To Believe or Not Believe -

That is the Question

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing, there is a field; I'll meet you there.   -Rumi

For the first time in many decades I was asked, "Do you believe in God?" My answer was definite. I said, "No." I surprised myself with so categorical a response, because it is in direct conflict with my religious upbringing, my identity for most of my life. Nevertheless, the statement is true.

"I don't believe in God any more than I believe in the chair I am sitting in or the ground I walk on." I explained. "I don't have to believe because I experience God."

In the guide service of the soul that I offer, I have learned that the question of belief causes a great deal of angst because of a misunderstanding of the distinction between religion and the spiritual life. The former is about belief; the latter is about experience. They are so different they actually have little relationship with each other -- except for the way one creates obstacles for the other.

A year or so ago a friend told me that she was in the midst of a spiritual re-evaluation. I was curious and I asked her to explain. She clearly articulated her struggle to clarify 'what to believe and what not to believe'. In listening to her I realized that it had been many years since I entertained concerns about what to believe.

I do remember in my youth believing the religious dogma of the church I attended. As I changed churches, the beliefs changed. Each Church had it's own brand of God, it's own definition of reality.

Then in my thirties and forties I began to formulate my own personal beliefs regarding God, reality etc. These beliefs seemed to need almost constant upgrading in order to stay current with my actual experience. I realized that believing entails a struggle with definitions of God, the Universe, etc. Yet how can I expect to be able to define something so vast? It is like expecting a drop of water to be able to conceive of and define the ocean, when all it really knows is what it is to be a drop of water.

At some point I quit upgrading and just let go of believing. I let go into trusting my own experience of God, Life, and Reality. My spiritual life began in earnest.

To me, God is an experience. God is IT ~ the all-encompassing indescribable source of Myself. IT is the inner presence. Whatever description supports the relationship with the experiential reality is the workable symbol to use to deepen the relationship.

Each of us has our own distinct experience as well as our own name or symbol of it,

just like in the old story about the five blind men describing an elephant so differently because they are touching different parts: the tail, the trunk, the foot, the back etc,

Simple awareness of breathing is an entryway that connects me directly to God.

When I pay attention to my breath, I marvel at the presence, the source, the love, the huge power that gently initiates that inhale after the little pause that follows every exhale.

Simply being aware of my breath and the life that IT is giving me is always magical. IT is life-giving power, unfailing, ever new, ever changing.

When I am aware of the subtle dynamic movements of the breath and simultaneously present to a natural phenomenon, like the ocean surf, the wind singing through the leaves in a pine forest, or the sun dancing beams of light on the surface of a flowing river, then I intimately experience a vast connected unity. I experience of the inner breath and the outer phenomenon as One. They have the same source. It is an experience as tangible and obvious as the connection between the ground under my feet that gives me the support on which to stand. Being present within that Oneness is my experience of God.

It is not a belief. It simply IS and I am within It. The experience is Life, always new, always different. The chair I sit in and the ground I walk on, I can understand and describe. But the presence of that power, the source of my life, is too vast and inconceivable for me to understand or describe. How can I form a belief, a conviction, or opinion about IT without limiting what is beyond my understanding? But, I can KNOW my experience of it. A drop of water knows what water is without having any idea of what Ocean is.

My spiritual life is a relationship with this huge but gentle indefinable experience. IT is the relationship that enriches, creates priorities and gives value to everything in my life. IT is the experience that holds the space within which all the relatedness of my life happens. To believe in IT, is to believe in my life.

When we speak of believing in someone with whom we have a relationship, we are actually referring to trust, and trust is based on experience. My experience of God as Oneness has given me a trust in my life that I never had when God was a belief in the sense of a conviction that I held.

My experience of dynamic, ever alive and changing quality of Life, Oneness as God is a relationship with power that is creating my life. Through this relationship I experience myself as a co-creator of my life. The relationship is a creative process of the interconnected creative energies within me and all around me. Life is an amazing Creative Love Affair. It is not our beliefs about God -but our experience of the unity of the Love that we are, that has the power to change our world and to create a world of Peace.

We are currently living in a world torn by polarities in belief, creating opposing positions leading to endless war, destruction and human suffering on so many fronts. Isn't it is time to surrender our positional ideas of God or whatever our version is of the "Right Way? Whatever we believe is right is still a position that creates more polarity, more opposition and separation. How would our experience change if we let go of beliefs in right and wrong and just accepted the amazing diversity of life that is real both inside of us and outside of us? What if we began to let go of being right and began to directly experience the Oneness that connects us all at our Source?

It is time for the actual experience of this ever changing, dynamically alive, loving relationship available to us? Coming to know that power with in us is more fundamental than knowing the ground under our feet or the chair we sit in. As our awareness of the inner presence grows, our access to a world of Peace becomes inevitable.  Thankfully whatever choice we make is perfect in the moment whether we are able to see that now or not.  Each of us is always coming from the Love that we Are in this moment of our evolution, perfectly.

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