A Buddhist Looks at the Arguments for the Existence of God

© Kenneth Ireland, March 28, 2024

Back to Lenten Practice

Wednesday Feb 14, – Thursday Mar 28, 2024

It has been years since I even noticed Lent, but this year, I prepared myself for the central mystery of the Christian faith. I had been writing about my relationship with Cardinal Avery Dulles, a remarkable man from whom I learned an enormous amount, whom I loved and, as a quirk of fate, happened to be a famous and well-regarded, even revered figure in both the Jesuit order and the official Catholic hierarchy. For several years, while I was a Jesuit, he was my spiritual advisor, and informally held that role for the rest of his life. He was disappointed when I stepped away from the more orthodox expressions of the Christian faith, but he was never harsh or judgmental. He always treated me as a friend and was extremely generous. I am very grateful for our friendship.

Several Jesuits and former Jesuits have been authorized to teach Zen, but I am not in that elite group. I was in the Jesuits for a decade, and when I left, I turned my back. In total honesty, I indulged hostility towards the institutional church like so many gay men of my generation. When I gave myself wholeheartedly to Zen, I discovered traces of Ignatian prejudice in my practice. Uncovering what was not apparent to me has taken years of careful work. My feet were so planted in either camp that I couldn’t distinguish any separation. I became known in my sangha as a Jesuit Buddhist. 

I hit on another sentence to describe my project, “A Buddhist looks at arguments for the existence of God, and a former Jesuit weighs these arguments in the Zendo.” It became important for me to specify that part of my argument had been colored by meditation practice. 

In the few weeks till Easter, I certainly can’t settle any argument about the existence of God, but following the age-old Lenten practice of penance and purification, I hope to clear away some of the underbrush obscuring these old questions, at least for me. 

When I write, I consciously try not to allow academic rules and conventions to hamper me. I know that this can be what we used to call the occasion for sin, but I also don't owe allegiance to any religious authority, and the days of the burning at the stake are over. Although I will try to be as balanced as any aspiring bodhisattva can be, I know that I have a definite point of view, which I will state as clearly as I can and then, like a good Jesuit scholastic and Zen student, try to refute my own argument. I take this work seriously, but I will also have as much fun as possible.

Capitalizing God as an honorific carries many linguistic nuances and preferences. I would prefer to separate us from our preconceptions and not treat God in the preferential way that the capitalization “God” might imply, but I’ve decided to follow the linguistic convention of capitalizing God. I intend it to be neither theist nor atheist, and not derogatory, just neutral. When referring specifically to YHWH, Jehovah, or the Father in the translations of the Jesus gospels as they come to us, I use the honorific “God.’ I may not always be consistent.

And finally, my conclusions surprised me, though I cannot claim to have satisfactorily resolved any of the issues I tackled.

A Jesuit theologian with the papal imprimatur asks me about God's existence.

During our last meeting, Avery Dulles said to me, "I hear that Buddhists haven’t settled the God question.” Of course, he knew the answer: most Buddhist schools are non-theistic; they do not usually entertain the question of divinity, neither affirming nor denying a supreme deity, certainly not in the same way that Christians do. But in Catholic dogmatic theology, statements about the nature of divinity are the coin of the realm. For Avery, the existence of a Godhead, a personal deity, was central, along with expressing or “confessing” assent to its existence.

That afternoon, despite our friendship, or perhaps because of it, I felt Avery was trying to pry an answer out of me that would undermine my Buddhist beliefs. His tone was friendly, loving, even playful, not in any way disapproving or forceful, but he was serious. He was trying to push me towards a more traditional faith because, for him—and for most serious Christians—assent to the existence of God, saying “I believe,” is key to salvation. I couldn’t respond that I still believed in God because, honestly, I was leaning more towards the agnostic end of the spectrum, an answer that would surely have disappointed him. My love for the man overrode any other considerations. 

Avery was a Jesuit through and through, and I might have countered with an invitation to inquiry, but I didn’t have the skill to turn a rhetorical or speculative question into an opening. I didn’t know how my friend would take it, perhaps almost as blasphemy, although my real fear was that he would have just made fun of the question—and me.

We might have waded into the tricky currents of sweeping, generalized truth statements that leave one floundering on rocky shores, or, to return to my speculative ruminations about placing my bet on the right pony, the kind of restrictive notions that Jesuits liked to argue about with Pascal and the Jansenists. Avery would have enjoyed that: this essay honors our friendship.

“Something rather than Nothing” 

First, let’s look at the question itself. “Why is there something as opposed to nothing?” is a religious question, or at least religions worldwide have appropriated it. Any preacher worth their salt will warn you to think about what happens after death. They call up an ontological fear and create an answer to the question: what persists after our experience ends?  

That question seems based on raw emotion, so it’s not scientific or philosophical. It might be psychological, even then, you have to lay down some parameters. I’m going to leave it for another time. My characterization won’t win me many converts among my religious friends who have been trained in the traditional seminary rendition of Saint Thomas Aquinas’s theology. Some of them even call it  “the Big Question,’ encompassing belief and unbelief, who we are, where we are in the universe, and how we got here. Our answers are expected to have the clarity of a clarion bell, dispelling our doubts and clearing the path to salvation. Proponents and believers claim it demands an answer.

