The thought that has been uppermost lately is the absence of God. This is easily dealt with at a philosophical level. God is utterly transcendent and that is the end of the matter. At the personal level, however, it is not so easily dealt with. This is because in human experience there is often some leakage across the void of transcendence. Something of God is experienced by many people from time to time. OK, not God as he is in himself. He is utterly transcendent, but something of God, something divine – his energies, according to Orthodox theologians. My problem is how to account for this waxing and waning of religious experience. Why is it the experience of some and not all? Why are the earlier stages of the religious life often rich in such experiences while the later stages are, more often than not, arid and barren? More fundamentally, what is the spiritual dimension of existence? How does it tie in with the physical, interpersonal and intellectual dimensions? I have always wondered whether this tiny spark of individual experience, at times so intense, at times so dull and banal, has any cosmic significance. Does the subjective experience of the individual reverberate beyond its immediate environment?
But who really knows, who can say
whence it all came, how creation happened?
The gods themselves are later than creation.
So who knows truly how it all came to be?
Whence all creation had its origin,
whether it formed itself, or whether not,
he, who surveys it all from the highest heaven
he truly knows – or perhaps he knows not.
This is from the Rig-Veda. It is staggering to think that 3,500 years or so ago people were asking questions like these.