the purple lilies (or maybe lotuses) open in my pond.
i’ve searched for prayers to pray.
i’ve search for a god to pray my prayers to.
but i found the lilies (or maybe lotuses) open in my pond.
i can’t pray to lilies in a pond.
and i can’t pray to a god that is not a lily in a pond.
but the lilies are prayers.
and i smile.
I ask: Does a poet know how to speak about God? no, a poet does not know. Even non-poets do not know. For there is no "about" when considering a God. The good Buddha said: Nothing is as it seems, nor is it otherwise. From this we learn: God is not what we think it is, nor is it something different. If God is not this, but it is something else, then that's a dualism Buddhists reject. Buber the poet said it differently, and that difference is of the essence: “God does not ‘exist’ in the way that things exist — but he ‘presences’ in the relation itself.” In other words, existence can only be predicated of things, but since God is not a thing, nor is he otherwise, we find that God is the between of I and Thou.
And for that reason alone only poets know how to speak when a God is to be spoken of.
Martin Buber said many things concerning God. He used the word God, but he spoke not about God, but to God. and when he wanted to tell us something in reference to God, he readily reminded us that there is nothing we can say about God, but we can always be in a relationship with the God that is between us. He said that God is in the embrace of a being. Or that God is the embrace. But we need to be clear: Buber explained to us that the personal relationship between man and God is one and the same as the personal relationship between man and man and between man and nature. There is no path to God that is distinct and apart from our relationship with each other and with the beings of the world. In other words, the personal God is made manifest in the between of I and Thou.
This God emerges in a dialogical process we fully control, and it fully controls us. This is the emerging God of the between of I and Thou. It is emerging, but also eternal. Clearly, this is the dialogical koan of a paradoxical both. God is eternally emerging, but this is of the essence: For that it depends entirely on us. Buber said that God is eternally a Thou: It is not what God is, but what it is for us. That is to say: if we say “it” to God, we are only fooling ourselves, for it is not God we are addressing, it is an avatar of Mara. And that is very important: Consider this: In Zen they speak of tariki and jiriki, that is, self-power or other-power. In other words: Either my own personal liberation depends only on me, or it depends on some factor external to me. Is it Zazen or it is the Nembutsu? The Zen poet Thich Nhat Hanh replied: it is interbeing. The poet apparently felt that this was a false dichotomy born of dualistic thinking. We are always in a relationship, and it is up to us to make it I-Thou or I-It, therefore it is not just me alone or just the other, it is me with the other. Martin Buber said it well: there is no I without a Thou. And he also said: it is will and grace. The will is my own power, and the grace is the other power that emerges in the between of I and Thou.
Buddha was a poet who lived in accordance to his poetry. He rejected any role for a God in the path to personal salvation. With Buddha we can say that a theologically diminished God is an existentially magnified God. Similar to Buber’s, for Buddha, God is a deed we do. Buddha did not mind if we choose to conceive of a personal God who is not a creator or a providential divinity. He broke away from Hinduism over these matters. We may choose to enter into a relationship with a God that is devoid of the attributes theology predicates of him. But this is a type of belief that requires great spiritual creativity, along the lines of Zen's dictum "We need great faith, great doubt and great determination.” For Buddha the relationship of compassion precedes human liberation, or it itself is the liberation we seek, and for Buber, likewise, relationship precedes human liberation, or it itself is the liberation we seek. Being that so, the narrow ridge or bridge ceases to be a hindrance and becomes instead a sign and a path. The Jewish teaching on this might be expressed thus: "hesed k'neged kulam." Ethics comes first, as God or Buddha is the between of I and Thou. Buber said it well: At the beginning it was the relationship.
Zen and Vedic poets can be wonderful when speaking of God. Buber rejected the need for rituals, sacraments and organized religion. So did the poet Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore wrote: “Go not to the temple to put flowers upon the feet of God. First fill your own house with the fragrance of love… Go not to the temple to bow down your head in prayer. First learn to bow in humility before your fellow man. Go not to the temple to pray on bended knees. First bend down to lift someone who is down-trodden…” It's similar to the poet Israel Salanter, a rabbi of old. He said that he values spiritual needs more than material needs, but the material needs of the poor are his spiritual needs. The poet Tagore knew well that we often go to the temples and offer prayers to absolve us from the need to do the deeds of true sacredness. For sacredness is not a state of mind, it is an ethical deed we do. In that sense the Zen poet Basho Matsuo beautifully said: “The temple bell stops, but I still hear the sound coming out of the flowers.” Paraphrasing the poet Dogen: If you think the temple is not in the flowers, where else do you think it might be? In similar words: if not now, when? if not here, where?