The question itself is a canard, or in French slang, a hoax. To clarify the possible answers, let’s give it the hair-splitting it warrants before we begin. The question is designed to introduce the question of God into ordinary discourse and ultimately leads us down a rabbit hole. It is formulated to skew the answer. Any answer is, at best, an assessment of probability rather than a true statement. My former Jesuit philosopher teacher, Ed MacKinnon, argues that the proposition is a statement that can be held by reasonable people rather than a proof as in science or mathematics. (Why is There Something? Edward MacKinnon, Philosophia 51 (2):835-855 (2023). I disagree.

If, for example, we follow Piaget and examine how a child learns about the world, among his or her first questions might be, “What is that?” pointing to Fido. Then he or she might ask, “Can I pet Fido?” “Why did Fido bite me?” or “Is Fido hungry?” but certainly not “Why is Fido there?” You usually don’t get to that before post-grad philosophy and debating Kant’s idea of denotation or Gilbert Ryle’s “Fido-Fido fallacy,” which he and Wittgenstein label “primitive word magic." (Meaning, Use and Rules of Use, Raziel Abelson. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.) In our case, Fido becomes “something with identified meanings vaguely about God,” much like the neo-Platonists who identified the deities of Mount Olympus with ideas and virtues to pass the muster of logic. I am not saying that such questions are out of order, but that they need much more explanation and definition before we are allowed to label “Something” as ontologically real and demand justification for its existence.

Is the question “Why is there something?” even a good question? 

Because I am going first, I will lay out my objections.

Begin with the concept of negation. The question posits “not-Nothing.” However, in this sense, nothing may just be “not everything that presents itself to our minds,” as an extrapolation or inference, not a definition. 

The double negative serves no purpose in the argument other than to get God in the door. “Something rather than nothing” is not even ordinary language. The way we speak in ordinary language does not include the inherent claim that we cannot know “something is something” unless we posit its negation. We are not obliged to imagine a world in which “what is so” is not. That is absurd. 

Joanie Mitchell teaches us, "You don’t know what you got till it's gone.” What do we get when we take away something? Her answer is “a parking lot.” To be clear, her answer to the question is “What’s left, or what did we replace it with?” and not what is this thing (state or condition) that you are naming “Not-a-parking-lot?” 

Ms. Mitchell uses a rhetorical strategy to affirm our knowledge (and appreciation), not an ontological definition of nothingness. Following Aristotle, Aquinas posits an orderly universe governed by natural law in which man has his place to know and serve God. In return, he is promised cash and prizes (which he may or may not receive, which is another problem to which he will return later). At this point, it is enough to say that It is also possible and legitimate in this universe to take away any promised benefits. That is variously called estrangement, hell, or sin. Aquinas knows all this through faith, not reason or empirical observation, though Aquinas does claim that there is no contradiction between faith and reason. When Darwin, Einstein, and Heisenberg et al. blew the supporting physics all to hell, modern schoolmen filled in the blanks with whatever cosmological ideas they fancied, but again, I would point to the neo-Platonists filling their empty blanks with virtue and form when they kicked out Zeus and his buddies. Sleight of hand. Bunk. That’s a technical term.

When Bill Clinton was asked in his famous deposition before Congress if there was a sexual relationship between him and Monica Lewinsky, he initially said there "is" no sexual relationship (US News & World Report, Ronald Brownstein and Kenneth T. Walsh). He went on, “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is. If the — if he — if ‘is’ means is and never has been, that is not — that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement.” Some commentators said this was his pitch to the Talmudic scholars among his judges. I contend that he just needed to get himself out of a hot pickle. Theists using the word “something” as an ontological bridge between science and faith are not much better than Clinton parsing the verb "to be” concerning sex. I don’t need a Rabbi to point to the duplicity because that is why we are parsing the verb “to be.” There has to be nothing out there, or we’d find ourselves in a hot pickle.

Let’s return to little Freddy or Frederica, who learned that Fido is called a dog. Hopefully, they also learned practical ways to avoid being bitten by Fido. They include feeding, training, learning to gauge Fido’s moods, and how to get him into his dog house if needed. But the question remains: how do we get from there to “Why do we have Fido rather than not-Fido?” 

How did this become a religious question, and why is it essential to get the correct answer? I will ask the Buddhist before I ask Aquinas, though I might use him as my reference point when I describe the hot mess that his religionists get us into. I am going to characterize four arguments for the existence of God. I intend to hold them as an object of meditation in a Buddhist way, but as I write them, I find myself trying to demystify them. They each have become almost a caricature of our culture’s way of thinking through these questions.

Instead of proving or disproving that God exists, I propose a more modest goal: to examine the claim that God exists. This avoids what seems impossible — to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a supernatural being has control and power in the universe, and whose existence or essential being makes the workings of the universe possible. It also sets philosophy on a more solid footing (in my view) — to use the tools that are available to human beings and evaluate various claims solely to determine whether or not they are possible or reasonable, and secondarily, that these beliefs provide us with some guidance about living our lives in a fully human way that is ethical and loving. Based on our understanding of human history on Earth, these questions and their proposed solutions have been debated. That is all we can say with certainty.

On a personal note. I have spent several hours a day for the past six weeks thoroughly reviewing and examining as many of these arguments or claims as possible. My emphasis has been mainly on the scholastic proofs following the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas that Catholic seminarians have studied since the Council of Trent. In addition to reviewing my intellectual history, I also searched for new work that has been done since I was at Boston College almost 60 years ago. But I was also trying to honor the question proposed by my friend and mentor Avery Dulles before he died: how might Buddhists settle the question about God? I will be 80 in a few months. I have spent far more time in meditation halls than in seminary, which has influenced my views.

