Vile Atheist
Loud and Obnoxious
So has anyone figured out who God is yet?
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Who is God?
- Thread starter enchanted_one1975
- Start date
godnotgod
Thou art That
"I am" comes out of the eternal Present Moment, where there is no beginning and no end, no first and no last, no history and therefore no remembrance of things past.
"I am" means always being.
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Vile Atheist
Loud and Obnoxious
I was.
godnotgod
Thou art That
We speak of the mind as if it were real, but the mind itself is only a concept. It is a self-created principle. The ordinary thinking mind which is forever grasping is always wanting to "know", to accumulate knowledge, to encapsulate reality into convenient bite sized chunks for easy digestion. But in reality, it is an illusion. Outside of that, we speak of the non-conceptual mind, universal mind, etc, but mind itself is no-thing. Rather than talk about the non-conceptual mind knowing nothing, let us speak about direct seeing into the true nature of reality, where no mind is the condition. In other words, there is no mind which sees; there is only seeing itself.
*****
Following is some information I had posted on another forum which should shed some light on the subject:
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Ray Grigg in "The Tao of Zen" offers some insight into the nature of nothingness: [edited]:
The extension of emptiness is nothingness, the condition of total negation; the no-concept of no-concept. It is emptiness at its most allowing..... Whereas emptiness is relative, nothingness is absolute, a notion that cannot be conceived and does not have a conceivable counterpart... nothingness is not remotely conceptual because it can be juxtaposed only with everything, with the finite. Nothingness and everything become the same experience as they conceptually disappear in opposite directions into the one absolute. This absolute is like the unsayable, inexplicable, unknowable Way that manifests itself only in the particular.
Nothingness is not conceptually approachable. It is not intended to be. It is not a place; it is not even an idea. It is a device, a condition of mind that engenders insight. It is the distance that provides perspective to every thought. Like emptiness gives context to fullness, nothingness gives context to awareness. Awakening, therefore, is not a condition of absolute negation, it is a relationship between the opposite absolutes of what is and what is not, between everything and nothing.
Since nothingness is absolute emptiness, it causes absolute filling.
This nothingness, which is also not-nothingness, is the common foundation of Taoism and Zen. Any effort to describe it is invariably wrong; any effort to remain silent is also wrong. The two options that are available--explanation and silence--are extremes that do not include the space between.
"Not this, not that;
not both, not neither."
Contradictions are not resolved; they are accepted and embraced. This is the only possible response to what is and what is not.
These irresolvable juxtapositions in Taoism and Zen produce a creative tension that seems to move toward a resolution that never arrives. Every conceivable intellectual, gymnastic effort only succeeds in making the problem more subtle and the resolution more elusive. The intellectual dilemma then widens and deepens to become an emotional one until this one problem becomes all consuming. Possibilities offer promise, but impossibilities block options. The situation demands effort but thwarts trying. Frustration increases. Tension builds until a breaking point is reached. Then, spontaneously, a letting-go happens. Everything collapses, softens, becomes airy and light. And the problem falls away and disappears.
The first and most difficult step in reaching nothingness, the crucial phase, is reaching this point of crisis that demands a total surrender to the overwhelming complexity of understanding. Profound confusion is the beginning of this opening process that ends in filling. Such opening is conditional on uncertainty*. Therefore, every certainty becomes a warning against pronouncements, against anticipation, against knowing. In the words of Zen:
"The most dangerous thing in the world is to think you understand something"
After awareness has been transformed by nothingness, everything is the same as before except that the old is now fresh, alive, and meaningfully ordered**. When everything is the same but not the same, how can this new and ancient sense of beginning be conveyed to others? All effort to describe it seems like wasted platitudes:
"To know that there is nothing to know, and to grieve that it is so difficult to communicate this 'nothing to know' to others - this is the life of Zen, this is the deepest thing in the world."
*****
*"No doubt, no enlightenment; great doubt, great enlightenment"
**"First there is a mountain;
then there is no mountain;
then there is."
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godnotgod
Thou art That
Maybe not. What if all that we call "something", even the physically tangible universe, is nothing more than a very well-crafted illusion? Then we might see the connection between nothingness and "somethingness", and how, for example, we can get a universe out of nothing.
I refer you to the following website which may provide you with some illuminating information about the idea of the universe as an apparition; as "maya". The gist of the position astronomer John Dobson takes is encapsulated in the following statement:
"....the Universe is the Absolute seen through the screen of time, space, and causation (kala, desha, nimitta).....time, space, and causation are like the glass through which the Absolute is seen, and when It is seen on the lower side, It appears as the Universe. So not only is the Universe apparitional, it's the Absolute seen through time and space, and that allows us to understand why the physics of the Universe takes the form that we see."
John Dobson of The Sidewalk Astronomers
*"[FONT=Arial,Helvetica]Enlightenment is finding that there is nothing to find. Enlightenment is to come to know that there is nowhere to go. Enlightenment is the understanding that this is all, that this is perfect, that this is it. Enlightenment is not an achievement, it is an understanding that there is nothing to achieve, nowhere to go. You are already there -- you have never been away. You cannot be away from there. God has never been missed. Maybe you have forgotten, that's all. Maybe you have fallen asleep, that's all. Maybe you have gotten lost in many, many dreams, that's all -- but you are there. God is your very being.[/FONT]"
Osho
godnotgod
Thou art That
We need to prove that nothingness can exist independently of anything/something else that is the challange.
