My Honest, Doubting Mind

[Zachary Lange]

I realized something which took me aback and shook me a bit, but now has filled me with warmth. I thought, for a great period of my life, that I was on a quest for truth because deep within me there was a strong faith. But I have discovered that the central quality of my mind is that it is an unbeliever. On good days this mind is an optimistic agnostic who says, "maybe....". On melancholy days it is a deconstructive mind, reducing all language, humanity and religion to robotic actions, mechanical bleeps and a quicksand relativity of pointlessness. This mind is as honest as it knows how to be. When I let myself finally be in this mind recently (for the first time in my life I faced this core of my self without jumping quickly away into my "faithful" comfort zone) I sat there in it...no more heaven, no more God, no more humanity, just a robot, just an animal...And all these bibles and sermons and priests and high morals were mere tools by which my organism survives.

Then something enormous came into the dark room. It was a speck of illuminated dust, but it was full of light and it asked " Isn't the greatest thing, the miracle of miracles, that in all the chaos and unlikeliness of it all, here I am looking at my mind? And Who is looking at my mind? What is this thing that looks at me from within? It is looking at this honest, doubting mind and loving it. I read recently that our genes do not exist for us, but we exist for our genes...An idea from prominent atheist populariser, Richard Dawkins. But what are these genes? What is it within us that wants to survive? What are these genes doing when they grow a human being and they give it a mind that asks questions that, to paraphrase Kant, "the mind by its very nature can not ignore, but neither can it answer"? That is the source of the human search for truth is it not? So what are these genes doing? Are they building a creature that must live in contradiction to itself? Man made in the image of God... Is the real question why? Or is a better question, "Why not"? Why not? Why not have hope? Why not have peace? Why not have love? Be love....

My intellect, my mind, must exist in a state of doubt, it can not grasp or conceive God.(In truth I don't think I can doubt God's existence any more than I can prove it empirically. I doubt ideals, ideas and conceptions of God as well as formulations of who God is and what God is. For me, every idea of God is a box that is too small to contain the truth, so doubt and faith must rest together in a symbiotic relationship. ) But the mind's most meaningful vocation is to wonder, to be perplexed, to acknowledge its vanity, to glory in its questions and to yield itself, to give place, to the soul. The soul in love, the body of attention beneath the eye of awareness, the intermediate I, the mercurial child of Too Much and Not Enough, Plenty and Poverty, the conduit between seen and unseen, the Womb of Mary, (perhaps even these mysterious genes of ours), desiring to reveal God in the flesh, God in three dimensions, in all dimensions. The work I do in living, attentive to wonder, is this transmutation of the soul. This birth, this conception, this romance, is reality. This is to see what is as it is and be in it as awareness. It is the vision of all who see that God is the love that we feel for each other and that our myriad souls desire to be one as he is one, to unbelieve what is apparent, to see beyond "merely" and "just" and "only".

[Simmy]

Beautiful! What a great insight!!