For the last few days I have been going around with almost a sense of astonishment that God is not visibly apparent. All my reading and thinking is on religious experience. What it is, and the how of it, tug at my thoughts throughout the day. In those moments when the hands are occupied and the mind is free, or when walking, the Jesus prayer starts to say itself and God is unseen, unfelt but nonetheless very real. But, why not apparent? That nags at me. Yesterday morning at meditation it struck me that I come to meditation with the attitude of wanting to get somewhere, to achieve peace, to have some sort of experience, but I get nowhere. And then it struck me – how arrogant, wanting to impose my wishes on reality, wanting my conception of how things should be to be, to prevail. Just stop and let reality be. Get out of your head and observe what really is and not dream of what you would have be. And then I think – no, that’s too passive. When I do that I find myself in that existential now where the only perception is that there is nothing more to perceive, where there are no directions and the horizon of existence is lost in darkness. It is not possible to stay there for very long before one is pulled back into the ephemeral world of thoughts and feelings and would be desires and the thousands of pragmatic necessities of daily life. I don’t want to stay in the ‘now’, I suddenly realise, because I am afraid of getting lost. Perhaps that is the key. ‘I’ needs to get lost. It is ‘I’ who stands in the way.
I think, shall I take a vow to do this or that – to meditate twice a day, not to indulge myself? Although vows are the norm in the religious life I do not think they are the answer. I think consciousness of the necessity to keep the vows would become the central issue, especially when the temptation to break them was strong, and vows are not the issue. Again it is an imposition of my idea of what needs to be done on reality. I would be doing this or that in order to keep a vow and not because it was the right thing to do. The necessity of keeping the vow would loom large on the horizon of awareness obscuring much. I have an intuition that God is apparent but that we need to learn to be aware of him. The clues to his existence are everywhere but they are subtle and we do not notice them, prevented by our preconceptions. Awareness of God is not just for an ascetic elite achieved after rigourous training. Union with God is built in to what it means to be human. He is the ground of being and the culmination of the human process.