Clockwork Orange, or shooting marbles on the Lyceum’s almost perfectly level floor 

Let’s tackle “The Unmoved Mover.” It purports to be the most universal of the arguments, or at least the TV Bishop Robert Barron would have us believe so; it is allegedly the most palatable that believers put forth to their enlightened naturalistic colleagues because it is based on a particular analysis by Aristotle, which also gave rise to the scientific method through his understanding of causality. Its religious formulation might be broadly called “Deistic.” 

Those who claim to follow Aristotelia over the 2400-year crooked path to our discussion talk about the existence of God as the “Unmoved Mover” or the “Uncaused Cause.” However, for each of the five contingency arguments that St. Thomas takes from Aristotle, there are two prongs: observation and logic, the moving parts, and the moving mental parts. One is locked down by observing the world as it is, and the other is abstracted from those observations, with hypotheses or checking questions.

Using the instruments of scientific observation, we can measure speed, distance, force, resistance, gravity, sound waves, etc., all of which seem to give the Thomists a comforting certainty that there is an “unmoved cause” at the very beginning. But is that conclusion supported by science? You can “move” from moved to unmoved using carefully constructed experiments, scientific instruments, and observation. However, tracing back to a primordial mover observation seems to uncover more moving parts, going faster and in all directions. I assert that focusing on one single mover is inconsistent with the data and requires a leap of faith.

For the moment, let’s set aside some of the more irksome consequences of conceiving of God as a personal being and merely describe him as a kind of clockmaker who has set the universe in motion according to a set of observable and predictable physical laws. Thomas Jefferson, a man of the Enlightenment, gave this advice to his nephew Peter Carr in 1787: "Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear." God and reason are synonymous, or God him/her/itself is reasonable. This is a distinction that I am going to have to sit with.

If God sets the universe in motion and allows reason, even divine reason, to dictate or at least guide its workings, does this guarantee that justice, love, and benevolence will prevail?  We no longer need to believe in a revealed God to be a good person, but can we point to the intricacy of the mechanism and say that God exists? But how do you find the benevolence of our universe being swallowed up in a black hole or the 700 species of Ornithoscelida, dinosaurs extinguished by an asteroid that veered off course 65 million years ago? The burden of that proof rests on the Deist. Mr. Jefferson.

Jefferson held a deep conviction in “The Laws of Nature and Nature's God.” We should also examine the proposition that such laws exist without blindfolded fear. In Deist thought there is a hierarchy to the things that God condones or encourages. We know that God exists because of the good order we see in nature. Nature, being revealed as science, allows us to understand the order of the universe. The science of the Enlightenment was based on the unfolding principles of the scientific revolution. 

Driving south on Highway 280 from San Francisco, I cross over the Stanford Linear Accelerator, a huge isolated tubular structure over two miles long that passes under the highway near Sandhill Road. Since 1966, the SLAC has been conducting experiments using isolated electrons traveling at speeds beyond my powers of imagination. Beyond that crude description, I don’t understand much, but I do know that scientists at Stanford won the Nobel Prize for developing a facility that allows us to decipher the actual activity of particle physics. This is centuries and worlds away from Aristotle’s Physics, which I envision being the careful study of the action of marbles on the (as level as possible) floor of the Lyceum from which Aristotle and his students began to measure mass, movement, distance and time which led to his geocentric model of movement in the universe. But rather than fault Aristotle for failing to grasp that our earth was not the focal point for movement in the Universe, I am astonished that his school was able to decipher so much given their primitive instruments of observation and measurement. 

Centuries later, these crude experiments would lead to both Newton’s Apple, Thomas Aquinas’s cosmological proofs for the existence of God, and after the Council of Trent, most Catholic priests were taught in seminary that the Universe was created ex nihilo by a Being who set the world in motion. The question remains: has it been shown that there was an urge or force at the beginning that initiated the inevitable, linked causal incidents we observe?

Hiking into the Source

What happens when a meditator searches for the Unmover or the Source of all of it? In the hours of silent meditation, within our inner world, we might imagine that we have traced many thoughts, feelings, and stories to their source. You’d think the search for an Unmoved Mover would be a cakewalk.

Late one Fall fifteen years ago, I sat in a week-long retreat up along the Klamath River in a small cluster of vacation cabins with Jon Joseph Roshi. For one of our afternoon meditations, Jon asked a long-time practitioner to lead us up into a cavern where he had done some photography. He was a spry old bird, perhaps having a decade on me but moving with the grace of a man many years younger.

That afternoon, we were to follow one of the several small gushing mountain streams that fed the Klamath. The walls of the ravine were steep. Though the rains were not torrential, it was very wet. We were to climb in silence, practicing walking meditation, kinhin, as best we could. It was a challenging, narrow path; the small, fast-moving stream dropped off sharply to the north. I had to concentrate more on where I was stepping than on my exhalation. I needed a stick to stay balanced. The thick green moss covering the stones, the only toehold, was slippery. They were laid out by nature's architect, who’d thrown out the handbook for a comfortable and safe ratio for step and tread. It was proving more difficult than initially advertised. Our spry photographer probably thought it was a stroll in the park. I did not.

Perhaps after a half-hour’s climb, we reached a pool. The combination of boulders tumbling down the ravine, plus beavers or storms felling the tree trunks, closed the remaining gaps and formed an expanse of perhaps 10 meters of still, mirror-like water. The stream seemed too narrow for the salmon run, but I still knew there was life under the mirror that reflected the tall pines with the bright blue that gave them an almost Technicolor background. I could also hear the soft sounds of what were probably small rivulets feeding my source, but had reached some kind of source. It was not the Big Bang beginning; it was not ex nihilo, but it was a beginning.

