What if one went to search for a Biclaudapus on the top of a high mountain? Does one not find it because it is too small? Or is it because it is so well camouflaged it evades one’s observation? Indeed, how does one find what one does not already know? How does one recognize that which one does not have some preconceived notion of? How would it be recognized? Look carefully.
When one says they are looking for God, what does that mean? Ultimate being is clearly beyond the domain of our natural physical senses. Is the awareness of God like an unbounded emptiness; a meaning that eludes the limited forms, undefinable by our base consciousness’ constructs. What if God has no form to present? Why would God have any form? Yet, as the Psalmist wrote, “…is the maker of the ear unable to hear, is the maker of the eye unable to see…”1? One may ask, is the maker of that which is aware, aware as well?
If our awareness of the Milky Way’s presence, or the awareness of the sea of hundreds of billions of neutrinos passing through one’s body every second, or if the awareness of the teeming population of bacteria and microbes that cover our bodies, and even the awareness that your roof is leaking – it has just not yet dripped down on you – if all these things escape one’s notice, should one expect is be aware of God?
Some may say God does not exist, as if they could possibly know that; their conclusion based on some preconceived juvenile notion that has not work for them.
Searching with great diligence and with the utmost of sincerity, if one insists on looking for an orange tree on the top of the highest mountain one will not find what one seeks though one seek for a lifetime. Is that a failure for lack of purity or good deeds? Does that failure prove the orange tree does not exist?
That is searching for a thing we know of but searching incorrectly. If we truly understood the orange tree we would not have looked for it on a mountaintop. Clearly one must search correctly. But again, how does one search for something that one does not already know.
The air one breathes, though it is all around us and we breath it every instant of our life, is not felt, seen, or tasted. It is completely forgotten until it is missed. Though gravity holds us securely down on the Earth it permeates the Universe to Infinity. If we were to look for it we would not be able to point to it and say – there it is.
We do not detect many things, though they pervade our existence. We may think about them when someone tells us various things exist, but they are completely taken for granted otherwise because the direct perception of these things escapes the operations of our immediately life.
One may say, we created scientific instruments that detect and measure these things. We have scientific theories and physical laws that explain these things and behaviors, therefore we know these things exist as demonstrated by our science and instruments. We have religions, rituals, many dogmas, and fMRI/EEG. Does one know God through those?
Look into the emptiness of one’s inner most being, between the thoughts, forget the self. Then fathom the unfathomable.
- Ps 94:9 ↩