yet fallibility, that ultimately it must collapse into itself, and return to nothingness (this observation, incidentally, is an open door to a myriad correaltions with physics and so on, ie what I have just described is mirrored in the nature black holes.
Also, cosmologically, we can look briefly at a phenomenon that fascinates me: the dark matter of the Universe. I feel that this 90% of the Universe called "dark matter" is what I have called background realisation and is in fact the living awareness of the Universe-Mind. The ratio is important: 90% of our brain is "dark matter"; according to the Kaballah 90% of the Creation is INVISIBLE ie dark matter. Enlightenment may be the transition to local mind ("ego/me") to Universal mind...and the individuation of being is the process reversed. Dark matter is the gravitational pull of the Uni-Mind, so to speak. Every second 100 trillion neutrinos pass through us - empty, transparent "matter", ominpresent yet invisible - and supposedly the compositor of this dark mattter is these neutrinos. According to research, "There is extensive circumstantial evidence that much of this (dark matter) is not made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons, as we are...What is dark matter? We don't know. Possibly dark matter is composed of neutrinos, or even more exotic forms of matter hypothesized by theorists." By dicitonary definition, dark matter is "matter not directly detectable by astronomers that is hypothesized to exist because the visible matter in the universe is insufficient to account for various observed gravitational effects". How intriguing: "insufficient to account for various observed gravitational effects"...Is this "gravitational effect" the signifier of the impulsion of the Divine?
To return to our core subject, as there is only Light in degrees of brightness, we can only be unaware of certain of its degrees, not in a state of darkness. Our unawareness of Light is our darkness, but darkness has no independent reality (this has often been said elsewhere, and better). Therefore, God does not see our darkness, as He is oblivious to all but Light. The brightness of the Light of the Divine is such that God sees only an absence, or gradations, of Light, not darkness; this simple fact explains and permits forgiveness and other forms of mercy on the part of the Divine, but also permits suffering, cruelty, and barbarism. As God sees only the lack of Light, and not darkness as such, He cannot see darkness. We, His created beings, see the darkness and respond; this could be seen as the apotheosis of the mirror principle, where we see darkness because we are the mirror of the Light, and we hold the darkness for the Divine.
Now, God said, "Let there be Light", so Light was not first-cause. So, what came before the Light? Before the Light, was the Void. And why did God need or want "Light"? He needed it in order to see Himself: the Light is itself God's mirror. Before that crucial moment there was only emptiness; something stirred in the Void, needed illumination and God appeared to create Light by which the Void could be "enLightened". This was the original duality, then: darkness (emptiness) and Light. For me, then, this must be the ultimate singularity - "where gravity and the curvature of space-time become infinite and anything can happen" - where all laws break down: because there is no One to create Two, only an absence of All, then reflection as Light, which is mirrored back into the darkness. The Void is where all laws known and unknown break down, where the formless reigns, invisible, ineffable, implacable, unseeing. The Uncreated is Created Emptiness, and vice versa, and so we have the ultimate paradox: nothing is everything, everything is nothing.
This all bears very heavily, too, on the nature of the truth of, and place of, Lucifer, the fallen angel, and his mythical place in one Creation story. Because, as there are only degrees of brightness of Light, Lucifer had to come from Light - which, according to tradition He did - as a (fallen) angel of Light. The importance of this point is that evil came from Light, as all does. It is simply not possible for evil to come from darkness, or indeed God. It is not that God does not exist, but that in His paradoxical non-existence is alone the first-cause, the underlying principle and pervasive Presence. Exploring mysticism, we find darkness denied: God, the Divine, may be possessed of a ruthless intelligence and vengeful apsect, but is never dark per se.
Even Jesus, on the cross, in His human, mortal aspect, reflected God's unawareness when, in His agony, He cried out, "Father, why hast Thou forsaken me?" He felt the Divine unawareness of His plight. If a Being so evolved could voice this enduring despair and deep sorrow, this sense of separation in and from the Divine, then how much more can we, whose state is much less awakened, expect to be bewildered and unconsoled by the perceived absence of Divine awareness of our sufferings? Yet, equally striking is that Jesus, despite his distress, was able to say to the faithful man being crucified beside Him, "Tomorrow you will be with me in paradise", demonstrating the degree of faith in God we should attain to, a degree of attainment hard and precipitate to reach and yet which is finally necessary if we are to really glimpse the awesome, simultaneous remoteness and closeness of God.
