The Inadequacy of Words

The Infinite cannot be captured by limiting words.

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Transcript

"Do you believe in God?" the interviewer asked.

"What do you mean when you use the word 'god'?" Carl Sagan replied. "The word 'god' covers an enormous range of different ideas, running from an outsized light-skinned male with a long white beard sitting on a throne in the sky, for which there is no evidence, to the kind of god that Einstein or Spinoza talked about, which is very close to the sum total of the laws of the universe. It would be crazy to deny that there are laws in the universe. If that's what you want to call god, then, of course, god exists… So when you say, 'Do you believe in god?' if I say yes or if I say no, you have learned absolutely nothing."

Carl Sagan, the famous astronomer best known for his "Pale Blue Dot" meditation on Earth's place in the cosmos, had exposed the trap hiding in plain sight. The word "God" itself creates confusion.

Yogi Ramacharaka reached the same conclusion. He warned that the common word "God" conjures images of an anthropomorphic being (a man in the sky with human passions) which belongs to what he called the infant stages of the race.

For this reason, the Yogis prefer ‘The Absolute.’ "We think it better to use the term 'The Absolute,'" they wrote, "not as a new God, but merely as a general term for the Source of Being, which is sufficiently broad to fit in with the conceptions of Deity held by all people."

Both men arrived at identical wisdom through different gates. The Infinite cannot be captured by limiting words. Because, to quote Spinoza, "to define God is to deny him."

Sagan's "laws of the universe" and the Yogi's "Absolute." Two phrases born from different worlds. But when you place them side by side, they seem to recognize each other. The scientist peers through his telescope at galaxies spinning in perfect mathematical harmony. The sage sits in meditation, touching something vast and nameless that breathes through all things. Both unable to capture what they've encountered, but certain they've glimpsed the same infinite mystery.

The question is not whether you believe. The question is whether you're humble enough to admit the inadequacy of all our words when standing before the infinite.