The word Being explains nothing, but nor does God. Being, however, has the advantage that it is an open concept. It does not reduce the infinite invisible to a finite entity. It is impossible to form a mental image of it. Nobody can claim exclusive possession of Being. It is your very essence, and it is immediately accessible to you as the feeling of your own presence, the realization I am that is prior to I am this or I am that. So it is only a small step from the word Being to the experience of Being.
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now
We humans still have much of our tribal ancestry hanging around: we tend to feel lost and unsafe unless we can identify as part of something larger than ourselves. When I was a teenager it might be whether you were a mod or a rocker; some identify strongly with others of their own race; very often it is a religious identification, sometimes zoomed-in to which actual congregation or meeting one belongs to, or which particular doctrinal flavour one adheres to.
These affiliations are tremendously sticky, in terms of social psychology, which perhaps explains in part why people find it so difficult to distance themselves from cults, however pernicious. They don’t only consist in feeling warm fuzzies for those just like us; they all too often involve feeling anything but warm fuzziness for those who are different – “othering” them. They provide us with a secure identity, with protection against those suspicious others, with a home and a community.
All such communities have badges. They may be visual (as with the mods and rockers) or audible (shibboleths); they may be emotional or conceptual, but they work. (Even those whose practice is dedicated to the realisation of the illusory nature of the self can unthinkingly fall into tribal identification – the vipassana lot, or the Pure Land ones, Sōtō Zen or Rinzai.) Tragically, these identifications can even be projected onto a deity or a metaphysical conceit, and then we really are in trouble: “My God is the only true God; yours is a heretical invention!”
Words are sometimes at the very heart of these identifications, and we don’t realise it. I recall a conversation over lunch with a friend some months ago, where I was trying to explain why I wasn’t comfortable any longer using the word “God”. I said that for me the word gave entirely the wrong impression if used of the metaphysical ground. “God” implied for me a being, so that one could say, “Look – there’s God, over there at the table by the door!” But she is a Catholic; of course she uses “God” to define a finite entity, even if the Catechism of the Catholic Church says he is a mystery (CCC 230).
Eckhart Tolle uses the word Being to speak of the metaphysical ground, just as Meister Eckhart used Istigkeit, or Paul Tillich “Ground of Being”. Some avoid using any term to refer to the ground: things exist, they say, what more do we need? But at the end of it all, is isness. I have to call it something, even if it is ineffable.
Am I trying to avoid identification altogether? Why? I admit that since childhood I’ve never been all that comfortable with being a part of something, especially a something, like a religion or a political party, that requires right attitudes, right speaking, right thinking as well as right (moral) action. However close I feel to so much Buddhist teaching, and no matter how immense the gratitude and respect I feel for so many Buddhist teachers, I am not a Buddhist. The same applies to Taoism, contemplative Christianity, or any other community of practice. After all these years perhaps I am just happier out on the borderlines, in the saltmarshes of the spirit.
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