ELEVEN
THE PROBLEM OF GOD
“Fire! Fire! Not the God of the philosophers, but the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob”
(So scrawled Blaise Pascal at the height of his great mystical experience, one bringing metanoia, that fundamental transformation of mind and heart that changes everything.)
In a splendid essay on “The God of Abraham,” Christopher Bamford notes that the name for Abraham’s God, El Shaddai, translates as “the many-breasted one,” and true to its name is feminine in both its grammatical use and general syntax. That the God of this “Father Abraham” of Hebrew history—from which arose Christianity, two Testaments, and other romances, bringing endless generations of argument and war-fare—was originally a female, and therefore a “goddess,” is surely noteworthy, though generally unknown to Christians.
Creation itself is, however, neither a subject of argument nor grounds for constant warfare, so one invents a male god for that. Which is to say the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, whose sacred fire forever changed our beloved French philosopher Pascal, eventually was replaced with the fire and brimstone figure of Jehovah—plenty of male dominance and warfare there, and a major example of the cultural counterfeits shaping our history and bringing grief.
An Early Cultural Counterfeit
Note that Abraham’s female god with many breasts was obviously able to suckle and nurture an endless number of tribes simultaneously and indiscriminately, as mothers tend to do with their offspring. All were equally El Shaddai’s children. Creator and Mother of Earth, She is our model and fountainhead of creation. She has long been presented in the West, however, through this strange masquerade of a father-creator, one who could not suckle and would hardly have had time to nurture, since roaring into history to whip into line and make that Mother’s offspring toe that line—which is more in keeping with a male-dominator culture, to say the least. How we lost Abraham’s nurturing God(dess) and were left with only this demonic Jehovah and our lament of “feeling like a motherless child,” is an interesting and speculative story, but far too complex to tackle here.
Equally intriguing is a link between the Gods of Abraham and Jesus, arising in references Jesus reportedly made to Abraham, in the native language Jesus spoke. His language would have been, according to scholars, Aramaic, not Hebraic, and surely not Greek (wherein one Paul-the-Apostle makes his Greek-oriented Jehovah top dog in his virtual-religious world, to which Jesus was unfortunately linked by our cultural history).
Anthropologist Mircea Eliade observed that great myths form only around an initial kernel of truly great people—giants of history, not mickey-mouse or limp milquetoast characters. And indeed we find a true giant of history buried beneath those two thousand years of mythological overlay on Jesus, sadly centering around, relating to, and encompassed by the worst aspects of this fire-breathing mythical Jehovah.
In my life I have had any number of vivid and transformative experiences resonant and associated with this romanticized and mythically overlaid Jesus, and I find myself creating romantic overlays of my own, adding to those this magnetic and magnificent figure has attracted down through the ages. This compulsion on our part to romantically-mythically overlay such great figures, generation by generation, shows the power of both mythical overlay and of such great beings.
My own longings, aims, and spiritual ambitions found their greatest impetus and organizing nucleus in that mythical-historical figure. And so for me the reality of Jesus lies within my mind, heart, and personal history with him, and I couldn’t care less about the dead annals of a supposed physical, calendar-dated history culturally agreed on. Nor about a dull theology, which has not yet displayed to me anything near what I have known personally, and felt brimming forth from this incredible historic-mythical figure.
To add a bit to this Jesus overlay, note again that the language he used was apparently Aramaic, not Hebraic. The Aramaic name which Jesus used when referring to creator, creation, life, and growth, was like Abraham’s feminine—and El Shaddai means not only the many-breasted one, but that one on whom we can “lay our head and be restored”— hardly so masculine a title as “Father,” as bestowed by Greek-influenced latecomers on the Jesus scene, such as Paul: this, of course, being the same Paul on whose radically overlaid and distorting Greek version the whole of Christianity rose to power on false wings.
Consider how such a masculine title—father—for the function of creation may have been quite inappropriate to these earlier Aramaic-speaking people, creation and giving birth generally being female functions. To a pragmatic and practical Hebrew, the idea of males giving birth, regardless of to what, to whom, where, or when, was surely an oxymoron, bringing serious cognitive dissonance. Since arguing over the fine points of scripture was (and is still, to some extent) virtually the lifeblood and sinews of the brain for the Jewish culture, scripture was like a whetstone with which they kept their wit and wisdom sharp. As my friend David Tetrault pointed out to me, Hebrew scripture wasn’t necessarily a code of conduct or verbatim history, so much as a way of presenting our ever-present paradox and problem of self to ourselves—a problem over which Jews could argue, as they have for centuries. We might to some extent emulate this tendency, to our advantage.