Buddhists are trained to look for change. We call it impermanence. Even more than karma, change is the one immutable law in the Buddhist Universe.  When I asked my first Buddhist teacher what “Impermanence” meant, he said, “You’re going to die, and along the way, the world is always changing.” When we look for change, for the moment of change, that observation changes our world. When I finally reached the still pool high above the Klamath, which might have been the beginning of something, I felt my racing heart and the quickness of my breath as I became aware of small, almost imperceptible drips between the rocks higher up. This makes pinpointing or even imagining a First Mover hard, if not impossible. It also makes positing an Unmoved Mover so vague that it is meaningless, or at least extremely limiting. I’ll go with vast and holy.

Politically correct Zen is not possible

In the early summer of 2018, there was an incident in the Zendo at Green Gulch Farm. Roshi Ed Brown, during a daylong meditation retreat, said something to offend a person who describes herself as a queer woman and a survivor of sexual violence. The incident appears to have been thoughtless, perhaps with a rough edge, but we mostly know about it through the backlash, which, frankly, seemed disproportionate. There are, or were, tapes of Ed’s talk, but I lack the patience to sift through them to hear precisely what was said. It is essential to remain impartial when assigning blame. Perhaps someone should take the blame (and apparently, Ed did try at some point), but that doesn’t interest me. 

As a person who was sexually assaulted, I was encouraged that another person had found meditation as a source of healing, but I am not surprised that Ed could not heal the wound. Zen has no silver bullet, and Ed is not a therapist. I am also saddened that the woman felt unsafe. I am sympathetic to both parties. What disappoints me is the decision of Zen worthies to ban Ed from teaching at any of the Zen Center’s Temples. He is among the oldest of Suzuki Roshi’s disciples, and his practice has demonstrated selfless dedication to the Way. 

All Zen Centers, like most religions, need to create a congregation, the crowd that will return. It is crucial. Zen is stealthy, and it may take some time to reveal itself, but most administrators of Zen Centers also have to keep an eye on the collection plate. I have been in that unenviable position. Hartford Street was set up as a neighborhood temple that shared the attitudes of its mostly gay neighbors. 

The richest, privileged liberal white clientele in California does not want to be subjected to bathroom gender brawls. The Zennist authorities felt that they had to take a stand. And thus the unenviable task of defining what is politically correct in Zen. I want to be clear. Zendos should be welcoming and safe for human beings facing any of life’s challenges. That has not always been the case, but the way that all the assembled roshis tried to smooth things over in Ed’s case destroyed the immediacy and the power of the moment. Not only did they throw the baby out with the bathwater, they murdered the helpless soul.

I can say with certainty that one of the keys to Zen practice is the student-teacher relationship. It is not an unequal relationship. In fact, the closer it is to equal, the closer to real friendship, and we touch the magic of Zen. It is a listening and response. It is not psychotherapy with the aim of getting better, better adjusted, or happier. Those things may happen, but it ain’t necessarily Zen. It has another overtone, a sacred one. It evades definition. It is not necessarily religious, even though it touches on the numinous. It also includes all of life. And that is where the danger lies.

If I were Ed, perhaps a solution might be to pass out a disclaimer to cover my ass when people entered the hall. (Of course, I have never been invited to speak at ZC, and at least one of the reasons might become clear if you make it to the end.)

“Friends, we have gathered to practice one of the most essential, perhaps the most crucial, even sacred pieces of our work together. We listen and respond, all the while realizing that the perfect dharma is imperfect in our hands. We chant occasionally and make seemingly impossible promises to dedicate our efforts to the liberation of all beings, but then comes a presentation of the dharma. Suppose the leader does his or her job; hopefully, you will be intrigued, inspired, puzzled, or even offended. If you come with a mindset that can only hear what you’d like to hear, it seems that a political rally is where you should be. I am no mind reader. I am not quite sure where my own mind will lead me, but occasionally, with any luck, it will be down a dark alley that needs light. If you’re at least willing to stay with me, sit still, and follow your own mind, you are welcome. If not, it might be appropriate to leave.

“If you are willing, your mind and mine can start to dance, like an introspective call-and-response in the Black Church, allowing us to see ourselves. I say something; you respond. There’s a mysterious formula here like treading the well-known words of "The Old Rugged Cross."

On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross,

the emblem of suffering and shame;

and I love that old cross where the dearest and best

for a world of lost sinners was slain.

Following the script of most Zen Center talks I’ve heard, I might open by telling a personal story and painting a picture of the inadvertent hero of my story, stumbling along through life. Despite my sincere intention, I got distracted; I stumbled, cracked my head, stepped in shit, mindlessly crushed a frog or even a snake, heard a madperson screaming incoherent truth in the center divide on Market Street, thoughtlessly dropped the fiver that was intended for Mother Theresa in the gutter, but I use the occasion to turn my attention inward, examine myself, realize that in this fleeting instant the dharmakaya opened with unmistakable brilliance. I resolve to dive in more deeply, to apply Buddhist principles more generously, plus any number of other worthwhile ways in which I might lessen my suffering and the suffering of others in the world. I am not disparaging any of these aims or outcomes. In a word, they are lovely; it’s very genial. We smile over cookies and tea.

