beyond belief

“Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.”
William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy


Meditation: “Meditation is like floating on the meniscus between sky and water, between heaven and earth, between spirit and flesh, between knowing and believing.”


Via Transformativa

believe bɪˈliːv

verb – accept that (something) is true, especially without proof. Oxford English Dictionary

One of the unexpected casualties of the UK referendum on British exit of the EU or ‘Brexit’ was truth itself. Prominent ‘Leave’ campaigners unapologetically misled voters with the trumped up claim that the £350m weekly EU budget would be redirected to the NHS if Britain left the EU. 52% of the British electorate believed the lie and won the day to Leave. The day after the result the claim was removed from the Leave campaign website and one of its most prominent mouthpieces, Nigel Farage, the then leader of the UK Independence Party, disowned it on TV. Who believes a politician?

It is not only political careerists who are not trusted. In a populist anti-intellectual tide sweeping western democracies it is fashionable to trash anyone who is presented as an ‘expert’. We no longer put any store in the pronouncements of pollsters, academics and economists. “People in this country have had enough of experts” was how Michael Gove, one of the leading figures in the campaign to leave the European Union, infamously responded to warnings against Brexit from economists.

It is not only in the secular world that the currency of belief has been devalued. In his 2016 book Brian McClaren calls for a spiritual migration from a system of beliefs to a way of life. “What we need is not simply a new set of beliefs but a new way of believing.” He is not suggesting having a belief is wrong (unless, presumably, it is the ‘wrong’ belief which for him is everything else except Christian) but he is suggesting if we use our system of beliefs as our primary way of gatekeeping those who are “in” or “out” of our exclusive club called the ….. (insert name of religious group here) we are missing the true meaning of believing in Jesus as the way into the Kingdom. “Belief systems perform practical survival and political functions that are completely independent of the truth of their component beliefs.”

So when the evangelical (or the atheist come to that matter) asks “what do you believe in?” it is not a theological question more a sociological question. Are you one of us?

This way of believing you might call dogma and it appeals to the mind. There is a different way of believing which appeals to something beyond mind which you might call spirit. When Nicodemus came to Jesus under cover of darkness he wanted to keep his options open. When Bob Hope was asked why he did benefit gigs for all religions he said he didn’t want to ruin his chances of eternity on a technicality. Nicodemus was a leader of the Jews but felt attracted by this radical rabbi. If Jesus had a direct route to God he wanted some of it. He used flattery to draw him out but Jesus cut through his double mindedness. “Unless one is born anew he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

Nicodemus took him literally at mind level. Jesus challenged him to go beyond earthly things if he was to enter the kingdom of heaven. It required a response beyond belief in earthly understanding. “Whoever believes in the Son of Man may have eternal life.” A belief beyond belief.

Jesus was not asking Nicodemus to accept a new belief system to upgrade his old belief system … Judaism 2.0. He was inviting Nicodemus to accept that He was the fulfilment of the law and the prophets and that He and the Father were one. To ‘know’ this is not so much mind’s assent to dogma. Rather a spiritual ‘ascent to the cave of the heart’ as French Benedictine mystic Henri le Saux titled his journal.

“I searched for God among the Christians and on the Cross and therein I found Him not. Finally, I looked into my own heart and there I saw Him; He was nowhere else.” Rumi

neti neti

“Once you label me you negate me.”
Søren Kierkegaard


Meditation:

“The more you abandon all images, all words, all imaginings and the more you allow the silence to overwhelm you … the more powerful you become.”


Via Negativa

My favourite guru in the annual spiritual supermarket sweeps in Tiruvanamalai in Tamil Nadu every December and January was a dreadlocked Jamaican kindly bear of a man from Brixton called Mooji.

I chose to spend most of my seven weeks in Tiru attending his ‘satsangs’ – open meetings in a rice mill including a five day silent retreat.

One of the little exercises he set us was to walk about town observing everything but resisting the temptation to label anything … ‘tuck-tuck’, ‘cow’, ‘chapati’ … but rather seeing things for what they are. As soon as you name anything you negate its true essence – a bit like the collapse of the wave function in quantum physics when an object is observed. It was playing hide and seek with you until the very moment you observed it when it crystallises into the familiar object you give a name. Names are useful but merely socially conducted concepts or taxonomies to help us impress a matrix of meaning on an otherwise chaotic sense-world.

In every mystic tradition there is a form of meditation called apophatic – from the Greek ἀπόφασις from ἀπόφημι – apophēmi, “to deny” – which takes as its starting point the fact that God is not what you can say about him. “We do not know what God is. God Himself does not know what He is because He is not anything. Literally God is not, because He transcends being.” John Scot Erigena (9th century)

In India this is called ‘neti neti’ which is a Sanskrit expression which means “not this, not this”, or “neither this, nor that”. You arrive at a closer affinity with God by a process of taking away. In the Christian mystic tradition this is called the Via Negativa. Try observing without naming; reducing everything to its ‘isness’ which is God.

“The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.” Luke 17:21