According to traditional, established and accepted “sayings of Jesus” (published in that final writing of a “New Testament” long after his death), this greatest of great beings is reported to have proposed that “the time has come and now is when one does not worship God on a mountaintop or in a temple, but in spirit and truth.” This rather eliminates churches and political alignments, taxes, armies, and prisons (indicating that this quotation was probably accurate), as well as replacing something substantive, as mountaintop and temple, with a most perplexing abstraction demanding definition and explanation—and a bit of the heart’s intelligence—to be grasped (giving even more authenticity to the reported statement).
This God-as-Spirit has not only a feminine designation, but involves a Darwinian biology through and through. This living body of ours is the only temple wherein that truth can be found, which offers us, however, the key to a genuine cosmology-ontology of creation, if we keep it free from religious-political overlays.
Declaring that God is a Spirit, Jesus referred to this Spirit as a “whole,” a phenomenon that cannot be broken up, or set apart from itself, and further, that it moves as it pleases. Our reifications are idol-making imaginations, where our fancy thinks to influence the phenomenon through our endless litanies of babbling prayer and plea-bargains. These noises simply aren’t heard. There is no one “there” to hear us, since our babbling reflects our incoherent thought-forms spoken, and the Spirit addressed is pure coherence.
Suzanne Segal, in her little book, Collision with the Infinite, gave us a stunning, mind-stopping clue and truth about self, Spirit, and God in her simple statement: “The Vastness doesn’t know anything is wrong.” The Vastness to which she refers is the state of pure coherence, which is resonant with Robert Sardello’s Silence, a state we can become aware of, somewhat, only in our own state of pure coherence—as best we can manage such a near-impossible achievement. All of which is to equate Vastness, Silence, and God as the process-phenomenon behind everything. This process-phenomenon is simply not available to anyone as an object for analyzing or experiencing as a thing, nor is “it” comprehensible to a mind with any trace of incoherence lingering around. All one can do is to experience what such total coherence means by achieving it. Even then one cannot turn and analyze, converse about, or be objective about it, as though it were an object for study.
In regard to our current best-selling titles about prayer, William Blake once noted that “as the plow follows words (the verbal outpouring of the plowman) so God answers prayer”—which is to say, we think we can talk oil and water into happily blending, but language has its limits. Prayer, whether answered by God or random chance, became for a while a popular New Age conference subject, projecting onto Cloud Nine the theatricals of a truly critical issue—the field-effect that group thought, if fairly uniform and coherent, can have when targeted on a single object or subject. (One version of this is found in the odd practice of Tibetans who chant over the body of a dying brother, a subject touched on in this book’s closing.)
Abraham’s feminine definition of this creative force is an argument strengthened by Ashley Montagu’s superb biological study, The Natural Superiority of Women. In Montagu’s study can be found, perhaps, reason enough for the timeworn jealousy men have for women, and for their continual attempts at takeover of all such natural female processes as intuition, ancient wisdom, “thinking for the left hand,” knowledge of the heart, intelligence for birthing and nurturing offspring, nurturing each other, and having compassion on ourselves. Those male-oriented power-plays to wrest such quiet power from Mother Earth, creation, and women in general, have upset the natural order of things, bringing suffering and chaos in their wake. This disaster is constantly increased by this same male compulsion to gain control over the very chaos the male intellect brings about, making matters worse and worse—as found in Goethe’s Apprentice in absence of his Sorcerer-Master. Thus arises our ever-present dominator male culture, ever trying to re-establish order through their harsh legalisms cut off from the heart’s intelligence, and always bringing but more chaos.
Abraham’s Movement
Examining the relation between Abraham and his God(dess) we find Abraham’s “blind” obedience to that Spirit (as I assume it to be). The Spirit says, “Move,” and Abraham moves. He doesn’t ask to where or toward what he should move, he first just moves. Out of that action of movement comes the means for the movement itself, the directions of where, why, and when to move, and the substance of what is found therein. This puts the issue of Abraham’s obedience in the strange-loop category.
