A meditation on divine existence
I was raised in an all boys Catholic school and by a devout Catholic family, but I don’t think there had been a day in my life that I didn’t question God. Even now, I still question why God has to be capitalized—I mean it’s not a proper noun, the name of an individual, place, or organization. I’m not even sure God has a gender, if God is a “He” or a “She” or an “It” or a “They,” and, yeah, some people make a big deal of that. I don’t, but I trust that John Lennon wasn’t really off the mark when he said that God wasn’t “an old man in the sky.” I think God is so much bigger a deal than that, more all-encompassing. I mean you can’t be omnipresent if, like a normal human, you had arms and legs and eyes and a nose.
When I was younger, I was more defiant. I doubt it was even an intellectual search, let alone a spiritual one—it was more vanity. When you are a teenager and you are looking for what you stand for in the world (and you are listening to a lot of rock music and reading a lot of science books and philosophy books and all that), it’s a boost to your ego to be not readily accepting of dogma, especially when they are rammed down your throat by the authorities, such as your parents, your teachers, your priests.
Lately, I have had many conversations with self-confessed atheists and I must admit I don’t really understand atheism. I kind of get agnosticism because agnosticism does not exactly deny the existence of God or the origin or creator of all things. It simply refuses to commit to such an unknowable, unverifiable concept. Atheism, on the other hand, is the belief that empirical evidence is required for anything to exist, and a supernatural being, especially when regarded as divine or sacred, without quantifiable or even qualitative proof, is a fallacy. Sorry, but I think atheism is a kind of intellectual arrogance. I doubt humanity, in its entire history, has seen enough, heard enough, known enough of the universe to say God does not exist on account of the absence of empirical data, though, even at this age, sorry, and even if I do believe there is so much truth in the Bible (or the Qur’an or the Pali Canon or the Tibetan Book of the Dead or the Torah or the Hindu scriptures or the sacred texts of Confucianism, not that I’ve read enough of them), I also doubt we have seen enough, heard enough, known enough to say that God does exist categorically enough to shut the doubters and the skeptics up.
Things changed for me in 1998, when after over two years of consistent meditation, once in the morning before I would start the day and once at night, before I slept, 15 minutes each, during which I would try not to be engrossed by thought. It wasn’t like I studied meditation and, if I did have any guide, it was mostly people I knew, whose understanding of the way life worked appealed to me, like my boss then, Jullie Yap Daza, or authors I read. I was dabbling in all things spiritual, reading books of the sort, trying to understand the very basis of religions like Buddhism. I had a fortune-teller, a feng shui guru, and an astrologer, whom I consulted on many things, not only for selfish reasons like how to align with the stars to make my dreams come true or how to rearrange the furniture to go with the natural flow of the energies of the universe but also to have a better understanding of the facts of life, like death, suffering, or emptiness. I joined positive thinking seminars. I tried to learn as much as I could from the likes of Deepak Chopra, Neale Donald Walsh, Andrew Matthews, Rhona Byrne, even Yoko Ono, or even Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. I even tried to decipher the spiritual or philosophical codes on which, I think, particularly in the wisdom of Yoda or the desolation of Darth Vader, the storylines of Star Wars were built. In other words, I opened up as much as I could to the mysteries of life.
Through meditation, I attempted to go deeper into the inner world, not necessarily mine alone, but that bottomless, edgeless space within us in which, as the New Age movement has implied, lies a trove of secrets to enlightenment.
Like I said, I was not—nor am I—an expert at meditation. I sort of just let myself go twice a day at 15-minute sessions, during which I would try to reduce myself to pure consciousness, just counting my breaths, focusing on my breathing, breathe in, breathe out, trying not to be aware of my physical body and the physical limitations my body represented. At some point, I even stopped trying to control my mind, to empty it of all thoughts. I would imagine myself at the bottom of an ocean and imagine every thought that entered my mind as something separate from me. If I thought of you, for instance, I would enclose you in a bubble and watch you rise to the surface of the ocean and burst out of existence when you got there. It didn’t matter how often you came to mind, as long as I let you rise to the surface and burst. Often, it was a good gauge of what occupied me, but in times of deep meditation, the thoughts came and went, unable to fully engage my attention.
And then one night, I emerged out of what felt like the deepest mediation I’d ever done, during which I felt like I was bigger than my body, hovering in the skies, reaching as far as New York or Paris or the edges of the universe. From that meditation, I surfaced as if from an expedition, enriched with an understanding that didn’t need answers to my questions. All of a sudden, I understood and I was no longer resentful of the fact that there was such a thing as God in a world full of starving children and helpless mothers and people born without eyes or noses or limbs or enough days on earth to feel God’s love.
I don’t question the existence of God anymore or a higher being that might have been responsible for all this magic, down to its very core, the very molecule, our DNA, that carries the genetic instructions that give life its myriad forms and colors.
It’s been a lifetime since 1998 and, despite its proven favorable effects on my wellbeing and peace of mind, I have since stopped doing meditations. No explanation, I’m just wired like that—I do not stick to formulas or I’m too lazy to keep doing the same things. I once prayed the novena to St. Therese and I’m glad I did and it gave me just the exact answer I wanted in ways that believers considered a miracle, but that was the one and only novena I’ve ever done. I don’t go praying the novena, though I swear by it, every time I am confronted by a dilemma only a sign from heaven could get me out of.
But I believe in God. Or I believe in magic. In 2011, I started to pray the rosary and I’ve been praying the rosary every day ever since. When my mother was alive, she might have been happy to consider me back to the Catholic fold, after having strayed for far too long, but I am no more Catholic now than I’ve ever been.
Except I don’t question the existence of God anymore or a higher being or some intelligent being that might have been responsible for all this magic, down to its very core, the very molecule, our DNA, that carries the genetic instructions that give life its myriad forms and colors and sensibilities. To this day, despite the unbelievable advancement of scientific know-how, the truth about us remains beyond science—inexplicable, unknowable, incomprehensible, magical.
For all its breakthroughs, science has not accomplished enough to take us to Mars, not counting our spacecraft missions, and it’s just next to Earth in our solar system. Until we have reached the very end of the universe, who are we to say there is no God?
Maybe it’s God. I don’t know. Maybe it’s something like God. I bet we’re too primitive to even give that higher power its proper name.