The Skeptical Mystic

        To see the face of godforms was only one type of experience; it did not count in my mission to ‘see the Face of God’.  I could remember moments of feeling one with the universe, being one with God, touching the Divine, etc. (I’ve spoken of some of these before).  Any of these experiences should have made me a content little mystic, willing to settle down into the harmony and comfort of my inner knowledge.

        Yet I was not content. Some inner urging kept pushing me forward, demanding some level of awareness not yet experienced. ‘Seeing the Face of God’ would not involve involvement with Christ or Buddha or Krishna.  It would not be any godform that would signal the end of my search; I wanted to see the Form of the Formless.  Only that experience would satisfy my spiritual craving.

        Gads, what hubris.  Any sane person would be content to have had a single experience and here I was casting aside handfuls of intense spiritual encounters.  Could I be so ungrateful?  In truth, I wasn’t really that insensitive.  Each experience had been precious and wondrous; I cherished the memory of each and every encounter.  Were it possible to exchange all traces of just one of these previous encounters to obtain a single new experience, I would have agonized, unwilling to mark any as unworthy of holding in my heart.  Yet, there remained an unquenchable thirst to know more of the Divine, the Absolute.

         To see the Form of the Formless is often defined by religions as being an impossibility; Humans cannot grasp the totality of the divine.  Some myths tell of humans being burned to cinders by the sight of the divine in its true form.  I was already aware of the Jewish story of rabbis who died or were driven insane when finally allowed to see the true form of the divine.

         Intellectually, I wondered how one would see something without form? If you could perceive something before you, beyond your awareness, even in some invisible form, would that not remove it from the category of formlessness? How would you know you had perceived something if the human mind contained no images or references with which to record the experience? There would be no ‘inside versus outside’, no ‘this versus that’, there could be no division between ‘the form and the formless’.

        I had no idea how I would find the path to this goal, nor how I would know if or when I succeeded. There may be warnings about attempting this spiritual journey, but there were no guidelines.  What a strange goal—to throw away the contentment of all my past encounters, to throw away the traditional life of a mystic, just to seek an unknown, one that most likely would never be discovered.

        I think this may be one of the hardest parts of a spiritual journey.  There is a tendency to stop and rest once you’ve reached a milestone.  To continue moving forward in higher realms means throwing away many of the techniques and theories you relied on to reach earlier insights. It means going back to the mind-set that you don’t know anything. You move forward in darkness, resorting again to blind faith to uncover something beyond your comprehension.  When I hit those pivotal points in my life, I can never decide if it is arrogance on my part that cannot accept the blessings already given, or courage to turn and step once again into the unknown.