The movement of obedience to Spirit creates the where and why of that movement, the same response found millennia later in Meister Eckhart, who “lived in wandering joy, without a why.” To live without a why is the challenge of all challenges, and the root of forgiveness as a primary force in line with creation. Eckhart also claimed that “without me God is not.” And of course he observed the opposite as well, all these being expressions of the mirroring strange loop phenomenon and variations of Abraham’s example.
In my first book, Crack in the Cosmic Egg, I commented that one cannot step out into nothing, since there is no such thing as a no-thing. Stepping out into apparent nothingness, one finds something always forming underfoot, for our awareness can bring about the creation of something to be aware of. This formation forms only as we step out into it, however—a step which, at its moment, seems the equivalent of jumping off the cliff without a parachute. But the stepping out—and only that stepping—creates what forms under our step. That is, true “leaps of faith” can be creative acts.
A prime example of Spirit and its movement is found in George Fox, from whom the Quaker movement arose. Were Fox at any time or under any circumstance, moment by moment, faced with a decision (the word means to cut off alternatives), he simply stopped and waited. At some point Spirit would move him as he needed to be moved, bypassing thinking in order to just move without hindrance. All too often Fox’s obedience to Spirit led to prison, where he spent a considerable part of his adult life, but that, too, is illuminating. Culture has no use for the nonpredictable whimsies of Spirit. Temple and mountaintop are far safer cultural alliances, and a dungeon is a far safer place in which to keep the George Foxes of history.
There is another aspect of Fox’s willingness to be moved, even to prison. One might ask if this willingness doesn’t contradict the definition of the intelligence of the heart as that which moves for our wellbeing. Well-being for one in service of the heart is a “universal” issue, as heart is not personal. One’s personal self has given over to that universal self, which is the heart’s nature. Intellect in the head, whose “well-being” without reference to the heart’s intelligence, generally proves disastrous in the long run. Fox’s suspension of intellect and personal investment on behalf of Spirit’s wholeness is an integrated movement, its wholeness not necessarily in keeping with intellect’s idea of well-being. So Fox’s well-being rested in Spirit’s wholeness, regardless of where it led, placing Fox and prison in the same position as Jesus and Crucifixion, the extremities between the two being beside the point here. Both Jesus and Fox, as history would show, have led toward the well-being of the overall history of us humans, whether or not we each open to such in our own life.
Discoveries from the Left Hand
My reading of Fox’s Journals led me to the discovery of Jerome Bruner, to my mind one of the twentieth century’s richest thinkers. One day back in the early ’60s, mired in the endless drafts of Crack in the Cosmic Egg, my romanticized inner model-image of George Fox stirred me to remove to the college library where I determined to discover what Fox practiced (and perhaps break my temporary stalemate and slight slough-of-despond). I found a spot where I could simply stand and wait, in good Miltonian fashion, as I assumed Fox did, without appearing unduly strange.
Doing what I could to suspend my ordinary roof-brain chatter, I waited, silently, for “it” to breathe me. And in what may well have involved some aspect of the Laski effect, “it” did indeed finally move me. What I can only call a force moved me quite physically, as though I were drawn like a puppet on strings to a section of the library I had not visited before (and I was as relaxed and willing to be so moved as I assume a puppet is, a rare state for me). I went straight to a particular shelf somewhat above my head, where I reached up and took a book, which seemed to me at the time to literally fall out of the shelf into my hand. The book was none other than Jerome Bruner’s On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand, which moved me out of my stalemate and gave me a better image of what I presumed to be Fox’s practice and some of the rewards therein. Further, Bruner gave many an insight into our human Spirit and its “left-hand operations”—those forces which function beneath our usual “right-hand thinking” with its “left-brained logic.”
Through such forces, giving rise to creation and birthing, we are not limited to a choice between reification and abstraction. We are dealing with aspects of the strange-loop phenomenon, which is neither defined by nor confined to our mental constructions. In such looping lies a way out of our all-too-human dilemma—today as always. At stake in this movement, generated outside our ordinary mental process, is a “single centimeter of chance” given us in which to respond, as Carlos Castaneda’s don Juan points out. The instant’s opening of Spirit is subtle, swift, and easily overlooked—or not perceived at all. But at that instant’s opening, if we immediately and instantly give over to it without the slightest flicker of hesitation, that force can move in and become the principal issue of that event.*6 In opening to Spirit one isn’t presented with a fact or possibility for pondering and deciding over. Our response must be as instant as the possibility that is opening, making them virtually one action, not two, and may require a bit of practiced attention. (Again, as Blake said, “Mechanical excellence is the vehicle of genius.”)
