We sIn when I is at the centre

Went to Christian service at St Helen's, Bishopsgate, London yesterday with my sister. Was very happy with the sermon. He explained that we sin when we put ourselves at the centre of the world. More exactly he continued that sin whenever we put anything other than God at the centre.

That made complete sense given what I was discovering in the previous post. Whenever we place a distinct entity at the centre of our world be it an image of ourselves, or someone else, or some material desire then we become trapped by the world and we are hidden from the truth which is that there is no distinct form to ourselves. That formless self they call Buddha in Buddhism, and God in the other religions.

The lesson for God religions to learn from Buddhism then is to resist giving God an image, because that simply reduces him to a thing in this world - and all "things" were made by God. God must remain formless and beyond our imagination for us to even begin to apprehend Him.

Buddhists might do well to remember this also, since they are just as liable to replace the formless with ideas about the state of Buddhahood and how to attain it. In meditation we are always told to ignore the inner states - there is no such thing as successful/unsuccessful meditation as long as we meditate. Even if we attain all the Jhanas, I suspect we are no better off if we attach to them formally as "Jhanas"!

The insidious rot that sets into God religions from forming opinions about "Who" their God is, is the very cause of all the conflict and problems we associate with religion. To believe that Our God is in any way identifiable and therefore distinguishable from any other god is to place him amongst gods and so defeat the whole idea of Monotheism. There can only be One God because anything which stood in opposition to Other Gods would not be God. No believer in God can ever therefore say that their God is different from that of another believer without being a non-believer!

The problem of course arises when prophets claim to represent God because then we have a form to place upon God, and in so doing our faith falls from being toward The Creator toward an object of creation. If Words come to represent God they too become false idols too. Any Form that we hold up as representing God is automatically a blasphemy because all things are created by God and so All things represent Him.

Scheptics will say what a load of rubbish because god doesn't exist so it doesn't matter. But that is not such an easy claim. While the religious heretics look form some evidence for God, a shape or thing which proves his existence or some worldly manifestion which they can attribute to God in someway, the atheists do the opposite and try to show that all the things which exist have nothing to do with God.

When will people on both sides learn that God is formless. There is no thing which points toward God, nor points away from God. Evidence is not the point. It is that there is a world in the first place, the place where we find we can investigate and squabble over the matter to begin with, that is God.

We are conditioned at this point to trip off into imagining the Big-Bang etc ad nauseam. Its a nice theory - it fits the facts, I don't doubt it is true, but its answering the wrong question! The question is how did scientists come about in the first place so that they might investigate and theorise the Big-bang? That we can't explain!

Imagine that we could explain how the Big-bang gave rise to scientists and therefore science. The theory would then explain how it came about - that's a chicken and egg. Either the Big-Bang came first and then created scientists and science to explain the Big-Bang, or Scientists and science came first and provided the explanation by which the Big-Bang might operate. Of course we know the "real" Big-bang came first, and we also therefore know that it all happened long before science and that the efforts of science to come up with a "fictional" Big-bang will always fall short of fully-wrapping up the mystery of where the universe came from. Any theory that could do this would be meaningless - personally I call it the fundamental universal priciple "Q". Which means nothing because its so fundamental. Everything depends upon "Q" but the cost of depending upon nothing itself, is that it is meaningless.

So where does God come in? When u realise that the human mind is incapable of a complete explaination of the universe, it then follows that the universe is not supported upon the pillars of rational understandable laws. Those laws are, at root, quite ineffectual for substantiating the universe - what afterall do they depend upon... ad infinitum. The truth is that the universe is supported by a miraculous mystery - It Just Is There Right Here, Right Now! That mystery is God and He has no shape or form and there is nothing to say about Him other than he sustained the whole universe Right Now. If that mystery ever shines into your life, even if only for a second - that is true Living, and that is what it means to have God at the centre and to be sinless.