William Burroughs said, "Nothing is true, everything is permitted", but perhaps this statement should be rephrased as "Nothing is TRUTH, everything is permitted", because, in essence, nothing - as the ineffable Void - equates with absolute Truth.We are created by God in "His image". Not, note as God, but only in "His image". In other words, as his "something-aspect" as opposed to His "nothing-aspect". We are created in His penultimate image, therefore His ultimate image is, by definition, a mystery to us. It is, in fact, the emptiness whence He came. Hence, we are, all of us, in a sense GOD, as the ancients taught. In the sense that we need God to exist, and therefore are inseparably joined to Him. But what is more important to appreciate is that, as much as we need God, in order to exist He needs us, both literally and figuratively, in the sense that through us the Divine experiences His Creation. This shows us why we feel existential angst, and feel "alone" in a hostile Universe: God, being deep within us, is in a way invisible to us. As long as we see ourselves as being somehow fundamentally separate and different from God, we are destined ultimately to perceive ourselves as "alone" in our suffering and even joy.
We are not "alone", though, but "all one", which the word means. The program is "burned into" us so to speak, and very deeply, which creates what the Bhuddist calls "ignorance" of our real nature and origins. When this "ignorance" lifts, what is revealed is the sense that we "don't exist", but only God does. Which is why mystics down the ages emphasise the realisation that "I" am nothing, and therefore GOD...because God, too, is nothing. It is axiomatic, is it not? If, in realising I am nothing I feel identified utterly with the Divine, then the Divine must Itself be a nothingness, at least of a kind. When we see this we know God and ourselves and are liberated.
So we are all alone - all ONE - in his mirror image reflected out of the Void, and this shows us our birthright and integrity as beings...and our responsibilities: as we are alone/All One, we have to rely in this life on our program, learn it, and run it from the Source, not the illusion of ego - which would be the "corrupted" aspect of this program. There is nothing outside us/God: we are ALL ONE/ALONE, in God. This is why it is unwise to expect help from God, as such. But we can expect to run our program with awareness and thereby experience help, learning and healing. Look again at the words of Jesus: "Not I, but the Father in me": the Father is in me. God is in us to be uncovered, as the ancients say; this "uncovering" is the foundation of Zen and the others schools of Bhuddism, for example. What the Bhuddists call "the Bhudda nature" is none other than this selfsame "Father in me". And the Hindus "I Am That" is the same thing expressed just a little differently. Yes, we have to look hard for it, for the evidence and the real operational instructions, we have to be intent on and hungry for the discovery and forgiving and forbearing of the vicissitudes of the journey. For God is turned to the Void, the Light is turned to God, and we are turned to the Light - by which we see, in ourselves, all Creation and finally the Divine, His "image", made visible by the Light. No, God is not aware of us as such; He is the ultimate transparent program running behind All, that makes it possible and lets it happen, but which is not necessarily aware of same. And we, too, can, as co-creators awakened to our birthright, "make it happen", too. We are co-creators, whether we know it or not.
Part Two by Michael T Vecchio
There was the Void. Light emerged (was created; driven by; put in place by)God. God only "sees" Light and the absence of Light. Darkness occurs from judgement: Darkness is not the absence of Light but a "something" that arises from judgement and that robs life. God is unaware of that which is not Light or the absence of Light. So when we go into judgement we are on our own as it were as to where that will take us. God does not even know. At any time we can turn toward the Light and let our judgements go.
So it's a strange universe. God is all-pervasive, comes from the Void, has dominion over all, participates in all, yet does not "know" all. Does not know that which is not Light or absence of Light. God only knows that which is Light or the absence of Light. That's the short version of what I have understood so far.
As I went into it more deeply what I noticed is, as I started to weed out some of the ideas that were in the way, the bottom line is that Creation is a mystery. The funny part is that even though it is a mystery we don't have to understand it to use principles that give us a fulfilling life. Again, I go back to what Jesus taught. For instance I know that when we define things exactly the way we want them we can have them that way, but as I said in my Comsciousness piece it "happens" on earth only when our being is behind it, much the same as the universe happens with God's "being" behind it - assuming God is a being. Yes, what I just got is God is pure being. That's all God is, is being! We are blended beings because we have this ego "thing", literally "thing", that can over-ride our being, cover our being from one another certainly. What I just got is that our being is what we share with God: That is our pureness of spirit. That is the self I talked about. So take all the "beings" on this planet and we begin to remotely fathom God. Ego can "say" whatever it wants, but being is what makes it happen. It's the concommitance of (ego/mind) and being that creates. Mind figures it out, but then must let go, so being (purity) can manifest. Being is manifesting from the Void that which it chooses.