The first impulse, in the Bruner book incident of mine, was so subtle as to be easily dismissed, or simply missed altogether. Only due to the fact that I had waited, rather suspended, for something of which I really didn’t know what it could be, could I have ever felt so subtle a movement. Nonetheless such subtlety was instantly powerful, so long as it was not doubted.
Later in the 1960s, winding up my writing of Crack, I was in the library late one evening checking references I had made. On leaving and walking toward the exit, I felt a sudden pull to my right, into a dimly lit room (apparently closed for the night), directly to a table whereon was a row of new books waiting to be cataloged by the librarian. The pull was quite extraordinary by then, and I compulsively reached for a green, hard-bound volume. Picking it up to read its title, a cold chill ran from the base of my spine to the crown of my skull, my hair (which I still had back then) literally standing on end. I clearly perceived being in the presence of the uncanny as I read the title: The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, by Carlos Castaneda. This was a new and unknown work from the University of California Press, which subsequently brought a major shift in my book, Crack, and insertion of a new chapter, “don Juan and Jesus.”
There is an admonition in the sayings of Jesus to keep awake and alert, for we can never know at what moment “it” might come. This coming of “it” covers a wide range of possibilities, and is ontological and universal rather than limited to any religious or philosophical notion or event. The issue is just what such alertness means. The preparation for such alertness seems to require being in that open state without reserve, an empty expectation, which alone allows for the moving force of Spirit, rather than that avalanche of “what-ifs” and protests our logic will immediately impose.
But in all practicality, one asks how can we remain in such openness and tend the world-out-there (echoing Simone Weil’s fundamental issue of grace and gravity)? The answer lies in “not letting the left hand know what the right hand is doing,” as our great Model pointed out. This is no simple matter, but rests finally on which “hand” we hold to be of primary, supreme importance—world of folly or world of spirit. We have to be attentive on two different levels of consciousness, temple and mountaintop on the one hand, Spirit and truth on the other. This can throw the issue into a strange loop wherein we can serve and live as both left- and right-hand worlds give rise to each other.
As with my being led to discover Jerome Bruner, I was led to this discovery of Castaneda by a resonance brought on by my absorption in my own book that whole evening, and my otherwise “blank state of mind” concerning such routine matters as winding up for the night to leave—a “right-hand” affair leaving my “left-hand state” open.
In summary of this, if the Spirit says move, and we move there and then, the movement of Spirit in our life “makes all things new moment by moment.” We then live in a state of “constant astonishment,” as my friend David Tetrault speaks of it. The least bit of resistance and the presence of Spirit simply isn’t—no one the wiser, not even oneself. On a moment’s reflection here, we can see a direct correlation between this open alertness and the blank mind state involved in all Eureka events, which is resonant with that capacity-compulsion of the very young child for open-eyed blank staring—which should be a capacity never lost. So long as mind and its busy intellect take up the stage, creative discovery cannot unfold, and the same holds for Spirit.
The answer to our enigma is to open to and live in a dialogue between the two, left and right hands. Irina Tweedie referred to this stunt as similar to “walking a hairline thread over a chasm of fire.” (As for me, I lose my balance, and the older I get, the worse my balance. I stagger.)
Bear in mind poet Blake’s statement: “Mechanical excellence is the vehicle for genius.” The instantaneousness of all such appearances and creative moves rests at some point on this mechanical excellence, which we must have developed, yet which ironically must be left behind the instant genius manifests: Kekulé’s snake, Hamilton’s quaternion flash, Mozart’s round volume of sound—all are like Blake’s “eternity in an hour” revelation. Revelations do not hang around that we might decide to heed them. Mind must have done its homework, developing the “mechanical excellence” that is the servant of genius. Realizing why the mechanics cannot be carried over into the appearance of that genius— or there is simply no genius—is not complex. Genius can be blocked by the very mechanism it must have for its appearance.
Again, a resonant dialogue between body and Spirit, grace and gravity, is called for. The trick is to know when to work, and when to do nothing except open. Robert Sardello’s suggestions for opening to Silence and nurturing such an opening through a kind of radical “notdoing,” is a neat summary of this living in balance. There are other cues. We are hardly without helpful hints, once we are ready to allow and follow this subtle, intuitive heart-intelligence—heart being the gateway to all things new.