But now we come to the part in my talk where you ask, Why is he saying that? How dare he go there? That tone. That language. We can talk about sex and drugs and rock and roll as long as we use the prescribed politically correct language and (at least pretend) that it’s all in the past. We left those experiences as we emerged from the Summer of Love with a drug hangover that lasted a few weeks, or years if we are honest. Thank god it cleared up. 

Most talks are, at least to some degree, commentary on Buddhist Scripture, sutra, or Koan. And if it gets real, it gets real, but the chances are 50/50 that it might go astray. I recall hearing a public talk by the Dalai Lama when he attempted to bring an esoteric distinction from a Gelugpa text into a bedroom fight between a husband and wife. He was not successful, but not because of the bedroom part. He turned it into an Ozzie and Harriet squabble and avoided a serious discussion about sexuality and the inequality of power and consent. He opened the door, but then didn't walk through. He played it for the laugh. Ed Brown’s accuser would have little to complain about. 

I promise that if I am lucky enough to open a door, I will try to walk in. I certainly will not shy away due to some prudery or elevated sense of myself. That is the attitude I try to bring to the conversations I have with my teacher. 

Now, just to be clear, my mother taught me well, and I reserve profanity for private moments. I will also try to frame what I say in a way that you are at least open to listening. I certainly will not encourage you to break the precepts even if I am commenting on the “Kill the Buddha” koan, but neither will I try to explain it away or give an answer I don’t have—certainly not one that you want to believe but is just a pack of lies.

The choir invokes the image of the old rugged cross. It is imaginary. It makes no sense. In our case, the only part that does make sense is that it is an emblem of suffering. Somehow, the hymnist manages to drag love into the picture of sin and shame. I’m sorry, that is the best I can do with it without wandering into a make-believe world of elevated, sacred lies. Sometimes the dharma is like that, rudely breaking into our world with no formal introduction, not making any sense.

It seems hit or miss. Sometimes a teaching will get you to first base, and sometimes the fly ball will be caught and you’re out. But we still honor the dharma. We cannot retreat. It is in the very nature of the dharma. If you can't hear that and are going to feel affronted, please leave. Zen is not politically correct.

A Zen reflection on Yom Kippur

 

For years, I had been hanging onto my resentment towards a person who really did abuse me mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and sexually. Something had to be done.

Then a Zen friend asked a good question: “Is forgiveness an act of will?”

Psychologists define forgiveness as a conscious decision to release feelings of resentment or vengeance toward a person or group who has harmed you, regardless of whether they actually deserve your forgiveness. It's a choice that allows a person to forgive another for an offense or act that was illegal or immoral. It is intentional. When a debt is forgiven, there is a release of any expectation or commitment to repay or compensate. When someone forgives someone, they let go of negative emotions. 

In terms of the law and psychotherapeutic practice, as well as perhaps even the Talmud, these definitions are helpful; however, as a Zen practitioner, I wondered if they went far enough. I’m going to posit forgiveness as a way to move beyond the past, in the sense that the trauma becomes a complete chapter of personal history without any lingering effects in one’s present, everyday life. I’ve set the bar quite high. But it is Yom Kippur today. Forgiveness is an act of God. It is a way to follow God. We all make mistakes. We all need forgiveness.

Some people define forgiveness as a command to forget the past and simply move on. I actually find that injunction extremely annoying. I’ve been told that I didn't have to condone the act, but I had to forgive to live fully and dispel the darkness, or something like that. My instinct tells me that if the past is not fully complete, part of being compassionate is to acknowledge what happened fully, rather than simply setting it aside. 

I also hate being told what’s in my best interest. Thanks for advice I didn’t request. But now that I’ve owned up to my off-the-shelf response, perhaps I can examine why I resist this blanket injunction to forgive. I want to decide when, what, and if to forgive. If the offense or event is not in the past because it’s not in the past, that’s a limit to simply declaring something ancient history. And suppose I’m being enjoined to dispel the darkness of past events that are blatantly evil and destructive. In that case, just dismissing them and their consequences under some command to “move on” is not particularly useful or helpful simply because it’s not honest. These are the sort of events that will inevitably repeat themselves.

My friend Susan Murphy, an insightful Australian Zen teacher, pointed to the story of Jesus at Capernaum when he healed a man whose friends lowered him through the roof of a house where Jesus was with some friends—the crowd so dense that this was the only way to get Jesus’s attention. Some version of the story appears in all three synoptic gospels.

The writers of the story clearly distinguish between two aspects of Jesus' healing. First off, Jesus says, “Your sins are forgiven.” That’s the most important one: the man’s faith and that of his friends have caught the attention of Jesus, and he does what he was sent to do, forgive sins. But it is, after all a teaching story, so there are objections: scribes and Pharisees, at least rhetorically present, ask, ‘How can you forgive? That power belongs only to God.’ And here are the words Jesus responded with in Mark’s gospel: "Why are you thinking these things? Which is easier: to say to the paralytic, 'Your sins are forgiven,' or to say, 'Get up, take your mat and walk'? “ The man stands and picks up his mat, demonstrating Jesus’s power, but it also says, compared to forgiving sins, that was the easy part. In the blink of an eye, the past becomes the past.

Why the deliberate separation of two events or two sides of the same event? Forgiveness is an act of grace and God. In the story, the disappearance of the physical impairment becomes the past. Jesus is neither a charlatan nor a soothsayer nor a fake miracle worker; the act of forgiveness belongs to God alone. However, in most cases, depending on factors we cannot fully understand, there may or may not be a sought-after, usually magical physical cure. However, this nuance is usually left for a commentator or preacher to address at a later date.

