Books could only explain what other people supposed God might be. Even if they purported to be firsthand accounts from people who had experienced God, they were still the memories of someone else's experience set down in writing. They were not the experience itself. To experience God, if indeed there was a God to be experienced, was up to me. 10

The Zen teachers I studied with viewed the gods, demons, and their respective realms spoken of in Buddhist texts as primitive descriptions of what we' d now call psychological states. 13

And why would God care what I believed, anyhow? Why would that be important to God? That made no sense. 79

Joshu Sasaki Roshi, the Japanese Rinzai Zen teacher whom I quoted in the title of this book, said, "You are educated all your life to venerate God and reject evil. Zen education is totally different: it teaches you how to swallow God and the devil at once." 81

Some say you need the concept of past and 86 future lives in order to make the idea of karma work out. If everything we do has karmic consequences, then why do bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people? If those good people were bad in past lives and vice versa, it all works out. But this appears to me to be just wishful speculation and, as such, not very useful. I don't really see the need to believe in reincarnation in order to make the idea of karma plausible. When I've quietly observed my own real life I see it working all the time. I will come back to this idea a bit later. 86-87

In her book A Case for God Karen Armstrong explains that the evidence.
words faith and belief didn't always mean what they mean when used by mainstream Christians today. "The word translated as 'faith' in the New Testament," she says, "is the Greek psistis, which means trust; loyalty; engagement; commitment.' Jesus was not asking people to believe in his divinity because he made no such claim. He was asking for commitment."
The word belief, as contemporary English speakers use it, is the more 87 recent invention. Originally it meant something more like the Greek word psistis. Then it began to change. "In the seventeenth century," Armstrong says, "as our concept of knowledge became more theoretical, the word 'belief' started to be used to describe an intellectual assent to a hypothetical—and often dubious—proposition." Scientists and philosophers started to adopt it, thereby shaping the word's meaning into its current form. 88 87-88

My first Buddhist teacher, Tim McCarthy, used to say that to be a Buddhist you had to have an equal amount of doubt and faith. This, to me, is the key. If all you have is doubt you're likely to get cynical and give up. If all you have is faith you're likely to go off the deep end and believe all kinds of crazy stuff just because it's somehow appealing. 89

Buddha himself cautioned 90 against that in a famous speech known to us today as the Kalama Sutra. He said we should not go by what has been written in scripture or spoken by an authority figure. We need to see for ourselves what is true and what works. We need to learn from our own experience. 91 90-91

People worry far too much about the Westernization and modernization of Buddhism. For example, it's nice to have faithful versions of ancient Buddhist texts. But we also have to be aware that even the most faithful versions we produce are not faithful. Even if we read the texts in their original languages, we come from such a different place culturally that we still won't be able to understand what the people who wrote them meant exactly. The people who read those texts during the authors' lifetimes may not have fully understood what their writers meant. Our own language, English, didn't even exist at the time most of those texts were written.
McMahan, in fact, cites a passage by Jay Garfield regarding the subject of translation:

When we translate, we transform in all of the following ways: we replace terms and phrases with particular sets of resonances in their source language with terms and phrases with very different resonances in the target language; we disambiguate ambiguous terms, and introduce new ambiguities; we interpret, or fix particular interpretations of texts in virtue of the use of theoretically loaded expressions in our target language; we take a text that is to some extent esoteric and render it exoteric simply by freeing the target language reader to approach the text without a teacher; we shift the context in which a a text is read and used. 96

12. Sam Harris Believes in God

When a person has a deeply spiritual experience and tries to communicate that experience to others, she will use the language her culture has available to express it. Often the only words to be had are those created by the prevailing religion of the culture. When someone else who has had a similar experience hears these words, he might be able to relate to them at more or less the same level. But when someone who has not had such an experience hears these words he’s likely to completely misconstrue them. Or, worse yet, he’s likely to take them literally. X

