Growing Zen

*all quotations from Thich Nhat Hanh, Going Home*

Thich Nhat Hanh has a great saying: "The finger is not the moon." That is, the thing that points towards something is not that thing itself. Picture being outside. You don't see the moon. Your companion does, so they use their finger to point toward the moon, to draw your attention to the right area in the sky so you can see it. The pointing finger is invaluable in getting you to see the moon, but you don't mistake the finger as the moon. You abandon the finger and look at the moon.

The same goes for God or the Divine or ultimate reality whatever it is you know or experience. We can use human concepts to get us closer to understanding God, but those are fingers. They are not God as God is, just ways for helping us understand God. If we cling to these concepts, we're going to get it wrong. If we mistake these concepts for the ultimate definition of God, we'll actually end up further away from God, because "my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your way my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts" (Isaiah 55:8-9). And if you cling to these concepts, these notions, and you hang all of your faith on them, and they're inevitably inadequate, not only have you set up a false god for yourself, you're going to end up with a heck of a crisis of faith, because sooner or later, these fingers will be revealed as not, in fact, being the moon. Having your religious or spiritual convictions and paradigms proven wrong tends to be utterly traumatic. “We have so many wrong notions and ideas; it is dangerous to believe in them, because someday we may find out that that idea is a wrong idea, that notion is a wrong notion, that perception is a wrong perception. People living with a lot of wrong perceptions, ideas, and notions, and when they invest their life in them it is dangerous." (Thay)

“When you have faith, you have the impression that you have the truth, you have insight, you know the path to follow, to take. And that is why you are a happy person. But is it a real path, or just the clinging to a set of beliefs? These are two different things. True faith comes from how the path you are taking can bring you life and love and happiness every day. You continue to learn so that your happiness and your peace, and the happiness and peace of the people around you, can grow. You don’t have to follow a religious path in order to have faith. But if you are committed to only a set of ideas and dogmas that may be called faith, that is not true faith. We have to distinguish. That is not true faith, but it gives you energy. That energy is still blind and can lead to suffering; it can cause suffering for other people around you. Having the kind of energy that can keep you lucid, loving, and tolerant is very different from having energy that is blind.  You can make a lot of mistakes out of that kind of energy. We have to distinguish between true faith and blind faith. That is a problem in every tradition. ...

If you call yourself a Buddhist [and I would replace “Buddhist” with whatever your religion is] but your faith is not made of insight and direct experience, then your faith is something to be re-examined. Faith here is not faith in just a notion, an idea, or an image. When you look at a table, you have a notion about the table, but the table might be very different from your notion. It’s very important that you get a direct experience of the table. Even if you don’t have a notion of the table, you have the table. The technique is to remove all notions in order for the table to be possible as a direct experience.”
(Thich Nhat Hanh, Going Home, bits from pages 71-82)

Story time :) 

1. When I was little, we had the Sunday School lesson about Jesus walking on the water. I think I was five years old. The next time we went to the beach, I decided I would walk on the water. I had faith. That's all you needed, because Peter started falling when his faith wavered. So, completely confident, my faith filling, suffusing my body throughout my limbs and torso and swelling my throat, I stepped into the waves.

And my foot went straight through the water to the sand below.

Maybe I wasn't deep enough. I tried again, further out, summoning the overwhelming sensation of faith, and stepped forward again.

My foot hit the sand. It kept hitting sand. I never did walk on the water.

2. About a year later, we had a lesson on how God hears and answers our prayers. I know it's a perennial topic, so I'd heard it many times before. But this time I was taken with the desire to "experiment upon the word" for myself. So, the lesson went, if you had enough faith and listened hard enough, you'd get an answer to any prayer. I went home and knelt on my bedroom floor and racked my brain for a question I wanted answered. I was a huge dinosaur fan and my mom had recently shattered my world by suggesting that maybe dinosaurs didn't actually live on the earth, that maybe a T-rex hadn't actually stepped right where my desk was at school. So I decided I would ask for the truth of what had happened to the dinosaurs. I called up that suffusive sensation of faith and prayed clearly and waited for what felt like forever for a voice to come out of the heavens to tell me what the deal was with my beloved dinosaurs. I never heard a voice. I never got an answer.

I shared those two stories to illustrate the kind of literal kid I was. I don't know if it is my natural inclination to be literal, or if it was the way in which these lessons on faith were simplified for kids my age, or what. But I also transferred this same literalness to my understanding of God. Somehow, in the emphasis on a personal and knowable God I had growing up, I had developed this concept that God was some guy who was somehow immortal and somehow lived in some fixed point in space called heaven and somehow created and controls the entire universe. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for a personal and knowable God. But somehow the idea got simplified and "notionalized" for me, and I didn't have any of the divine mystery of God in my concept of God. So, ironically, I felt farther and more isolated from God, because I was looking at God too literally in my human understanding.

Living Faith

If "your faith is not made of insight and direct experience, then your faith is something to be re-examined. Faith here is not faith in just a notion, an idea, or an image. When you look at a table, you have a notion about the table, but the table might be very different from your notion. It’s very important that you get a direct experience of the table. Even if you don’t have a notion of the table, you have the table. The technique is to remove all notions in order for the table to be possible as a direct experience.” (Thay)

So the thing for me is to study as much as I can, to see the table from as many points of view as possible, to help me to create the most complete picture. But personal experience of God, of the divine, is the most important.  "In the teaching of the Buddha, faith is made of a substance called insight or direct experience. When a teacher knows something, he or she wants to transmit that to disciples. But she cannot transmit the experience, she can only transmit the idea. The disciple has to work through it by himself. The problem is not to communicate the experience in terms of ideas or notions. The issue is how to help the disciple go through the same kind of experience. For instance, you know how a mango tastes, and you may like to try to describe the taste of the mango, but it is better to offer the disciple a piece of mango so that he can have a direct experience." (Thay) 

If we cling to notions, to snapshots of the actual thing, rather than going back to the thing itself and experiencing it over and over, we stagnate. We cling to something that is not real, that does not promote real, living faith. If you have one concept of God and say, “This is it. This is all there is. This is exactly how and what and why God is,” you’ve replaced God with a snapshot. Actually, more like a sketch that you drew yourself. And that sketch is elevated to the status of a false god, if it takes the place of your seeking to continue to experience God Himself. Your certainty keeps you from experiencing God. And really, who can definitively say exactly what God is? God’s ways are not man’s ways. We have a very limited understanding through a very mortal lens. We see through a glass darkly, as it were. So, to a mortal mind, the divine will always defy description. God is not to be bound be mere words. I think that’s important to remember. It would save a lot of bad feeling of people arguing about how they see God.