Where is God? they wonder.
“Is God in nature?”
It is there but not in it. Tibetan mystic Longchenpa said samsara (our reality) is like an echo. You can make out lots of things just by looking and listening. But what you see and hear are just echoes. They have no real substance.
“Is God in a holy book?”
Yes, perhaps, if you read between the lines. Or better yet, don’t read the lines.
“But the idea of God is so necessary. It’s like a rock I can hide behind.”
I understand. But is it really a rock when it is made up of a big pile of words?
“These things that I feel but cannot see or hear. This feeling I have in my chest for… I don’t know what for, only that it is so much bigger than me. Why can’t I call it God?”
Because as soon as you call it God, it points to precisely not what you meant to convey.
“This confuses me.”
There is nothing, no words or concepts, that can capture those indescribable feelings you have.
“So, there is no God?”
Any effort to name it only reeks of our own arrogance.
“What are we then?”
In the great impenetrable unknown, we are ants.
“What do you call this world of ours?”
All we can say is that there is something beyond words, something indescribable because we can occasionally feel it. Is that not enough?
“Wouldn’t it be awfully quiet to be unable to say something?”
When you have spent six hours climbing a mountain, what do you do when you reach the summit? You stand still and gaze. What else?
When you wake up, and reality immaculately resumes around you, do you not stay still and gaze?
When you look into your wife’s (or husband’s) eyes on a sunny day and see reflections of bright light… so much like an angel…
When you are about to die and let go of your body and mind, you, likewise, stay still and gaze.
Of course, the greatest thing you can gaze at is what you cannot see.
A demon finds himself on top of a train that is about to disembark (from a story called The Last Meditation in The Nonchalant Man Between Worlds):
“The other demons asked him: 'You wanted to get on that train, didn’t you? Now what? Are you just going to stand there? Sing, you demon, sing, sing your heart out. Like the prophets of old!'
“The demon reflects: Is this all a dream? If it is, he has no ability to wake up from it. Isn’t the hallmark of reality something that goes on without our being able to interrupt it in any way? Could there be many layers of the mind, and he is, in this particular moment, trapped in one, and because of that, this is, as far as he is concerned, reality?
“Reality is neither permanent nor everlasting. It is unyielding because we are stuck in it. And just as reality is not what it appears, all true roadmaps are necessarily internal. What is projected as the world is but a layer of the mind. It is no place for children or grown-ups with the minds of children.
“So, the world is a flower that grows out of a demon’s mind, he observes. He has started to hum to himself. It is as though, through humming, he is trying to align with the reality all around him―one that is arbitrary, of no lasting value, and should be met with indifference and fortitude.”
Stay still and gaze—at what is within or without.
You can see and feel the magic when you are no longer yearning and hoping.
It’s like when you are in a hopeless situation and cannot see a way out, and suddenly, you feel free. You have run out of words and are just staring at whatever you are staring at.
Absolutely no more words: no words to describe a situation, our state of mind, or our sense of self.
One is relieved when one has hit rock bottom and can fall no further. Do dead ends and hopelessness lead to freedom, like the way one sees colors in pitch black?
And you are gazing. Others are confused by that. What are you doing? they say. What are you looking at? But you are not confused. It is all magnificent. You have started to hum to yourself. It is as though, through humming, you are trying to align with this deep and vast feeling you have inside (like the demon did in the above story)―one that is arbitrary, of no lasting value, but also strangely familiar, like you have done this many times before, like you have been gazing for a thousand years.
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