The Agnostic's Path to God

"Life, like a many-colored dome of glass, stains the white radiance of eternity." ~Percy 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

Shelley claimed to be an atheist, though he is one of my favorite spiritual poets. Buddhism is often described as an agnostic religion: a religion that does not depend on dogma or belief.

Agnosticism is a path to God proceeding through doubt. An agnostic's question may be a deeper prayer than a believer's certainty.

There are remarkable similarities between the agnostic's path and the path of negation found in Indian and Christian mysticism. Vedanta calls this path, Neti Neti, "not this, not that." Christian mystics call it the Via Negativa, "the negative way." For example, Meister Eckhart declares, "O God, quit me of God!" To find true God, Eckhart rejected every intellectual concept of a "God." Likewise the medieval Christian classic, Cloud of Unknowing, teaches us to go beyond all knowledge, and to enter by means of "un-knowing" the pure silence beyond intellect. "Un-knowing" is the very meaning of "agnostic."

In the Via Negativa, God is neither an object nor a belief, not even a thought. For thoughts are but "graven images" made of mind instead of silver and gold. Transcending every name and form, the contemplative discovers that God is absolutely no-thing. Mute attention comes to rest in vast silence, the silence of unalloyed awareness naked of thought, image and word. Yet when fully embraced, this boundless negative awareness suddenly reverses its essence, revealing the infinite Yes beneath all no's. Self-luminous Being floods awareness, no longer over-shadowed by intellectual concepts. In Eckhart's words, "The Eye through which I see God is the Eye through which God sees me." It is when we behold no-thing that we see with the Eye of God.

Thus too the agnostic arrives at pure spiritual insight: distinguishing awareness from thoughts and beliefs. God is not an image fabricated by thinking: God is the clarity of the very space where thinking arises and dissolves.

In Buddhism, this conscious space prior to any image that it might contain, is called "Bodhichitta." In Christian mysticism, it is the "luminous darkness of the Godhead." In the lovely phrase of the King James Bible, it is called "the peace that passeth all understanding." For who could possibly hold the infinite in a finite concept? Truth comes not by knowing what God is, but un-knowing what God is not.

The ground of eternal Being is there from the beginning in the depths of the agnostic's soul, prompting the very questions which lead to this shattering of belief, the graceful and blessed catastrophe of enlightenment.