The following is a republication of another article which I wrote in another blog in early November last year! I rediscovered it whilst trying to find out the contents of another article which I wrote last year and which some one is trying to read today . I had completely forgotten what I had written, having written more than 300 since I first started blogging . The reason I find this article interesting is that it seems to be related to three of the topics on which I am presently writing, viz. God, afterlife/reincarnation and the nature of the Tao in Chinese Taoism. To me, the description of the God in this poem seems remarkably like the description of the Tao in Taoism and of the non-dualistic ideas of Nagajuna's Middle Way in Buddhism. I wrote this article the morning after I had the relevant experience..
The Cause of All Things
embraces all
and is above all,
is not without being or without life
He does not lack reason or intelligence.
Yet,
he is not an object.
He has no form or shape. no quality,
no quantity, no weight.
He is not restricted to any place.
He cannot be seen .
He cannot be touched,
Our sense cannot perceive him,
our mind cannot grasp him.
He is not swayed by needs,
or drives
or innner emotions.
Things or events that take place place in our world
can never upset him.
He needs no light.
He suffers neither change
nor corruption nor division,
He lacks nothing
and remains always the same.
He is netiher soul nor intellect.
He does not imagine, consider, argue or understand.
He cannot be expressed in words
or conceived in thoughts.
He does not fall into any category
of number or order.
He possesses no greatness or smallness
nor equality or inequality, no similarity or dissimilarity.
He does not stand or move nor is he addressed.
He does not yield power,
neither is he power itself
nor is he light
He does not live
nor is he life itself.
He may not be identified with being,
nor with eternity or time.
He is not subject to the reach of the mind.
He is not knowledge,
or truth,
or kingship,
or wisdom
He is not the one, or oneness;
not Godhead or goodness.
He is not even spirit
in the way we understand it
or sonship or fatherhood.
He is not anything else known to us
or to any other being.
He has nothing in common with things that exist
or things that do not exist.
Nothing that exists
knows him as he really is.
Nor does he know things that exist
through a knowledge
existing outside himself.
Reason cannot reach him
or know him.
He is neither darkness nor light,
neither falsehood or truth.
All statements affirmed about him
or denied about him
are equally wrong.
For although we can make positive or negative statements
about all things below him,
We can neither affirm,
nor deny him himself
because the all perfect and unique cause
of all things
is beyond all affirmation.
Moreover, by the simple pre-eminence
of his absolute nature,
he falls outside the scope
of any negation.
He is free from every limitation
and beyond them all.
The higher we rise in contemplation
the more words fail.
Words cannot express pure mind.
When we enter the darkness
that lies beyond our grasp
we are forced, not merely to say little,
but rather to maintain an absolute silence,
a silence of thought
as well as of words....
As we move up from below
to that which is higher
in the order of being,
our power of speech decreases,
until,
when we reach the top
we find oursleves totally speeechless.
We are then overcome
by him who is wholly ineffable.
It was 5.30 a.m. I had just finished reading this poem, written by Pseudo-Dennis The Areopagite in the 6th Century. I was profoundly moved. I agree. God is not a substance, nor a being nor a person let alone a trinity of persons. Is God a feeling? God is an absence. God is an absence which may also be a presence. Can his presence be felt? He can certainly not be perceived by our five senses. Is he a visceral feeling, a feeling which pervades not just some parts of our body but our whole body? All attempts to describe him is bound to end in abject failure. If he can be described, he cannot be God. He cannot be confined by our words, not even by our thoughts. Nor even by our feelings.
He can only be suggested. We may look in his direction, but never "see" him fully. We can only encounter him in silence, when we are no longer ourselves, when we forget ourselves and who we are and become open to the unknown, as a newborn baby. If he wishes to encounter us, he won't stay long. Is God like a child who likes to play hide and seek.? One moment he makes an appearance and another moment, he vanishes without a trace. He is forever elusive, fleeting, obscure! Is he extremely shy? If so, why?
I closed my eyes. The words of the poem arranged in the above format appeared in the dark screen of my mind as tiny forms matching the length of the individual words first in greyish green, then in bluish gray but the individual letters appeared blurred. They were moving. The words at the bottom of the poem seemed to be falling away as if they had just been sprayed with a powerful but invisible solvent and began to fly off downwards, slowly, gently, as leaves from a tree in a soft autumn breeze or like so many tiny broken bluish grey kites swaying in the sky. They were literally dissolving right in front of my eyes! I do not know why I had such an image.
I opened my eyes. I left my bed. I wanted to relieve myself. Suddenly, without any warning, I felt a presence. I felt some energy coming from above me. It reached down through my cranium and spead downward. In less than a second, it passed through my face, my chest, my stomache and then reached down to my shins. My feet were still firmly on the ground. I did not know what happened. It felt strange. I felt a tingling feeling all through my body and nearly had goose pimples. I started thinking: "What could it be?" The moment I started wondering and thinking, the feeling vanished. The whole "encounter" lasted less than 5 or 6 seconds. What was it? A delayed physiological response of my body to the thoughts which pre-occupied me when I was reading and feeling the power of the poem?
Since doing chi kung, the surface of my skin has become more sensitive to waves of energy in the external environment. Often, on my way to my office, when I pass along the section of Hollywood Road in front of but opposite to the Man Mo Temple, I felt such waves of energy, many many times. Maybe it is just the electro-magnetic field there. There is a small power transformer at the corner of the tiny garden there. Or a real presence? Or my imagination? God knows? Buddha knows? The Tao knows?
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