If we intend to promote a spiritually nourishing way of looking at life, then we need to start by agreeing on some of the basics.
“What do workers gain from their toil? I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live. That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of God.” (Ecclesiastes 3: 9-13, NIV)
According to most religious thinking, one might say all mainstream Western and most Eastern, we come into this world from somewhere. That “somewhere” is the Source to which we ultimately return. The Source is infinite and the world we are born into is finite. Between the two is an infinite gap. It is why no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. To say that we are radically separated from our Source is the ultimate understatement, as there can be no larger gap than an infinite one. By its nature, there cannot even be words to define it. Words and thoughts are hopelessly finite.
Whether we’re talking about people or ping pong balls, the same applies: A finite set contains a portion of the infinite set. No matter how big that finite set is, the portion that’s not included is still infinite. Hence, the infinite gap.
So what can we definitively say about the infinite while here in the world? Nothing. There is nothing we can say that will fully capture a single aspect of infinity. Does this mean that talking about God is pointless? Of course not. We’ve been talking about the Great Spirit—probably for as long as humans have been talking. It’s so universally ingrained in us that we can only conclude that the wonderings about a reality that exists just beyond the detection of our five senses must happen for a reason. Understanding what that reason is goes a long way in defining what makes us human. We do, however, need to recognize that a central fact of our existence is that our best efforts at discussing it are merely analogies.
It is the very perspective of Infinite Wisdom that we cannot begin to fathom. We can only see the ultimate reality of being, “through a glass, darkly” (KJV). While we can, for example, say, “God is love”, we only do this with the understanding that we fall infinitely short in intellectually understanding what that means. We might gain a deeper understanding through mystical experiences, but these go beyond words and therefore defy explanation. The mystic cannot explain enlightenment to one who has not experienced it. Like a tadpole trying to understand what it’s like to live on land, it can only be explained by the frog in negative terms:
“Do you swim?”
“No.”
“Do you breathe water?”
“No.”
We are hopelessly, albeit temporarily, “stuck” in the finite. While the best we can do is analogies, they are essential! We need to share them as best we can—partly for the sake of our individual relationships with the Divine, but also because of our collective relationship. We depend on language to talk about things we have in common as God’s creatures and, most importantly, how these commonalities can be used to guide our earthly lives.
The words “creation” and “universe” are important to both religion and science. In religion they are place markers, and scientifically they might be misnomers. Matter may have always existed, so there may be no beginning, no creation. (Not to promote a fundamentalist interpretation, but Genesis doesn’t expressly say that God created the heavens and the earth “ex nihilo”, or out of nothing. It talks about the “face of the deep” and “murky waters” but says nothing about where they came from.) So while “Creator” is a place marker, we might one day throw it over as erroneous. Likewise, there may be an infinite number of universes, which kind of contradicts the prefix.
“Infinity” is also a label we stick on something that’s beyond our comprehension. The mysteries of the mind of the Deity become a cornerstone for faith. Faith takes over where comprehension ends. The case we’ll be making here is that this gap is by design. It is how and why we were created. Seeing it this way shifts the discussion of why we are separated from a perspective of blame to one that simply accepts the nature of being; it is a physiological fact that the human brain is irrevocably stuck with finitude.
Mainstream Christian dogma says that our alienation from the Source comes from choice; we decided to separate ourselves from the Divine, resulting in man’s fall from Grace. If you prefer this analogy that is perfectly fine, so long as you can manage to believe that without it leading to damaging practices as it does for so many who choose to focus on judgment . . . but we’ll get to that.
Seeing the infinite gap as a defining feature of man’s relationship with God will be our paradigm.
When we start with this and apply simple logic, so much just falls into place, making plain the mistakes made by various religions and religious thinkers. Let us make then, the infinite gap a cornerstone for our discussion.
“We are not physical beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a physical experience.” (Various attributions)
We are given three tools which are the tools of wisdom and serve as bridges. They are connectors between the world and pure Spirit. The first is the words of others. The second is the innate understanding that lies within each of us. And the third is the mystical experience.
The words of others are our starting point. For those raised in religious traditions they are the first lessons, marking the beginnings of our spiritual journeys. These lessons come from authority figures like parents and teachers, as well as through the sacred texts of the traditions we are born into. Before we begin the passage to adulthood, most of us have not developed enough to form our own perspectives.
Passages to adulthood begin around puberty. In many cultures they are marked with rituals and initiation rites: from the Hebrew bar and bat mitzvahs to confirmation in Christian traditions, to the sometimes brutal tribal ordeals that still take place in parts of the world today. All of these serve the same psychological purpose; they mark the passage from dependency on parents and caregivers to becoming adult members of society. While the rites of passage coincide with the beginnings of being able to think for ourselves, the extent to which individual thinking is encouraged or even tolerated can vary greatly from one culture to the next—not to mention between families within those cultures.
The mystical experience is the jumping-off point between the finite and the infinite. The term encompasses a broad range, from Hindu enlightenment to an individual’s sudden and unexpected glimpses or “aha moments.” Mystical experiences transcend words and will not be discussed much here. This is not to understate their importance. It is in taking us beyond the shackles of our finite brains that mystical experiences have power. But this is also why we cannot define or even effectively describe them.
Whether we’re talking about people or ping pong balls, the same applies: A finite set contains a portion of the infinite set. No matter how big that finite set is, the portion that’s not included is still infinite. Hence, the infinite gap.
Our focus will be on our finite thoughts and words and how they shape the world around us. Logic serves, in an infinitely small yet immensely important way, to enable us to bridge the gap.
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