This is Susan’s observation: “When Jesus told the paralysed man who had been lowered through the roof for a miracle, ‘Pick up your bed and walk,’ effectively he was acting not in the name of supernatural power but in the name of the forgiveness he was asserting he had a right to bestow. ‘Justice is mine,’ says the Lord. What I see here is that the true miracle was not the performance of a nature-bending act. It was forgiveness. He veered away from performing miracles after that. They were cheapening his teaching. . . . Forgiveness is surely the actualising of love.”

I just let a Zen teacher provide the midrash for a Jesus story, so now I’ll spin a Zen tale from the threads of the Gospel..

A small band of Zen monks carries a paralyzed brother to meet Jesus in Capernaum and get his blessing. Like the throngs of people I see in India lining up for darshan, they’re seeking some relief for their sufferings, but following their training, our Zen monks don’t have too many expectations. There, I’ve set the stage for a Buddhist encounter with Jesus. 

Their Zen training actually adds a lot of work. They have to carry their brother a long way from a distant Eastern ashram. Then they find the materials and tools to fashion a ladder to get up to the roof. They certainly can’t steal one. After determining where Jesus was sitting, they carefully cut an opening in the ceiling, not hurting anyone in the room with falling debris. Each one of these actions is deliberate, requiring planning and effort. The work is performed as carefully and mindfully as possible. They’re monks after all. I didn’t mention that they might also have to learn Aramaic, but there’s already enough to do without that, so let’s throw in the magical appearance of a good interpreter.

Somehow they climb down into the presence of Jesus with the brother they’ve just lowered in a sling, and hear, “Your sins are forgiven.” 

They also hear the Pharisees' question: “Doesn’t forgiveness of sins belong to God?” "Good question," they say, and the dharma combat begins. The Pharisees are the fall guys in the Gospel stories, but not for our Zen monks: What is forgiveness of sins exactly? What is there to forgive? Are a misstep or an evil act the same? These monks live by the Law of dependent origination, Paticca-samuppada. Something in their brother’s past resulted in his paralysis. At least in that regard, on the surface, although Jesus does not talk about any cause for the man’s affliction, there seems to be a tacit acknowledgement that it was the result of something in his past, his sins. In Zen they were taught to chant: “All my ancient twisted karma from beginningless greed, hate, and delusion, born through body, speech, and mind. I now fully avow.” 

I promised therapy. Here is an examination of the mental results of past events.

I recognized my personal connection to this Jesus story, and I thank Susan for providing the context for me to work into. I am the paralytic lowered through the roof. Among my sins were sexual dysfunction and frustration; there was alcohol and substance abuse; there were the silly issues with partners that popped up—when I managed to find someone willing to put up with my defensiveness. I would have certainly preferred to exit the dead-end process earlier. I can imagine the possibility of having time and energy to explore other avenues, but daydreams are most often nothing more than dreams.

And yes, I regret those lost opportunities. It is not difficult to be truly forgiving and compassionate when you really comprehend the pain of your own life. But expanding the story just a bit, it also applies to another person’s life. It seems to actually spring up naturally without effort or responding to a command to move on. And, in my case, it happened in its own course after I was willing to do the work of unraveling the complex story of my abuse.

Why do intelligent people believe nonsense? Because when we’re vulnerable and in pain, we need to experience compassion. The real answer to the question about "moving on" is that the compassion and forgiveness had to be for myself. And because I’ve opted for the Zen route, it was not like just falling through a hole in the roof or being lowered into a Blessed Presence. I traveled from afar with the help of companions, and I remained angry long enough to get to the heart of the matter. That was my good luck, at least for me, that route could not be short-circuited.

The hip New Age coffee house sage will tell you that not forgiving only hurts you. There’s no one to break but yourself, so why not “Move On”? By contrast, in legendary Zen, a deceptively ordinary lady at the tea stand doesn’t order you around. Instead, she asks a simple, innocent-sounding, straightforward question: “Hey, Mr. Paralytic, is that ‘not-walking-mind’ past, present, or future?” A good answer might allow you to step into the radical present. The past is past because it’s past; the future might exist in hopes and dreams, perhaps sadly colored with regret; the only place to walk into is this moment.

If there was a tea stand in Capernaum, you can bet that there were crowds like the ones surrounding Jesus. Zen is oftentimes a lonely practice, but maybe a few stragglers found their way there after Jesus had performed enough miracles for one day. They might be lucky enough to come armed with some good questions. That might take some work, work that’s still to be done, like finding a path to forgiveness.

In Zen, forgiveness is an act of will if you refuse to settle for an easy way out. Then the Blessed Presence thing just happens. That cannot be willed.

For Jon Logan, John Piane, Eddie Logan, Lilly Logan, and their families. In deep gratitude.

It's More than a Taboo Against Knowing Ones Self

The world is not as it appears to be.

How much can we really know when it comes to the difficult task of knowing ourselves?

In most spiritual practices, there is a notion that the world we see and experience is an illusion. It is called māyā in both Hindu and Buddhist world views, a blindness that prevents humans from having a complete experience of life. The word māyā in Sanskrit points to a mental condition of pretense or deceit that’s a hindrance on the path to realization. Its Hindu roots also carry some notion of magic that the gods use to create illusion unless they are appeased. In Buddhist and Hindu theology, samsara indicates the perpetual cycle of enslavement to birth and death and the pain of being caught up in the grip of illusion. Samsara simply means “world” in Sanskrit, but has been extrapolated out to include an endless cycle of birth and rebirth, spelling out continuous suffering.