Some religious people try to deal with their fear of the unknown and the unknowable by believing in what others have said and written about the unknowable in ancient books. Many in the atheist camp want to deal with their fear of the unknown and the unknowable by believing in what others have said about them in more recent books. If they believe that all spiritual experience is based on hallucinations or imbalanced brain chemistry, then they have nailed it and it is no longer unknown and, therefore, no longer scary. X

13. Morality and Karma

14. Does God Work Miracles in Brooklyn?

As for the reliability of scripture, one scripture I do believe is the one in which Buddha says, "Don’t believe in what is written in scripture." That’s in the Kalama Sutra, by the way. And I don’t believe it because Buddha said it. I believe it because it makes sense. 123

But the past and the future do exist. They exist right here, right now. We are the expression of our past, and our actions now create our future. Past and future are intimately present with us at this real moment. 128

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18. God Holds His Own Hand

Lots of psychotic people believe they understand layers of reality deeper than those accessible to ordinary people. And I think that in some cases they may be correct. But they've encountered these deeper levels of reality before acquiring the balance necessary to be able to navigate their way through the agreed-upon illusions human beings share. 164

But things in the real world are never really one way or another. It's only our brains that force us to see them like that. It's our brain's job to do this. But luckily our brains are also 164 able to accept things they don't really understand. This might be the true meaning of faith. 165 164-165

19. Hotline to Heaven

That's because there can never be a "next Beatles." The Beatles were a phenomenon that was intimately bound up with the times in which they appeared. Times change. 168

There can never be a next Buddha, either. All these people who claim to be the next Buddha are simply frauds. There will be no next Buddha and no Second Coming of Christ and no new Beatles. Look what happened when they tried to re-create the Star Wars phenomenon. So it's best to just drop the whole idea. 168

The idea that God has a living representative on Earth—the pope used to tascinate me as a kid. Since our friends the Kashangakis in Nairobi were Catholic I often wondered about the pope. Did he really know what God was thinking? Did he have a hotline to heaven? When I was a little kid, it seemed that things like that just might be possible.

Some popes with the same problem. They're no closer to God than The less delusional of the popes seem to know this. And yet they have to say something.

Buddhist monks understand that the full truth of the universe, or the actual nature of God, cannot possibly be put into words. Yet people keep asking them to do so, and it's their duty to answer. Even if the monk has some understanding of the underlying basis of reality, he won't be able to convey that to someone who has not put in the work to try and come to terms with her true nature. It's a losing battle. Still, the monk has to say something. 170

It's about how organizations try to claim God as their own. But this is nuts, because God cannot be owned. 171

In a way, God is the intellectual property of the church—at least the church in question's specific definition of God. . . . The church exercises control over who uses God and how he is presented, and they earn money from this usage. When someone uses God improperly the church doesn't sue, but they do often take action to stop or at least denounce that sort of usage. 172

But you can't really control God in this way. If you do, he's not God anymore. That kind of institutional control turns God into nothing more valuable than Mickey Mouse or Superman—or Ultraman. Mickey Mouse and Superman certainly do have some kind of value. But God is different. We need to allow people to create and define their own relationships with God. God is something different to each person who approaches him. When you try and standardize God, you end up with a dead God, stuffed and mounted, who might look beautiful but who can't do anything for anyone. 173

Perhaps I'm wrong in feeling that a structured organization isn't the best solution to the problem of keeping those who claim to be Zen teachers honest. I certainly know I'm in the minority.

