Openness is the least blasphemous name for God.

            Rainer Maria Rilke (14 Dec 1875-29 Dec 1926)

While watching a lecture the other day, the speaker flashed a written quote across the screen:

Openness. A name – or more than a name – for God, for the Divine, for the universal consciousness, for love, Spirit, the Self. For the life force. The names are endless.

Rilke was an Austrian poet who held as a core belief that the divine can’t be defined, contained, or limited by the use of human concepts or language . And that to give names or forms to ‘God’ or the divine is blasphemous because it reduces a limitless, evolving, mystery to a small, rigid projection.

Of course openness is also a human concept, an attribute ascribed by a human mind to a space, person, thing and so on. And it’s also a word – that is, it’s a bit of human language with all the baggage that brings with it.

So, do we simply have just one more human concept and word to add to an ever-growig list of names and forms of ‘God’? Not to forget that God is in itself a human invented concept and word.

But I get Rilke’s point: he was trying to move on from the tendency for us to use limiting names and forms. In his view the application of names and forms to the divine only serves to build walls that hide or obscure the divine, allowing the development of many and very often conflicting doctrines and dogma that have often been the cause of division and strife between the peoples of the world.

He thought dogma and doctrines of all kinds were meaningless and irrelevant when it comes to knowing the divine.

‘The Open’, he described as a state of pure existence unbounded and unfiltered by memory, fear or any other mental constructs we humans use to divide reality.

In other words a ‘good experience ‘ or a ‘bad experience ‘ are mental concepts that we come up with to label our experiences based on our fears, our memories or on the speculations of our minds and input from our senses.

Of course, being human beings in a material body living in a material world, we really do need to name, describe, label and judge our relationship to and experience of the world. The problem arises because we finally decide that these subjective experiences are in fact absolute reality and thus blind ourselves to any other options.

Openness is both the path to the goal and the goal itself. The way forward is to keep asking the big Who am I? questions – without insisting on getting hard and fast answers we then proceed to cast in concrete.

Embrace our own subjective experience without allowing it to become our apparent reality that only serves to keep us separated and subject to even more suffering.

Transcend it all. You are all.

All that is.