The monotheistic religious traditions attribute our alienation from God and ourselves as the result of sin. In Christianity, particularly after Augustine, Eve's sin in the Garden of Eden, and Adam’s complicity, cursed all mankind to Original Sin until the sacrifice of Jesus. While any broad statement is, of course, misleading, it is enough here to point to the role of sin and alienation from God that traps us in misfortune’s clutches.

Religious and spiritual teachings have proposed various ways of digging ourselves out of this hole. Christianity and other monotheistic traditions advocate “conversion,” repentance, prayer, and good works; Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism veer towards the meditation/introspection end of the spectrum, coupled with an analysis of the condition itself. 

Gurdjieff (I mention him because he is the subject of other posts on Buddha, S.J.), as well as various disciplines that have emerged more recently, attempt this analysis in the more neutral terms of being asleep. Gurdjieff said, "Man is immersed in dreams... He lives in sleep… He is a machine. He cannot stop the flow of his thoughts, he cannot control his imagination, his emotions, his attention... He does not see the real world. The real world is hidden from him by the wall of imagination." 

These characterizations are simplistic and miss a lot of nuance, a fault for which I will be criticized, including by my inner critic, but my purpose is to point out the predicament, not necessarily to argue the merits of any particular solution. 

A conundrum

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”― George Orwell

Why can’t we know the entire universe as it is? I will briefly outline three distinct ways that humans know (or imagine they know) the world: first, the gold standard, measurable data, and the instruments that humans have developed over time to explore, record and verify our knowledge; second, information that we “get” in conversation with other men and women about events in our lives, either in present time or from our history; and third, the information that comes to us from memoires, dreams and self-examination, as in therapy, and more broadly from what we might call the numinous sphere of our experience.

On December 25, 2021, the Webb Space Telescope was launched into space. Fourteen days, eight hours, eleven minutes, and three seconds later, after full deployment, when I logged into the NASA site, I was able to see the first images transmitted from the deep reaches of space. It required a 10 billion dollar, highly engineered instrument rotating at 1.5 million miles from Earth to expand the scope of our universe. My vision was extended by 13.5 billion light-years, allowing me to observe galaxies that formed only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. 

Closer to home, remove the scientific device, and I am limited by the range of my hearing — sound waves landing on my eardrums and my brain recognizing their origin and source. I had the experience of sitting in the same room with a friend when she began talking about a car coming up on the road, but I hadn’t even heard its tires on the stony path. I had to wait to experience their rumble, but I trusted my friend and, because the driver was a person we both loved, we also had a story that we could talk about in the future.

I don’t know all the dimensions of what I refer to as “myself.” As an adult at 81, I still don't realize how all the emotional, physical, and spiritual trauma (or joy, but trauma has a tricky way of hiding because we tend to avoid pain) of years past affects me now. If I were completely aware, I would not have been stunned last week by that “ah ha” moment that shed light on some personal behaviors that have been troubling me for years. I’m calling this knowledge domain subjective as it relies on information about our reactions to past events that we store in our brains, or more broadly, our somatic systems.

I have sketched out the concepts of observation, recognition, and remembering or retrieval, with an emphasis on their limitations. Again, I accuse myself of gross over-simplification, but for the purposes of describing our conundrum: When I acknowledge the extent of my blindness, do I simply feel frustrated or unfulfilled in some existential sense, or do I undertake the practice of observing myself? Let me explore some of the ramifications of the philosophical argument behind my dilemma to see what, if anything, holds water, makes sense by congruity, and where there are holes in the bucket.

 

The first part of this argument I would like to examine is that, as humans, our perception of the universe is limited; however, we believe that the information at our disposal provides a complete representation of the world as it is. Even if we admit that the world is not as it appears, we imagine that with investigation, we can discern more accurate information and, like a sleuth, uncover the culprit and save ourselves. This is simply hubris.

Self-observation is at least partially what the language points to: we investigate ourselves. But there are limits to any claims about the reliability of our human experience. What part of the “self” comes into play is not altogether clear, but this much is true: it is “subjective.” How do we examine the data? Is it real? Can it be verified? Is it useful for understanding past personal events as well as predicting the results of present and future actions?

Common sense demands — correctly, I think — that I can only believe what’s in front of my nose is indeed what’s in front of my nose if and only if I limit what I assert about the way I see my world to what’s actually under my nose. I know the immediate world I directly perceive. Unless I can verify it, all the rest is an assumption. Suppose I allow my mind to stray into the world of made-up stories, half-remembered or repressed memories, heavenly illusions, or sexual fantasy. In that case, I can no longer legitimately assert that I am seeing the world as it is. I want to believe that I can be as stone-cold sober as a hanging judge, whether or not I really can wield judgments best left to God. I will convince myself that I won’t stray into the forbidden territory of false opinions or prejudice by taking the moral high ground, but in fact, I am deluded into believing that the world I see is objectively real. A small portion of what I see can be reliably verified by measurable data, but in fact, most is almost entirely subjective, buttressed with the few agreements that I’ve managed to wrestle into my corner from family and lovers, political allies, or friends from church. Yet we claim that common sense provides a reliable indicator of the validity of our varied experience.