And I may be wrong about God as well. 173

21. What God Wants From You

As you know, I have problems with words like emptiness and nirvana and Buddha nature and all the rest of them as they seem to be understood by contemporary Western Buddhists. These words are often taken by Western readers as things that happen in our heads. Even approaching a phrase like nonaffirming negative requires one to do some mental gymnastics just to get grip on what's being talked about. 175

We all have doubts and anxiety about what we ought to do with our lives. You do. I do. Contrary to what John says, I'm sure Jesus did too. Buddha did, and these doubts are often depicted in the sutras as the temptations of Mara, an evil Satan-like being. It would be nice to believe that there is a God somewhere out there, and if we could just ask him what we were supposed to do, he could give us an answer. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. don't think there is a God like that at all, even though I do believe in God. The synoptic gospels seem to be teaching us this lesson, while the Gospel of John wants us to believe in a savior who could be played by Bruce Willis or Chuck Norris. 178

In Zen we talk in terms of taking aim rather than achieving specific goals. You aim at the goal and let your arrow fly. Depending on your skills and luck your arrow might hit the target, or it might not. Even if you're the most skillful archer in the world, a sudden gust of wind could come along and redirect your arrow miles from the target. That's why even the best archers in the world can't guarantee that they'll always hit every target. 179

In terms of rules, I already talked about the ten Buddhist precepts that one is recommended to follow if one wants to live a happy life. Because they're so important, I'm gonna list them again here. They are I) Not to kill, 2) Not to steal, 3) Not to misuse sexuality, 4) Not to lie, 5) Not to cloud the mind with intoxicants, 6) Not to criticize others, 7) Not to be proud of oneself and slander others, 8) Not to covet, 9) Not to give way to anger, and 10) Not to slander Buddha, Buddhist teachings, or the Buddhist community.

These aren't rules you need to obey lest you face punishment from God—at least not in the usual sense. God is the universe. So you can 179 expect some kind of adverse reaction if you choose to go against what the universe wants. But there is no judge who sits on high and decides whether or not you have obeyed the law. Rather, the law of cause and effect works in the same way that grabbing a a burning bush to make it stop talking to you causes your hand to get burnt. And God is also you. So it's you dealing with yourself for what you know you did wrong.

The precepts seek to address the most common situations a person might face and provide the most common solutions to moral conundrums. Thus, if your intuition fails, your best bet is to follow the precepts. On the other hand, there may be rare times when breaking the precepts, at least as they are written, might actually be the more moral choice. 180 179-180

We also know from experience that we often get things completely wrong when we try and make predictions. We catalog the times we got things like this wrong into the box labeled "times I I failed to predict an outcome correctly." And if you're me, you write under that "because
I'm really stupid."

But it's not stupid at all. It's just normal. 181

But God isn't a guy just like us. He is, in fact, us. I know that loads of people get quite upset over the notion that we, ourselves, are God. This is because they have some very specific ideas of what God is, and obviously we are not like that.

So what do I mean when I make this absurd assertion? I mean that the universe, that is, God, manifests in as many ways as it can. Infinite ways. Forever. We are all part of the whole of this infinity. We are each of us infinite. Not in some future afterlife we are infinite right now. We as individuals are not the whole except in terms of the way we partake of the whole. We are limited. We live a while, and then we stop living. After that we do not return. These are contradictions. Life is full of them. Get used to it.

God, in my way of thinking, is not only omniscient and omnipresent. He is also just as stupid and limited as any of his manifestations. So while God knows exactly what he wants, he also doesn't know what he wants at all. That's precisely what makes him so omniscient. He even knows the feeling of deepest ignorance in all its possible manifestations. 182

Tim often talks about how God knows that God doesn't exist. Which is sort of like saying that there is no God and he is always with you. God doesn't want us to believe in God because God knows there is no God. Yet I believe in God anyhow. Go figure! God is knowledge as well as ignorance. Our contemporary Judeo-Christian culture can't handle such a contradiction. But there is evidence this wasn't always so. According to Elaine Pagels, in her book Revelations, in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, a a hymn called "Thunder, Perfect Mind" was discovered in which God says:

I am the honored one, I am the scorned one I am the whore and the holy one ...
I am the barren one, and many are her children.

