Hi Dudley,
I feel your question touches on the central point I feel called to explore in this blog.
Here are the facts on the ground as I’ve come to understand them. I am here. My life is filled with many experiences, many joyful, many sad, some terrible, indeed. While often bittersweet, sometimes bitter, I find life is nonetheless, lovely. And, I know that this all ends. I’m in no rush, but I know my death will come, eventually. No doubt.
Out of this bubbling knowing I find my whole body asks why and for what purpose do I have, as Mary Oliver calls it, “this one wild and precious life?”
I’ve found people sell all sorts of nostrums to address these questions. Some say actually we don’t die. The variations on this assertion include those who claim there are secrets, or not so secret ways, all I have to do is buy their product or service, and my body will live forever. (Please forgive the harsh tone, but I feel it important to be particularly emphatic here…) Others say my real self is not my body at all, and if I buy their product or service my soul will live forever. Many variations on the theme out there, many. Some are cons, plain and simple. Others are sincere, indeed heart achingly sincere. (Hence my regret for the negative emphasis I put into this paragraph) But the bottom line is I’ve never encountered a claim of immortality that stood up to close examination.
The facts on the ground as I encounter them seem profoundly otherwise than are presented by those who would live forever. I look around and it is pretty obvious my body cannot live forever. Actually, nothing does. I mean even stars die. As to a soul-as-separate from my body, if there is some part of me that isn’t completely caught up with my physicality I can’t find it. (And, I promise, I’ve looked hard at this…) Everything I experience is best explained, and simply enough explained to be very hard to ignore, through natural means. Metaphorically speaking, what you see is what you get.
As it says in the Diamond Sutra life is “a star at dawn, a bubble in a stream; a flash of lightening in a summer cloud, a flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.”
But this does not mean, for me, that what might best be called the spiritual quest is a dead end. Actually my experience is quite the contrary. Throughout history any number of people have said things that strike me as having meaning in regard to these great questions and have informed my path. They include Gautama Siddhartha, Qoheleth, Nagarjuna, the author of the book of Job, Laotzu, Chuangtzu, Meister Eckhardt, John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Huineng, Wumen, Dogen, Hakuin. A handful of others…
At the beginning of his seminal study Buddhism Without Beliefs Stephen Batchelor gives two quotations. I find they neatly summarize the issues.
The first is from the novelist Marcel Proust. “We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness, which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.”
I find religion is a map for that journey, tattered and with some false marks here and there, but nonetheless a genuine map to wisdom.
(A quick aside on religion: I believe the worst of religion, as with the rest of our lives, comes through what I have to call “reification,” a term with several meanings, but by which I mean taking that which is passing for that which is permanent. This is a human inclination, it seems. But religions, at their worst, seem more than other institutions to enshrine what really seems to me to be the fundamental conceptual error of human consciousness. Historically, only one religion seems to address this. The Buddhist doctrines of anicca and anatta are well worth considering in this context, if with another warning. These concepts themselves must, I find, must be engaged cautiously. It appears the closer any concept is to what might be called “truth,” the greater the danger of reification…)
This noticed, if we avoid the trap and don’t let the spirit become so many dead letters, don’t if you will turn verbs into nouns (and it does appear we and everything in this universe are all actually verbs), then the many spiritual traditions begin to sing of the way. Maybe, I suspect, all of them, if sometimes only through that glass, darkly, point to our possibility. It really seems within all religions there are voices calling to a depth that I find my heart resonates with, and which engages my mind, and compels me forward on the quest.
Here I find that second quote at the beginning of Batchelor’s book particularly helpful. It is what is revealed as I’ve journeyed along this way.
It comes from the medieval Chinese koan anthology, the Blue Cliff Record. “Emperor Wu of Liang asked the great master Bodhidharma, “What is the highest meaning of the holy truth?” Bodhidharma siad, “Empty, without holiness.” The emperor said, “Who is facing me?” Bodhidharma replied, “I don’t know.”
Our journey is to that cloud of unknowing.
To that god beyond god.
To not knowing.
This is not simply a call to humility, although it includes humility. Rather, it is a call to our true home. I believe.
I find the context of liberal religion the best place to explore this way. For me. Liberal religion embraces a broad tolerance, a provisional acceptance of many truth claims, and a belief that attention will sort it out. For me while spiritual liberalism occurs in just about every religion (of Western faiths I think particularly of the Episcopal Church, the Hicksite Quakers and Reconstructionist Judaism) the principal expression of this spiritual liberalism, I feel, is found within Unitarian Universalism.
That said, in answer to your specific question, Dudley, no I don’t consider liberal and agnostic as synonyms. Liberal is broad and tolerant, it creates a context for deep inquiry. As a spiritual community it is the place to raise a family, a healthful place we can gather together and make the world and ourselves a little better.
Agnostic, more or less starting with its original use when coined by Thomas Huxley, as an engaged not knowing, is the method of wisdom. I believe this not knowing is the way itself…
Only don’t know.
Which is found when one applies the principle: don’t believe anything you think. Here is the deep agnosticism which I’ve been coming back to over and over of late.
That’s the deep agnosticism I find in at least aspects of contemporary spiritual writers like Stephen Batchelor, Ranier Maria Rilke, Don Cupitt, Mary Oliver, Shunryu Suzuki, John Tarrant, Susan Murphy, Ken Jones, Barry Magid, Diane Rizzetto, Ezra Bada, Elizabeth Hamilton, Susan Blackmore. And a handful of others.
Who throw me back into the journey of mind, without clinging to anything in particular.
Perhaps this is all best expressed through the Zen tradition. I know of all the spiritual disciplines it has been Zen that has most helped me. The practices, zazen and koan introspection, lots of zazen and koan introspection; and the literature have shown me the way. One famous anecdote particularly captures the heart of all this. I’ve addressed it before, and no doubt, will again. It is recorded as case twenty in the great koan anthology, the Book of Serenity, recorded here with my own running commentary…
Fayen and some companions were caught in a snowstorm and took refuge at Dizang Monastery where the abbot, Luohan Guichen asked Fayen, “What is your journey?” In a Zen context always a dangerous question. How are you doing? Becomes the stuff of life and death. Fayen replied, “Going around on pilgrimage.” Not a bad answer, but not sparkling, either. Dizang, abbots are often known by the name of their temple, pushed a bit further, inquiring, “What do you expect from pilgrimage?” Then Fayen gave the simplest of answers. “I don’t know.” The time was ripe, what in Christian theology is sometimes called kairos, the time of fulfillment. Dizang didn’t even need to pluck the fruit, it was so ripe. Instead he simply blew on it, gently, saying “Not knowing is most intimate.”
And Fayen understood.
I hope this is helpful.
James
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