God? what God?

I recently received a thoughtful questionnaire from a university student engaged in invaluable research for her thesis on Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction and Theravada Buddhism. Her thesis comes at a time when “mindfulness” has become a buzz word in the field of mental health. The questionnaire included such questions as:

How Close do you feel to God?

I was offered four options.
Extremely close
Somewhat close
Not very close
I don’t believe in God.
Other questions included:
Have you had an experience that has convinced you that God exists?
Indicate whether you agree or disagree with this statement: God dwells within you.”
Have you had an experience of God’s energy or presence?

The questionnaire asked if my meditation experiences

a. strengthened my belief in God,
b. did not strengthen
c. convince me of God’s existence.

All very valid questions and the questionnaire had suggested that ‘people have many different images and definitions of God’. So she wisely advised those that she sent the questionnaire to use our own image and definition of God.
After reading through the questionnaire, it left me wondering whether belief in God or disbelief revealed only a personal response, or reaction, to the word “God.” Is the word God and all the associated theistic standpoints a form of metaphysics, an abstract concept with no basis in reality.
I have examined 12 typical definitions of the word “God” and all of them seem to have such shortcomings that it leaves me, and possibly others, with a sense of dissatisfaction around this tendency of humans to feel devotion to a God.

1. GOD THE CREATOR. I remember seeing a piece of graffiti in London. It read: “God hasn’t forgotten the world. But He’s now working on less ambitious projects.” If God created the world, then all responsibility for the state and the fate of the world rests in God. If not all, then what does God take responsibility for and what do we take responsibility for. Perhaps we have to concentrate on forgiving God for what He permits to happen in His creation.

2. GOD AS FIRST CAUSE. If the world arose out of the First Cause, then the world would be the same as the First Cause. If the world arose totally different from First Cause, we would all be moving further and further away in time from God yet helplessly tied in to God. A belief in God as First Cause dismisses the Dharma wisdom that reveals multiple conditions and dependent arising circumstances bring about all events, including the arising of the world If God is the First Cause and created the world in seven days around 10,000 years ago (an article of belief for a billion people or more on this Earth) then all scientific evidence and the noble research of thoughtful people must be ruthlessly discounted.

3. GOD IS LOVE. If God is Love then why does this God permit the appalling levels of suffering on all sentient beings – the young and the old, the innocent and the guilty, the believers and the non-believers? The intensity of despair, depression, sickness, torture and terror reveal a God who shows a pathological indifference to what is happening on this Earth or merely an occasional dispensation of His love to a few for unfathomable reasons.

4. GOD IS ALL POWERFUL or a HIGHER POWER. God appears powerless to stop infliction of destruction upon the Earth – wars, earthquakes, Tsunamis, famine, hurricanes, AIDS, volcanoes, epidemics, forest fires and other nightmares heaped upon sentient beings and the Earth itself.

5. GOD IS ETERNAL and PERMANENT. We dwell in the circumstances of various dependently arising and passing conditions unable to pinpoint anything whatsoever as permanent in time. Such a concept of God as Eternal means that the word God must stand in relationship to something that we can perceive in every single moment that never changes to become something else different from what it was. We are unable to pinpoint something Permanent.

6. GOD IS BEING or PRESENCE. Some advocate that there is only Being or Presence. There is absolutely no past and there is no future. If this is reality then we are all frozen in Being, trapped in the power of the Now. There would be no release, no escape if we did not wish to abide in Being. It is inappropriate to make a metaphysic out of Being since what has come to be emerges from numerous causes and conditions. This ontological view rejects action and results of action as an illusion.

7. GOD IS ABSOLUTE TRUTH. It is rather a meaningless term, often used to impose a point of view on another (s), or to proclaim a religious dogma. Absolute Truth is another metaphysic. If there is Absolute Truth then surely it has to be defined or explained, otherwise God is merely words invested with intensity.

8. GOD IS ENERGY. If God is energy, then all worship, devotion, love and prayer is utterly pointless. What is the point of a reverential attitude towards a cold, indifferent, unfeeling and unchanging Energy?

9. GOD IS CONSCIOUSNESS or PURE AWARENESS. If Consciousness exists or Pure Awareness exists independently of everything else, and everything else is subject to impermanence, then Consciousness has to exist before and after everything else. Who makes such a claim? Who can show Consciousness independent of phenomena? Is the ego simply ascertaining claims for itself as Consciousness, as the True Self? Or does the ego claim No Self while using the language of “I” and “you” in daily life. Is consciousness also subject to causes and conditions like everything else? Is liberation to be identified with consciousness?

10. GOD IS ONENESS. To fix God as Oneness renders pointless the arena of change, impermanence, inner work, development, evolution and becoming. Absolute Oneness is yet another claim upon reality. If there is an ultimate experience of Oneness then it renders meaningless differences, diversity and variations in the nature. If we experience Oneness with everybody and everything, we eliminate all differences of view. If change is claimed as only one part of Oneness, then what are the other parts of Oneness?

11. GOD IS INTELLIGENT DESIGN. It seems highly questionable to consider God as Intelligent Design when we live in a state of daily vulnerability through uncontrollable forces in the nature and people lives. Is it intelligent design to place us in a world demanding that we believe in God based exclusively upon a certain religious book or Saviour that the majority of people in the world know nothing about - or simply do not concern themselves about.

12. GOD IS INEXPLICABLE. This is often used as the last refuge for those who wish to hold onto “God.” If God is personal what does God do when there are devout prayers being said at the expense of others – such as soldiers on one side and soldiers on the other side of an impending battle. If God is impersonal, then God doesn’t care about all the prayers, observances, chanting, hymns and acts of devotion in His name. If God is Inexplicable, then there is no point in any reflection or meditation on an Inexplicable God.

In the Canki Discourse of the Middle Length Discourses, the Buddha shows scant regard for belief in God or for chanting and hymns that were compiled and sustained for generations. Such a tradition is like a file of blind men with one following blindly after the other. “Something may be fully accepted out of faith, yet it may be empty hollow and false” said the Buddha.

The Buddha commented that trying to reach God is like making a staircase to an imaginary mansion that the seeker neither knows nor sees, or a man standing on one side of the river invoking through prayers, hymns and chanting the other side of the river to come over or a man who desires a beautiful woman that he has never seen nor knows anything about.

In the same discourse, Bharadvaja asks the Buddha. “In what way is there the discovery of truth?”

The Buddha said that one investigates into states of mind such as greed, hate and delusion – in other words whatever state of mind the self feeds on. He said the Dharma is “profound, hard to see and hard to understand, peaceful and sublime, unattainable by mere reasoning, subtle, to be experienced by the wise.” The Buddha said that there is a ‘final arrival at truth’ through listening to the dharma, reflection, zeal and scrutiny until one ‘realises with the body the ultimate truth and sees it by penetrating it with wisdom.’

I wrote a short e-mail to the student apologising that I could not be of much help with her questions and the other experiential questions around mindfulness and meditation on a scale of 1-6 - adding that she had a valuable to task to examine mindfulness.