Aren't you beginning from the assumption that it does? Could it be, instead, that Nothingness completely infuses Everything that is Something, and vice-versa, like dye dissolved in water? That when you look into the nature of Something, you see Nothing, and vice-versa? Taken together in this manner, we have a relative yin-yang relationship. As a whole, we have Absolute Nothingness, and Absolute Oneness.
Any final or absolute proof may only be possible from a purely experiential state.
There is no urgency, no mandate, for proof. Do we need the proof first, or the experience?
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Thief
Rogue Theologian
I would agree...time does not exist....it is a mental construct.
But the ability for God to say..."I am" cannot be diminished.
And His presence is not universal.
Hence the atheist argument.....show Him to me.....
"I am alpha and omega...."
If His servants use such terms.....what do 'you' think 'you' are doing?
godnotgod
Thou art That
What makes you think that God is Something Special and Exclusive?
"I Am" is actually a statement of universality as well as immediate presence. It is to say that one is awake and connected to the Source that emerges in this Present Moment, [as an orange is connected to the orange tree]. Why do you suppose it is not possible for any conscious being to awaken to this reality, the universal reality that infuses all existence, and to state with absolute certainty: " I Am"? You must come to realize that what so many of us consider to be Something Special is not so Special after all; it is none other than our true way of being from one moment to the next, and that way of being is The Ordinary, and it is this Ordinary State of Being, this "I AM", that is common and universal to everyone and everything. If this were not the case, Yeshua would never have revealed to the common man that "the kingdom of God is within you". In this sense, he was saying the same thing as Buddha did: that the gifts of the Incarnation are not exclusive just to the historical Jesus, but that all sentient beings have access to it. What we fail to realize is that these gifts were given even before we were aware of them. It is like the baby fish born into the sea; he never notices that the sea was there to begin with because he was born into it. And so, we think that we are lacking something, that we are separated from something, and that we must go on some quest in order to find it, when, in fact, we have it all along, or rather, "It" has us.
"Before Enlightenment, sweeping the floor;
after Enlightenment, sweeping the floor."
"Before you become Enlightened, it is Something Special;
after you become Enlightened, it is Nothing Special."
Godnotgod,
This is a new thought and quite profound. Thank you for your detailed replies above!
Kind regards
Onkarah.
godnotgod
Thou art That
Not sure. The way I understood the first statement is that the Miraculous and the Ordinary [Buddha-Mind and ordinary mind] are one and the same, while the second says that the description of something is not the actual thing being described, in short, "the description is not the described", ala Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
and....
"I chop wood and carry water.
How miraculous!"
However, the two statements do seem to overlap in that, in finally saying that "mountains are just mountains", one recognizes the ordinariness of the miraculous.
"Before I began my study of Zen, mountains were just mountains, and trees were just trees.
During my study of Zen, mountains were no longer mountains, and trees no longer trees.
When I became Enlightened, mountains were once again mountains, and trees once again trees."
Unknown source
also:
"The river flows tranquilly on, and the flowers are red"
Essentially saying that everything is as it was before, except we now see reality as it is, rather than how we conceptualized/intellectualized it to be.
See here:
Ox-Herding
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Query: Where does this come from? I ask as the holiest men in my tradition were supposedly woodchoppers and water-carriers. Miraculous in that there is no trees or water in the desert!!!
Thief
Rogue Theologian
godnotgod
Thou art That
The version of the poem most often quoted is from the Zen tradition, but not sure exactly where in Zen:
"Before Enlightenment, chop wood and carry water;
after Enlightenment, chop wood and carry water."
The version I had quoted:
"I chop wood and carry water.
How miraculous!"
....I remember as having read from a Taoist source.
If this represents a connection from Buddhism to Judaism, it is possible that Buddhist monks, perhaps traveling along the Silk Road, brought their teachings with them where they sprouted, especially in Mystical Judaism; the Nazorean Essene cult of Mt. Carmel, where Yeshua is reputed to have learned and taught, and from which original Christianity is said to have broken from, and in Kabbalism, another mystical Jewish cult where you will find Zen-like meditation techniques still being taught.
godnotgod
Thou art That
If that is true, then God is totally dependent for his uniqueness upon the un-unique. Otherwise, how would you know he was unique?
Does that then make the un-unique the creator of the unique?
You make the distinction between the creator and the created, thereby creating a separation between them from the get-go.
I thought the whole point of religious endeavor was to realize one's union with the divine essence. You know. Kinda like the union between an orange and the orange tree out of which it grows.
Are you sure we are not grown rather than having been created, "created" in the sense that an artisan creates a pot, or a woodcarver creates a puppet, thereby rendering us as artifacts?
The Infinite is subject to neither alpha nor omega.
It is for this reason that It is called the Infinite.
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godnotgod
Thou art That
Yes! I suppose I was being a bit anal in doing so.
The other version is Donovan's song:
"First there is a mountain,
then there is no mountain,
then there is."
Great! I'll have a look-see.