The Power of Remaining Agnostic

"The only freedom is to find our composure in the truth of impermanence."

This is a quote from Suzuki Roshi, a Japanense Zen teacher who taught here in the US for decades, in the mid/later part of the 20th century.

I've been reflecting on it for years now, letting it wash over me, testing its truth, over and over and over.

And since having two children--one of whom is fresh out of the womb--I sit with it on an even more unbearable level.

When I look back at some of the more embarrassing habits I have engaged in during the course of my life, I can see pretty clearly that I was just trying to avoid this level of insight into impermanence. Obsessive exercising, weird eating habits, casual dating without commitment for most of my romantic life until about 30 ... I was afraid. Afraid of losing my youth, afraid of losing control, and afraid of loving something or someone so much that I wouldn't be able to bear it.

Getting married was already hard enough. I felt all of my fears of abandonment pop up, and watched myself try and push my husband away, even in small ways, from day one of our relationship. "You can go if you want," was always my attitude. "I'm totally cool. I'm good, all alone, thank you very much." But underneath the armor there was a deeper pain--the one that gets closer to the core of that quote. Something like, "I am so scared of loving you; I am scared of needing you, I'm scared of being dependent." And then, beneath that layer, another one: "I am needy. I am interconnected. I cannot live this life in isolation. I need you. Even though you are not in my control."

I did a lot of therapy to get from those outer layers to the inner one. But having children took me even further--another layer there to face. This one has churned inside of me since I laid eyes on my daughter the morning she was born, gasping in awe, feeling like my breath had actually been taken away from me. I was floored by the level of love. This layer started eating away at my defenses to loving completely. It asked of me, "Can you love something completely, with every cell of your body, while letting it go every day?" Oh god. Can I? My daughter is growing up so fast. It is amazing and unbearable to watch it all unfold. I look longingly at her baby photos and videos, wondering where all the time has gone. I watch her walk away from me into the arms of teachers and friends, totally trusting the world, ready to find more. Can I just love her and let her go?

Now, as I hold my newborn son, I have further insight into how quickly this period goes by. I savor each moment with him, watching him change not just daily but hourly. Can I just love him and let him go, too?

I have to ... but it is so hard. Every moment it brings up more to be released. It calls in more toleration of deep, rich love. It peels back layers of fear and resistance, calling me into more of myself, beyond any control, beyond my self-identity and into an ocean that is fully outside of my own control.

To me, the quote is all about touching into these kinds of spaces. As humans, we have a much larger capacity to feel than we often allow for ourselves (and often we are never taught how to tolerate and even embrace this kind of feeling life).

So now we get on to the "spiritual path" and its place in all of this.

As a young adult, I voraciously studied Buddhism and even adopted a meditation practice and a meditation teacher, eager to dive right in to the spiritual life. I liked Buddhism because it did not tell me who I had to be, or what I had to believe. It just asked me to sit, quietly, with myself, and see what happened. "Be a lamp unto yourself," the Buddha said to his students while he was dying. "Trust in your own experience--don't take what I say to be true. Test it out for yourself."

Even though I really didn't understand a lot of what Buddhism was trying to teach me, I somehow kept yearning for the practices. I just wanted to sit there and find out.

And now, decades later, I see that what all that sitting on a cushion has done for me, finally, is that it taught me to be with all of this intensity without running away. To me, remaining agnostic means that we are willing to sit in the fire of our experiences, without running away from them into addiction or even into theorizing about what they mean.

A lot of what I have been exposed to in religious traditions is just another coping strategy--a way to "make sense in our minds" of the raw, unbearable mystery that is our embodied, messy human life. Looking back, I have even used Buddhism to "cope" in this way (as in, "I can just go meditate and it will all be ok"). But do we really know who we are, or what happens when we die, or what this all means?? Like, really??

As a math professor, the thing I enjoy the most about math is the certainty. If a student wants to argue with me, I really don't have to take it personally, and I don't have to defend anything. The truth is just sitting there, clear as day, through each logical step.

But other than hard, raw math, there have not been many things that I have agreed with as "true" in my life. Even the sciences are revised as we discover new things, or when new genius minds come along and create brand new paradigms through which to view reality (quantum physics, anyone??).

My path is one of an agnostic. I choose, moment by moment, to remain open to what comes next, without adopting any of my thoughts, beliefs, or theories to be the end-all-be-all about any of it. It is a hard road at times, but I realize now that I cannot live my life any other way. And there are not many truisms on this path, so an agnostic has to sit with a lot of uncertainty.

But the truth of impermanence seems to be a clear one. There is no arguing that we will all die, and that everything changes, grows, decays, blossoms, in its own time, forever. But we can only know this by paying attention, and witnessing the change on more and more subtle levels. It's so much deeper than what we think, always.

So when someone tells me that being agnostic has anything to do with "whether or not you believe in God," I choose to think that it's actually a lot more subtle than that. In fact, what if being willing to not know whether there is a God--or to know anything at all about what any of our experience ultimately means--brings us closer and closer to any experience of "God" or divinity in the first place, if there is one? I don't feel like we have to conclude, with our minds, whether or not there is anything at all.

To me, the path of the agnostic is just one of being willing to take a leap into experience, without knowing, again and again and again, all the way up until we die ... and maybe beyond (we shall see!).