The Uncreated?

Follow my ways and I will lead you
To golden-haired suns,
Logos and music, blameless joys,
Innocent of questions
And beyond answers.
For I, Solitude, am thine own Self:
I, Nothingness, am thy All.
I, Silence, am thy Amen.

~ Thomas Merton

So lovely.

Mujer Saliendo del Agua 
 by Leopoldo Gonzalez

For so long I swam in that Space Merton talks of.  It felt cleansing and purifying and all the other words advertising agencies like to use to describe skin care products.  Issues of ideology or theology aside - I am talking here simply about presence and communing with that, innocent of questions and beyond answers.

But then I started asking this one particular question, and it kept growing and growing until it got so big that it started clouding out that innocence and exploded like an airbag until it felt like there was nothing left.  I started thinking, "What if this 'presence' is something other than Source, the Uncreated?  How do I know that this ... whatever I commune with, that feels like though it's in me is in some ways not-me even though it is not separate from me - how do I know that that thing is not a created being itself?"

It seems such a silly thing, writing it down here, sort of childish.  But regardless, that is the question that I asked, and it has muddied the waters for a lot of years now.  It's perhaps a reflection of my pyroluric tendency towards greater levels of paranoia now I'm dealing with the whole premenopause thang (I can't believe that menopause is still something that is not spoken of, or if it is, it's still considered something that women need to "get over".  But I digress).

De la cintura pa' bajo, de las rodillas pa'rriba by Leon Ricardo

More likely that question I asked - who is this Source I am dealing with? - is a particularly fine question, I don't know.  But it stopped me swimming.

If the God I have been communing with is anything existing independently outside of myself, then that leads to the possibility that it is a created being itself.  And then that means I cannot trust it anymore.  Because a created unknown being is a finite being and from my perspective here, feels far more unknowable than an uncreated being that is infinite.  Even though on another level, the first would be far easier to understand than the second.  But a created being is capable of evil.

I don't know if I am making any sense.  I am open to the idea that there are many other beings in the universe apart from us.  I think that many of our religious texts (for example, the Old Testament) could quite possibly be accounts of encounters with those beings.  It makes total sense when you read them in that way.  And it also explains why the god of the Old Testament seems almost like a split personality.  Maybe s/he is!?

Blessed Are the Poor For They Shall See God
by Kathryn Cook Hernandez

Last night I talked to that "God", because I miss communing with them.  The communing goes on inside of myself, and it's the whole world puffed out on my insides, and it grounds me in a way that I have been missing.  I talked to that "God" in the hope that they are Source. Thinking that the idea that used to frustrate me so much - that of God being an invisible being, unseen, uncreated - is really the only palatable choice.  It is the only way to be able to trust that space that feels like I am most fully myself, that feels like it is a combination of me and the universe.  Conscious consciousness. 

I miss the swim.  It's like swimming in the dark.  It adds an extra 193,000 shades of depth to every colour.  It floods me with innocence.  I communed with that unknown last night and it was like a five-minute delve into bliss and homecoming.  I do not think I can resist going back for another swim, even if I still don't quite trust the origins of the water.