In this same vein, take the poet March Chagall: He said: “I see poetry in everything around me: the sky, the trees, the faces, the human soul. Poetry is not only in words but in the way we look at life. And God is the ultimate poet, who speaks through the beauty of the world.” When Chagall said that he sees Jesus as a great poet, he was offering the most basic insight of the spiritual life: Poetry is not just a way of speaking about the world or painting her beings, poetry is a way of acting in the world. The true poet writes poetry through deeds of embrace, like the poet Jesus did. The same way as Dogen who finds enlightenment in the ten thousand things, Chagall finds it in the fiddlers, the roofs and the flying herrings. He said: “I am in love with life and in love with God. I don’t know how to define it, but I think that through my work, I am worshipping the divine.” Again, by refusing to give definitions, only poets give us a proper definition of God. One notable collaboration between Buber and Chagall was the German translation of the Hebrew Bible by Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, titled Die Schrift (“The Scripture”) which featured illustrations by Chagall.
Speaking of Jesus as a poet, Thomas Merton was a poet who yearned to approximate not just Jesus the poet, but his poetry. In this regard, shortly before his passing Merton wrote that he wanted to discard what he called his own “spiritual abstractions and the spiritual narcissism of ‘I am the center and the periphery of all that exists’.” Merton was reflecting on the stages of his own spiritual development and had come to recognize them as antithetical to his spiritual project. Merton then remarkably shifted toward Buber’s I and Thou philosophy and viewed its principles as both a “challenge” to “the hollowness and falsity of my life” as well as a spiritual task in which: “My business is to verify Buber’s (spirituality) with my own.” Merton wanted an existential confirmation of his spiritual path for he had understood Buber’s dialogical insight that all real life is meeting.
Antonio Machado, the genial Spanish poet, saw God much the way Buber saw it. He wrote: "God created the seas and from the seas he emerges like the clouds and the storms. He is the creator and the creatures make him." In other words, Machado the poet wants to tell us that we create the gods that create us. And that is a fact. His is the emergent God, the one we create every time we say Thou to a being. Machado said: “The poet does not seek the fundamental I, but the essential You.” Of course, for there is no I without a You. The poet also said ”there is no path for the walker, the path is made as we walk.” This is the Zen's path-less path, the gate-less gate. Buber said he had no certainties of any kind, not intellectual nor spiritual, for all of life is walking within the confines of a narrow ridge. Still in “mitzrayim.” It is not easy to make a path within a narrow ridge, but as the poet Nahman from Bratzlav, a rabbi of old, told us: The most important thing is never be afraid to walk.
Fernando Pessoa, the genial Portuguese poet, held his own zen-like views on God. He said: "In any spirit that isn't deformed there is the belief in God. In any spirit that is not deformed there isn't the belief in a particular God." In other words, we can hold the belief that there is a God, but we should not believe that this God has a name and a teaching. Don't point at God and say: I know you! You don't. And that's what makes the meeting with God a true dialogue. The poet, wrote: "Whether they exist or not, we're slaves to the gods." For Pessoa the existence of a God is of no consequence, for we are devoid of discretion in its presence, as in its absence. In many religious traditions to be a slave to God is a virtue, avodah comes from the root eved, slave. But in Pessoa's poetry, submission to God is neither good nor bad, it just is, and we'd better be conscious of it. True: We have corrupted freedom into an illusion, and with that, this obsession about us giving birth to gods, or with the poet Nietzsche proclaiming their death, makes no difference at all. And yet, (with Pessoa there is always an "and yet,”) we are free to give birth and also to issue proclamations, just so long as we recognize them as devoid of meaning. He wrote this koan: A poet is a faker who feigns even the pain he really feels. Pessoa said that he wrote his own "fact-less autobiography." Think of it, only a fact-less autobiography can possibly tell our truth, for we, like God, like Buddha, are not “facts," there is no “about” us to tell.
In other words, the poets Buber and Pessoa are telling us that we may choose to believe in the existence of a God, but we should not fall in to the temptation of predicating of this God all the theological attributes of divinity, including creation, especially creation. The God they point at is a God that serves no purpose, or at least none we can ascertain. But if having a purpose is important to our lives, then we should consider not the purpose of God, but the purpose of our own lives.
For some poets a transcendent God is not enough. Blaise Pascal wanted a personal God. He said: "God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and scholars." In a sense, for Pascal, if God was only an intellectual abstraction derived from evidentiary proofs and logical syllogisms, it would not be the personal God he was yearning to encounter in genuine relationship. In that case, as Pessoa argued, though from the opposite end, this kind of God is of no use. Pascal longed for a God of Pascal, not a God that belongs to equally to everyone in the same manner and in the same place and time. We cannot say to Pascal: God is within you, for he and Buber saw that for what it is: nothing but a transcendental soliloquy. Or in other words, the bad sin of theological narcissism.