Ambiguity is fundamental to the fabric of the universe. We are alive only because the universe insists that things be two ways at once. Or more than two. So in such a state of total ambiguity, how can we know what to do? 183

Intuition is the universe telling you what you really want to do. The problem is that we have 183 been touched since birth to drown out our intuition we thought before we can really even understand what does intuitions are.

The only way I know of to get in touch with what God wants is to be very, very, very quiet. This is not easy to do. You have been taught since birth to make your mind as noisy as possible. To sit down and shut up in other words, to do Zen practice or at least something like it takes a great deal of effort. But it's worth it.

So go ahead and do it, and see what God wants from you. 184 183-184

22. God Is Silence

n the book of Kings, verses 11 and 12, it says, "And, behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake: And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice."
I would say that the author of the book of Kings didn't take it quite far enough. Maybe God doesn't have a "still small voice." Maybe he has no voice at all. Maybe God is silence.
And yet if you're quiet enough you can learn to listen to silence, to listen to nothing, and to learn from nothing.
Most of the ways that Western culture has developed for relating to God are much too loud. We make a joyful noise unto the Lord, as the book of Psalms enjoins us. But our noise is too darned noisy for us to hear the reply. We can't hear the silence that underlies all that noise. Silence is contained in everything. And everything is contained in silence. When we are very quiet, we align ourselves with our own silence. You don't need to find perfect quiet in order to be with silence. Perfect quiet is a myth. I've been in isolated mountain temples in Japan where the cicadas were almost deafening, and I've been in 185 sensory-deprivation tanks in Canada where I I could hear people walking around on the floor above me. Perfect quiet doesn't happen on this planet. But silence is everywhere. Even in the noise of contemporary life there is always silence. Silence is here right now.
In the Dhammapada, Buddha says, "When one knows the solitude of silence, and feels the joy of quietness, one 1S then free from fear and sin and feels the joy of the dharma."
We've forgotten silence. We crave noise and stimulation. When we're not stimulated enough we feel unfulfilled, cheated. We get bored too easily, even with access to all sorts of excitement, literally right at our fingertips every second of every day. We've forgotten that all creativity arises from silence. And as Katagiri Roshi, the late head of the Minneapolis Zen Center, said, we need to return to silence. Perhaps the ultimate creation arose from the silence of the void. Perhaps our whole universe is God's dreaming in the silence. Tim McCarthy once said to me, "You share identity with all things and you are responsible for all things, and a natural love for all things just happens to be present and you recognize that." God is one, but God has infinite identities. God shares his identity with all of us, just as we share our identities with God. 186 185-186

God is not the possession of any religion. If anything, religion can be path away from God. God cannot be bound up inside churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples. Those are just community centers where people gather to hang out with their friends. God is no more to be found in those places than he is in rock clubs or back-alley bars. God is in the wilderness, and God is in the city. Everywhere you go God is there. God walks with you. God is you, and God is the very act of walking.

When Americans start talking nonsense about putting God back into our schools or insisting that our nation is more "under God" than any other, it makes me ill. That kind of God is just a warped fanThe kind of God that hates homosexuals or glories in violence is absurd. Thankfully, he'll be gone soon maybe not soon enough. But he isn't going to be with us much longer. Thank God! It may not seem that way now. But when we look at the broad sweep of history, we see that the more fanatical believers in God have been losing ground for centuries. Sure, there may be a few in Congress now. But they used to run entire continents! 187

When we forget God we make as big mistake as we do when we insist that our concept of God is the only one that matters. When we forget God we treat one another and the world we live in as objects. We fail to recognize that whenever we harm someone else or the world we live in, we only harm ourselves.

Of course, some people don't like to use the word God, and that's perfectly understandable. The word God has been abused for centuries and continues to be abused. I'd like it if there was a better word, but so far I haven't found one. No other word is big enough or divisive enough to do the job. God is too huge to be called anything but God. And God demands too much of us to be called by any name that politely tiptoes around all the ugly morass of differing opinions about his nature. 188