The God Paradox


OK, so let me just start with a disclaimer here. I'm not professing or trying to convince anyone of anything and I fully respect everyone's right to freedom of thought.

I'm just sharing my own experience 馃槉

The paradox is that I don't understand God unless it's through Buddhism, a non-theistic religion.

Buddhism is not concerned with the existence or not of God. The main point of Buddhism is to be a practitioner of presence, understanding, compassion, kindness and joy. And it is through the practice of presence, understanding, compassion, kindness and joy that God has become available and understandable to me.

So it's a question of pragmatism. First do and experience in the flesh and then clarity will follow.

My Buddhist teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, wrote this book:


He says that the "Kingdom of God" is the present moment, and that we don't have to die before we can appreciate it. This kind of message I understand. 

The Kingdom of God is all around us, we can see it if we're here, but not if we're lost inside our heads, and this is what the practice of meditation teaches us to do - to be here, so that we can see, experience and appreciate the Kingdom of God.

Look around.

Stilling our thoughts we can see it.

It's in the sky when we look up, it's in the fresh air that touches our skin as we breathe, in the trees that keep us company and provide so much for us, it's in birds, in the most delicate of flowers, in water and in sunshine. It's light - as in, opposed to darkness as well as to weight - it's calmness and spaciousness and it's freedom. Freedom from suffering caused by ignorance and craving - please see my post on the 4 Noble Truths. The Kingdom of God is a miracle. A miracle available to each and every one of us.

What about you, how do you integrate God into your experience of Life?




Comments

  1. Unknown12 February 2017 at 15:45

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  2. Unknown12 February 2017 at 15:49

    Hi Tanya ! Thank you for this interesting post about God or the Power of Life in the Universe. To me it is the same but with different words and words are not important in this respect. I notice that with the advancement of scientific knowledge, the idea that we humans have of God, changes continuously in a parallel form. That shows that that idea is a mere projection of us. With the discovery of the hard-to-conceive size of the Universe, we humans only can wonder how many planets and forms of life there surely exist in it ! In our time, in contrast to the time when the Bible was written, we can think that God or the Power of Life in the Universe could well not need our species. When we, according to the Bible, were expelled from Paradise, God was still close to us, as if He or She was waiting for our species to overcome the mistake of having eaten from the Tree of Good and Evil. Now we could well disappear without any problem, feeling that God could not even notice our disappearance. This is an enormous change in our view of God or the Universe and it is surely more in accordance with our present knowledge.
    On the other hand, as physics and Buddhism agree (and other religions too), all is interconnected as if all our macrocosmos and microcosmos were one single organism and any change in any part of it would have a consequence in the totality. Therefore our disappearance would have consequences in the Cosmos but not as central as we could have imagined several centuries before. It is our responsibility to keep this planet, our home, in good state and respect all kinds of life in it, including mineral life. The Universe is alive and if we do not respect it, we shall disappear and become replaced by other forms of Life.

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  3. Teacher Tanya Meyer13 February 2017 at 10:29

    Thanks, Antonio :-)
    I see you've already clicked "like" on the message from the Dalai Lama today, in which he says that "limiting our concern to our own nation alone" (a direct jab at the new US President, I'd say) "is out of date".
    What's interesting - fascinating - is that the 4 Noble Truths should remain intact 2500 years later. What vision, what clarity, what depth!

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  4. Unknown13 February 2017 at 18:02

    馃尶馃尫馃尶

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