A Brush with Eternity

Yesterday I had a discussion with a friend about many things. One of the things we discussed concerns that eternal mystery some people call "God".  I said I felt frightened because I seemed to be wandering into a territory in which I could find little solid support from anything or anyone, as if I were stepping into empty space or a void. After I got home, I picked up a book "On God"  by J Krishnamurti and read the final chapter. It's entitled "From the Ending of Time, 2nd April, 1980". It is the record of a conversation between Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986), a famed spiritual thinker and writer and David Bohm (1917-1992), one of the foremost quantum scientists and theoreticians of the twentieth century, who participated in the Manhattan Project which led to the production of the first atom bomb, a fearless seeker of the truth, whether physical or metaphysical and author of the influential book Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980).

Both Bohm and Krishnamurti feel that there is something beyond quantum physics, something ungraspable and Krishnamurti was asking whether our mind can move beyond theories, enter into another metaphysical reality, beyond words, beyond emptiness into a silence which is part of that emptiness. Bohm said, "I should say that." and that it is the territory of the absolute, something totally independent, entirely self-moving, self-active, something which is the cause of itself or the same thing, something that has no cause. Krishnamurti thinks that that emptiness is energy, energy which exists in silence but that there is something beyond even that, something much more immense, immeasurable, something much greater than that, something which is the beginning and ending of everything, something that is the ground (used as a metaphor) upon which everything else exist (space, energy, emptiness, silence etc), something which is the "death" or "ending" of the "particular" mind and even of the "universal" mind. He said, "I think it becomes almost inexpressible if you say the universal is gone, because expression is the universal. It is something which can never be put into words but which must be put into words" but that any attempt to put it into words makes it relative. Their idea is remarkably like the idea of LaoTzu that the Tao is nameless but that if we are forced to give it a name, we shall call it the Tao and Bohm said, " I think we have a long history of danger with the absolute. People have put it into words, and it has become very oppressive.".

If what Krishnamurti says is right, then God is something, some being, some entity, some Ground out of which everything arises and into which it dies so that God has no beginning and no ending. Bohm asked Krishnamurti: "What would it mean to talk of the ending of the universal?" Krishnamurti replied: "Nothing. Why should it have a meaning if it is happening? What has that to do with man?...That ground hasn't any relationship with man.".

Bohm poses the question that going about it logically, starting from the suffering of mankind, whether it's possible that such suffering originates from a wrong turning and man has got it wrong but Krishnamurti replies, "Yes, but man asks, help me to get past the wrong turn. Put me on the right path. And to that one says, please don't become anything...But man won't listen." To Krishnamurti, the barrier to that refusal is the "I", all our thoughts, all our deep attachments and thinks that if we can't leave these, then we will have no relationship with this "God" but man doesn't want to leave these! What man wants is some comfortable, easy way of living without any trouble, and he can't have that. Since without this relationship with this "God", this "Ground" of being, there is no meaning, hence people start to "invent" meaning. Bohm suggests that the ancient religions have said that God is the Ground and that "God" is "the attempt to put this notion a bit too personally perhaps." and Krishnamurti agrees because it gives them "hope", gives them "faith" and "make life a little more comfortable to live" and that if there is no "I", there is something else operating. Bohm thinks that the "Christian idea of perfection may seem rather boring because there is nothing to do!" Bohm was thinking of the idea of "creating" order, the subject of his book with F David Peat, "Science, Order and Creativity." (1987) .

It seems that both Krishnamurti and Bohm think that even if there is some metaphysical reality upon which everything which exists relies for their existence, it has no relationship with man. This is what I think too. But since this  is a rather bleak conclusion, most men are too weak to accept it and as a result they invent the idea of various gods or a God, who is the head of all other gods, much greater than Zeus (the Christian God is supposed to be all knowing, all powerful and all perfect and all loving and is ready to intervene on behalf of those who worship him and believe in him). It looks to me remarkably like an entirely human concept of normal social exchange between one man and another: "If you scratch my back, I will scratch your back" . The only difference in the relationship between this object of our social exchange and us and and our normal social or commercial exchange with the ordinary man is that that the opposite party to that exchange, the supposed being we call God is invisible but still somehow "omnipresent", much more powerful, much more knowledgeable and much more loving than our "normal" fellow human being. He is simply man's imaginative projection of what is the best, the most noble and the most powerful human being writ large, a kind of invisible but loving Superman! We are said to be created in the image of God. To me, it looks far more likely that we have fashioned our own God in the image of our own " ideal" self! We simply heap upon that concept everything we wish we might have been but are not and call him "God".