Imagine Your Body

Imagine your Body. Let your Body imagine you.
Your Body is all you have imagined until now.
Your Soul is the glow of your Body this moment.
What you imagine today is your Body tomorrow.
To imagine anything but your Body is a dream.
To imagine that your Body is any less than a cosmos,
each cell a furnace roaring with delight, each atom
a wild and perfect swirl of sentience
whose center is the womb of suns,
and in the silence at the proton's core,
the infinitesimal pause between the pulse
of quark and anti-quark, this sky,
this vast out-whirling mother of night
who mantles all our hope with stars:
To imagine your Body anything less
is the only Sin.

The Agnostic's Path to God

"Life, like a many-colored dome of glass, stains the white radiance of eternity." (Shelly)

"Thine own consciousness, shining, void, inseparable from the Great Body of Radiance, hath no birth, nor death, and is itself the Immutable White Light of Buddha Amitābha." (Tibetan Book of the Dead)

Agnosticism is a path to God proceeding through doubt.

An agnostic's question may be a deeper prayer than a believer's certainty.

The agnostic follows a path very similar to the path of negation found in Indian and Christian mysticism. Indian philosophy calls this path, "Neti Neti," not this, not that. Christian mystics call it the "Via Negativa," the negative way. For example, Meister Eckhart declaresd "O God, quit me of God!" To find true God, Eckhart rejected every intellectual concept of "God." Likewise, the medieval Christian classic, Cloud of Unknowing, teaches us to go beyond all knowledge and enter, by means of un-knowing, the pure silence beyond intellect. Is un-knowing not the very meaning of "agnostic"?

In the Via Negativa, God is not an object, not a belief, not even a thought. For thoughts too become "graven images". Transcending every name and form, the contemplative discovers that God is absolutely nothing. No-Thing. Mute attention comes to rest in vast silence: the silence of unalloyed awareness, naked of thought, image, word. God is No-Thing! This boundless negative awareness suddenly reverses its polarity, revealing the Yes beneath a myriad no's. Luminous Being floods awareness with its own self-essence, no longer over-shadowed by intellectual concepts. In Eckhart's words, "The Eye through which I see God is the same Eye through which God sees me."

Now the agnostic arrives at the purest spiritual insight: to distinguish thought from awareness. God is not an image fabricated by thinking, but the clarity of this very space in which thinking arises and dissolves. In Buddhism, this pure space of awareness prior to thought is called Bodhichitta. In Christian theology, it is the ground of Being; in the lovely phrase of the King James Bible, the peace that passeth all understanding.

For who could possibly hold the infinite in a finite concept, a graven image of intellect? Truth comes not by knowing what God is, but un-knowing what God is not.

In the agnostic's direct encounter with un-knowing, that which was the background of thinking becomes foreground. The self-effulgence of pure awareness outshines the dim candles of thought.

The ground of eternal Being was always there in the depths of the agnostic soul, prompting the very questions which led to this shattering, this graceful and blessed catastrophe, when the dark casements of the intellect fall away, and we let in clear beams of the original Self, who is the Christ in all.