Some would argue more strongly that common sense doesn't just advise, as in “take aspirin if you’re feeling a bit woozy.” Normative logic prescribes limits for my world, drawing boundaries for the experiences I can assert are true and can reasonably trust. The process of expanding my world requires another level of investigation. I am obliged to account for the way I want to see the world. This demands that I undertake a careful, critical examination of subjective factors, from yearning and dissatisfaction to remembering with Proust the smell of my mother’s cookies, the elation of catching my first fly ball, or the humiliation of being punched in the nose by the class bully. 

This simple observation may point us in the right direction. We begin to see and understand the mechanisms of the apparatus of our perceptions, the thoughts, feelings, sensations, visual perceptions, and the registration of this experience in our memories. Our worldview is very limited unless we are willing to admit other factors, including, for example, our conversations with other people, our reading of history, and, most importantly, empirical scientific evidence, which, along with an understanding of the instruments of observation (including both physical science and psychology), allows us to test and verify our assumptions. This is also common sense.

However, I don’t want to let my argument devolve into complete solipsism. Surmising that what’s in front of my nose is also what’s in front of my friend’s nose is possible only if I have an agreement with my friend that he or she describes what’s in front of his or her nose with similar identifiable characteristics, mass, color, along with the collection of data from my other sensations, within a range of probable predictors. This will include an agreement to use a common descriptive language. Digging through this complex web of linguistic and psychological machinations tests the limits of human intelligence, but it does seem to be a worthwhile project. It can lead to freedom, but it can also verge on the preposterous.

I have drawn this picture as extensively as I could to describe a gap in our understanding. We neglect what we know empirically both in the way we conduct our lives and in what we allow ourselves to believe. We would like to believe that our understanding can get us out of trouble, and when it doesn’t, we look elsewhere to fill in the gap.

The Lacunae. The Unknown is simply unknown. The rest is just shit we make up. Enter the Guru!

There’s a natural lacuna in our experience where we don’t have reliable information. In my view, it is unknown because it is unknowable. We as humans do not have access to the data required, or our physical bodies and minds simply do not have the capacity to experience or know what remains hidden. There is no ontological reason; there are no secrets. 

It’s a normal human instinct to seek certainty. We all want peace of mind, but because we are afraid, or lazy, or greedy, or insecure, or arrogant, this creates an opening for the guru’s stealthy entrance. This ignorance becomes the playground for superstition, magic, wizards (sorry, Harry Potter), myth, and deception. Any appeal to a supernatural or unseen world that uses our inability to know creates a loophole and opens a vast playground for all kinds of mischief, from the taboo against walking under a ladder to believing your daily horoscope, supplied, of course, for a fee.

Even after we’ve observed and accepted that we as human beings have a limited range of perception due to physiological constraints, the limited capacity of our sense organs, as well as the neuro-physiology of our brains, our mind plays a trick; we tend to forget and set this aside, but we still experience dissatisfaction: we don’t get all the things we think we want or imagine we need. Plus, there are psychological consequences that come from the firing and misfiring of synapses that distribute endorphins to our pleasure centers. It makes no difference whether or not these actions and reactions are random or follow some predictable pattern; we experience an imbalance coupled with limited data to account for it. Voilá, from chemistry set to ontological predicament!

As a matter of fact, our suffering always seems to get the upper hand. When our unhappiness or dissatisfaction reaches a tipping point, we reach out for an answer, even if it means grasping for straws. Enter the person, book, practice, or belief system with an answer. It doesn't even have to be a good answer. Searching for answers to existential questions can require suspension of belief; perhaps the answer imposes an alternative set of beliefs and demands submission to its authority. In some sense, it operates like a narcotic or psychological addiction — the high it produces needs to be repeated for it to be effective. 

Over many centuries, our answers have taken the form of tribal ritual. In the small village where I live, when I’m in northern India, I rented the first floor of a lovely new building; my flat had been designed and built by a trained architect; the rent was relatively high. A good friend rented a smaller room on the ground floor, but there was a problem with the ventilation and the sewage. It really felt unsanitary. It had been built on the cheap by a local carpenter. Complaints got no results. Tempers flared. My friend left; there were bad feelings all around. The Nepali woman who owned the property called on a village priest to solve a problem. I saw with my own eyes the bloody sacrifice of a young goat to create favorable circumstances for increased guest house revenue ― and sanitary plumbing. My solution would have been to hire a competent plumber, but my owner opted to pay a witch doctor for the magic of animal sacrifice. 

At another end of the spectrum, Bob Hoffman, the psychic tailor and inventor of a process psychic therapy recommended by Claudio Naranjo, sits in a Berkeley coffee bar, gazes off into space; he delivers a prediction or confirmation about a life choice or personal problem, allegedly from his spiritual guide, Dr. Fisher. I can hear the certainty in the psychic’s tone of voice when he divines the root of your predicament and says, “Doors will open.” The door actually remains shut until we see for ourselves what is posing as an answer. Snake oil doesn’t even loosen the hinges.

I still haven’t really answered my own question about knowing ourselves. I’ve just pointed out some of the false claims. Knowing that there are limits to what we can know doesn’t invalidate what direct experience teaches us or weaken those experiences. It simply rejects their infallibility. I can be satisfied with my own experience. In the words of Jack Kerouac, “One day I will find the right words, ... then it sounds; you just can't fail when you get into the rhythm of the dance.” 

Note: I would like to acknowledge Geshe-la Kelsang Wangmo’s course on Dignaga, which was taught at the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics, McLeod Ganj, HP, India, during the Spring semester of 2014.