So, what is this "being" business? God is pure being...and we can create from our being...
What are we really saying? I have no more idea of what being is than... the Man in the Moon (I'm told there is one and looks that way to me, although it's mostly an artifact of the Sea of Tranquility :).
The good news is I share it with God, we are co-creators in that regard.
We just don't have a way to deal with it and we should admit that. You shall know the truth and truth shall set you free... We don't even have the capacity to imagine who or what God is or what being is... If we go back further in your dialogue, God doesn't even know Himself, He is revealing through us... how would we have the capacity to know it much less comprehend it? That's why it is so important to live a life that you consider worth living; then you will see your being, God will see your being because it is of the Light...if you uncover it from ego. We can't define it, we can only show it, and lip service won't do, because it is of the heart... and that's the truth of the matter... As we go deeper and deeper into abstraction we become more removed from the ultimate answer, or more appropriately the satisfying answer. As I said before, we can use the "Net" to bring us closer to God or separate us from God. It's that easy and that black & white. It's simply, as in all things, a matter of choice. You can tell I'm getting older: I tell the truth more often, because it's all I have that can set us all free. Sometimes it hurts and sometimes I feel helpless and abandoned, but the truth for me remains and is the key, if only in the moment!
I suppose my frustration is evident. Yet, I have used the Net to uncover my relationship to God through you and our dialogues. I am very thankful for that. I see it all so clearly sometimes. Today was one of those days when I knew everything that was going on. Each rustle of the leaves in the fall wind. I knew it all, loved it all and was overtaken by the sheer beauty of it all. The Void spoke to me, it had nothing and at the same time everything in it. Quite extraordinary. And, all this started from a sense of frustration. The best analogy I can come up with is: it's like we are a fragment of graphite trying to describe a pencil line. The pencil line would be difficult for another piece of graphite to comprehend.
(My friend) Jerry uses the word "attention". What I'm getting is when you have your attention you are in your piece of the Void. When you are paying attention you are "surfing" - negotiating/moving in - the Void.
JSG: "surfing the Void"....! :) I know what you are getting at, I think. As I find myself more and more re-established in the the "nothing" aspect, it all goes so easily....what can possibly oppose the lack of any concrete properties...ego, whatever..."Not I, but the Father in me" indeed...
What I know so far is: attention is that which when I have it I know it. You see I'm cutting out all the "ideas" about how things "are" because the ideas are only based on other ideas, so it's a house of cards that may not get you anywhere. Whereas what I know for sure, I know. Then, you can have all the ideas you want about what I know, but the bottom line is I know it. It's not a supposition. It's based on knowledge that relates to the Void, is the best way I can describe it. My name is one thing that I know for sure, as well as my address and my kids and wife's name. What I am saying I am saying with that certainty, that authenticity. So does God care about my address? No, I do. At least in this life and if I'm going to play the game of life, I like knowing my address. Lets take it closer to home. What about who I "be". Does God care? No. I do, if I'm going to play the game of life. I see that as the issue in life. We are afraid to know who we are, we are afraid to know our address. Some of those that do, you know their names, some are presidents and rock stars and.... princesses and kings and great sportsmen. I can tell you this exactly...
On this planet if you know exactly what you want (and I mean know it, not think it, not imagine it, not suppose it, not "it's kinda like it", but fully know it as in the Void) it materializes instantly. Until you get to knowing it exactly, you can whistle in the wind. How do you know when you know it from the Void? It materializes instantly at that point.
JSG: And, strangely, this manifestation happens just on the turn from complete "knowing" of it to complete detachment from it...it becomes nothing, and so do you, and of course Nature, abhorring a Void, is obligated to fill it...paradoxically, with the manifestation created by the absence of its selfsame progenitor: paradox-in-action.
I am reminded of St. Anselm's famous defintion of God, which Rene Descartes used as the basis of his proof of the existence of God: God is "that than which no greater than can be conceived" and in the spirit of this stream of thought, we could posit that "that than which no greater can be conceived", finally, must be either everything...or nothing, which are the same.
So all of this relates to being... which I can't define... attention... which I can't define and knowing... which I can't define. My point is we have a lot of conversations that are based on things we truly do not have a handle on. It's frustrating, but moving to the other side it is satisfying also. Why should we have a handle on it? There's an easy rule to live by... stay focussed on the Light, when things are heavy look at the flip side... Light and easy.