Author: Scott

At sixteen, a direct encounter with the non-dual nature of reality changed the entire orientation of my life. I hold a PhD in Asian Comparative Studies with a focus in Indian Philosophy of Religion, and have spent thirty years as both a scholar and practitioner across the Vajrayāna Buddhist, Trika Śaiva, and contemplative traditions. I founded the Institute of Abiding Bliss to make that depth of wisdom genuinely accessible to anyone willing to look more closely at their own awareness.

space

These thoughts you so ardently hold — clutching them with rapacious greed, identifying them as […]

By Scott

language is impotent: a musing on god

This article was prompted by a simple question on a spring afternoon.

The statements in quotation marks were from the person who posed the question. The pieces parts without quotations are my responses.
My friend surveyed anyone willing to answer:
“What is your personal definition of God.”
Perhaps this is an important inquiry and meaningful quest. I pretend it is. I’ve assigned profound significance to the question and the search. Since my earliest memory, the excavation of God has been the object of my devotion.
Is meeting one’s object of inquiry, devoid of one’s own projections, possible? Perhaps a true encounter with the object of inquiry occurs solely via these projections.
Playfully I have looked. Through the eyes of a practitioner I have observed. As an academic I have studied.
I would not, intentionally, claim to know anything beyond that which I have seen and experienced. Presently, that is all I may offer. The divinity, God, This, Consciousness, Self — the sounds utilized are inconsequential. This will not be imprisoned by linguistic cages or disabled with description. The ephemeral and perpetual lie of thought circumambulates rather than dissects.
My search has not brought me any God. Everything uncovered persistently reveals I know nothing.
“Can you summarize it into just a few words?” she asked.
God cannot be known through conventional means.
“Through unconventional means?”
By conventional I mean it will not be apprehended or explained with thought or words. This is impossible. Neither language nor thought have the capacity to capture such profound emptiness. I must be abundantly clear: I lack the ability to present an absolute truth, or any truth whatsoever.
I may only attempt to point to what I have experienced of This — that which lies beyond thought and form.
Following forty years of persistent, passionate inquiry, what was uncovered was this: God, or whatever label mind attempts to pin on it, evades mind’s voracious thirst to enslave anything it apprehends.
Here, language is impotent.
What is experienced of God may only be acquiesced through silence and space.
There is only nothing to be known.