A story of life’s meaning is none other than thought. Thought is not reality. The fact that thinking happens is. In reality, thought is none other than thinking. All that is known of thinking is the knowing of it. All that is known of knowing is that knowing happens. Knowing simply is. Is-ness simply knows. Knowing is being. Being knows. If there is any true meaning to be found, it will be found in wordless knowing, not in word-based stories.
If God created everything and us, who is ultimately responsible for it and us all? Did we choose to be created? Did we ask to have life? No. We could not since we were not. Thus, if God chose to create us, he owes it to us for everything. Yet, all God stories point to us as the problem, the source of our suffering.
But if God is all perfect, all just, all loving, all knowing and all powerful as he claims to be or others claim him to be, why should we be the problem? Why is it that the creation of a perfect God is so imperfect as to sin and fall and deserve condemnation, pain, despair, and eventually eternal damnation if we fail to believe in him? And why so much suffering, conflict, and destruction in this decrepit decaying world, when all could have been prevented by a fiat of God’s will?
Theologians armed with their theodicies have tried to justify all this suffering and imperfection for centuries without success, having wasted much paper and ink and contributing to carbon emissions in the process. Only the free will defence deserves a mention but even then it is hardly persuasive—how could an all knowing, all loving, all powerful God allow for so much devastation for billions of creatures for thousands of not billions of years? In the end, more stories to justify or defend previous stories fail to convince.
Stories born of thought are not reality. The fact that stories are being made is. One who questions relentlessly and ruthlessly in honesty must go beyond stories to touch the truth beyond words. Only then can any conviction worth its salt be established, not by self-will or effort but by grace, purely.
Grace from beyond that is pure revelation. What grace reveals is not a story born of thought. If so, it is no better than self-made delusion or fantasy. How many so-called God believers really know what they claim to believe? Who knows? But for you and I, perhaps this journey of unrelenting inquiry might evoke something priceless beyond measure. Will you begin?
