The Mystery of Happiness

How to live a soulful and spiritual life.

T. Byram Karasu, M.D. is Silverman Professor of Psychiatry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. See full bio

July 30, 2009, Social Life

Believing the Unbelievable

Believing the Existence of God in the form of Absence

When someone quotes the old poetic image about clouds
gradually uncovering the moon, slowly loosen knot
by knot the strings of your robe.
Like this?
If anyone wonders how Jesus raised the dead,
don't try to explain the miracle.
Kiss me on the lips.
Like this, like this.

-- Jalalu'l-Din Rumi

Since the Divine Being is a revelation of the ultimate Self that dwells within us all, communion with God should be undertaken as a meditation on one's own immanent divinity, not as of literal imitation. If God meets you only from without and not from within, then you have God outside and not in your soul. Sometimes Christ has been imitated without the imitator coming anywhere near the ideal or its meaning; superficial and false believers have turned God into an external object of worship. But it is this very veneration of the object that prevents us from reaching into the depths of our soul and transforming it into a deeply spiritual wholeness. If God remains an external image, we remain untouched within the deepest part of ourselves. Happy, says Louis Pasteur, is he who bears God within.

Even a good-faith imitation of God changes a man, and may slowly prepare him for true wholeness. In either case, the genuine experience of God is always a slow process. As Zen Master Shunryu Suzuki tells us:

Even though you try very hard, the progress you make is always little by little. It is not like going out in a shower in which you know when you get wet. It is more like being in a fog, you do not know you are getting wet, but as you keep walking you get wet little by little.

T. Byram Karasu, MD is the author of The Art of Serenity