Prayer

I was a man of prayer. In time, as my "beliefs" became less concrete, I knew that I did not know. The more knowledge that I gained the more I realized that I really knew nothing at all. And I also began to realize that I was not alone in this realization. I found it to be a very universal rung on the well traveled spiritual ladder. As Lewis Carroll once quipped, "If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there."
Prayer began to cease as I found that I no longer knew who or what to pray to. Almighty God, Heavenly Father, Lord Jesus? It felt so woefully inadequate. My view of God became more like that of the experience of Tao:

The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named is not the eternal name
The nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth
The named is the mother of myriad things
Thus, constantly without desire, one observes its essence
Constantly with desire, one observes its manifestations
These two emerge together but differ in name
The unity is said to be the mystery
Mystery of mysteries, the door to all wonders

What name could be named?


I began to pray like breath; natural and rhythmic. My prayers were built of gratitude, of asking for wisdom and compassion.  I did not question the vehicle of my transcendence. For doing so would be like stopping mid-dance in an attempt to investigate my dance moves. Or like stopping a song only to concentrate on a single note. Oh my delusion! Prayer? God?


Many mornings, as the sun rose over the trees and the birds began to move with the unseen rhythm of the day, I would find myself singing a doxology; 

Praise God, from whom all blessings flow

Praise him, all creatures here below.

Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

Amen, Amen.

I sang free of belief and with the sheer joy of it. It illuminated something within me. Saying that you believe in God or saying that you are an atheist are just two sides of the same coin. Both are belief. Yet there is that which exists beyond the limits of belief: it is a knowing. And you know that you know. It is a realization that lies beyond description and belief.


Is this God? Tao? It's laughable! Do you need to name it?

As Krishnamurti said, "I maintain that truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. This is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead ot to coerce people along any particular path. If you first understand that, then you will see how impossible it is to organize a belief. A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallized; it becomes a creed, a sect, a religion, to be imposed on others".