The poet Jorge Luis Borges went a step further in the denial of rationalism, almost as close to Zen’s intuitions. He said: "I cannot believe in the existence of God, despite all the statistics in the world." That is to say, a God that can positively be affirmed by the use of reason, even if it exists, it is not worth believing in. This is the koanic choice Borges makes: This kind of God may indeed exist, but even if he does, count me out. Borges once said that he had read Buber’s I and Thou and thought that was a wonderful poem. However, when he went back home to Buenos Aires he was astonished to learn that all of Buber’s philosophy was contained within that little book that he had read as a poem. Borges knew that only poetic philosophy might approximate the truth.
Albert Einstein's poetry saw the opposite view to those of Pascal and Borges. For Einstein God is not a personal being, but only a poetic rendering that describes the structural beauty of the universe as a whole. His is the God of the philosophers and the statisticians. Einstein said “I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind." This is a form of Deism. Einstein, like Spinoza, did not believe in a God that had a purpose and communicated it to humanity. The universe is an awesome being, the one and only awesome being, and we can call it God or nature, deus sive natura. Can we worship the universe? no, but we can say Thou to it and to each of its beings. The poet Einstein insisted in understanding the world through the expression of spinoza’s radical love.
That radical love was the philosophy of the poet Baruch Spinoza. The poet Heinrich Heine said that Spinoza, "was a God intoxicated man." Spinoza saw God in everything and everything through God. For Spinoza there is no personal God, there is only the love of God. How can we love a God that is not personal? Spinoza said that God is the only infinite and eternal substance, therefore when we love any being of nature we love God. Spinoza said: “The intellectual love of God is the mind’s love of God, insofar as it is considered as united with God.” For Spinoza, therefore, we can love infinitely and eternally because we are one with all that exists. Buber said the same thing: God is in the embrace of a being. Paraphrasing the Zen poet Dogen: If we can't find God in all beings and between us, where else do we expect to find it?
In Judaic philosophy and theology we find some mainstream affirmations that are based on dualistic beliefs and some others sustained by rationalist explications. I’m, of course, speaking of the Rambam, or as the west named him, Maimonides, a rabbi of old. For Maimonides, the existence of God can be ascertained through rational syllogisms, as his teacher Aristoteles well taught. For him what cannot be rationally proved cannot be spiritually believed. But consider his advocacy of apophatic theology. Rambam argued that there is nothing positive we can say about God, except what God is not. If Buddha say not this and not the other, Maimonides reply is “not the other.” But saying that something is not this, seems to imply that it is its opposite or something else, and we necessarily must posses a sufficient knowledge of a subject to be able to affirm with certainty that it is not this, but only the other. Maimonides fell into the logical error of predicating attributes about the God he said we cannot, in positive terms, predicate anything at all. The dalai lama, in this regard, is a Maimonidean too, as he also said that beliefs must be confirmed by reason or be discarded. He wrote: “If scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.”
Consider this: With Buber the poet we ask: Is this God a presence we can ascertain, or is this God a totaliter aliter? Consider this too: My will to love comes from within my true-self, therefore it cannot be discarded, refused, rejected or otherwise taken away from me. There is no Levisinian asymmetry, there is only going toward the Thou. My love is mine, but it can only to be actualized between you and me. Not "mine" as in commodity possessions, for it is freedom we seek: "Mine" as in my inborn ability to offer it to another being. It is inborn, like the original Buddha nature, which is the opposite to the Christian belief in the inborn original sin. Those who love know that love exists, like God, like Buddha, except when we don't offer it to a being. In that case it extinguishes itself like a candle under the rain. For there is grace in the between of you and me and everywhere in this world. This is the God Buber wrote "about." I hear him say: "God is not between I and Thou, God is the between of I and Thou.” Buber reminded us that we find God in the saying of Thou, for there is no God, and no Buddha, besides the moment and place when we say Thou to a being. The grumpy Basque poet Miguel de Unamuno was angry with God, very angry, because He created us to die. We are mortal beings, and that’s a divine scandal. I can see Buddha saying to him: You are not mortal Don Miguel, you are also not immortal. You just are. To which Unamuno replies: nonsense, utter nonsense! I can see the Buddha burst into an uncharacteristic belly laugh and say: Emaho! Don Miguel, You finally got it, you finally did. This I've learned: After all, and despite life itself, all the poetry we write, and all the philosophy we conceive and all the religions we invent are more or less our desperate attempts to learn how to grieve.Then I asked the poet Buber, and he reminded me that yes, despite life itself, the only true sacrament is the sacrament of the neighbor.
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