Anguish is the most terrible state you may experience because everything that you have held on to, every hope that may have sustained you, has now left and there is nothing but complete disintegration. Anybody who is a person has to undergo the experience of anguish. It may be the death of a child, or someone they have loved very much. It may be the destruction of their family, or the failure of their hopes, or their country or the whole world. We all have to know that nothing on a material level can be relied on permanently. In the end, nothing we know on the level of relationships can survive for any length of time.
Anguish is the experience of severe bodily and mental pain: that we are nothing; the world is nothing; all on which we anchored our hopes is also nothing. This is important, because it takes our mind fully away from the things of this world and their pleasures. We have to move beyond childish and childlike attitudes to the adult way which is a way of ultimate being.
Until you have experienced anguish you have not lived your full, proper life. It is a situation of complete desperation, both physical and mental, and nothing that you believed in before seems to have any relevance to your present state, gloom or despair. What is the essential difference between desperation and despair? Desperation is a state in which you hang on for grim death to the one thing you think will help you in your present state of emptiness. Despair is a complete hopelessness that there is nothing at all in the world, and there is nothing for you to do but to give up. Therefore, desperation at least holds out the possibility that there may be one remedy to help you in your present state of negativity, while despair denies you that possibility. The ultimate end of unalleviated despair is quite obviously suicide. On the other hand, desperation tells you inwardly that there is something to be hoped for, and that you will not commit suicide, unless you are a very gloomy person. You will hold on, even by a hair's breadth, and through this, follow through to greater things in the future. It is very good to experience desperation. Then at last you have to face things directly as they really are and not behind the veil of illusion. Not many people can do this, and most people who surround a person in a state of desperation are remarkably useless. Most of them run a mile, because they know their own inadequacy and cannot face your inadequacy either. In a state of despair nothing can prevail.
Is there any hope for a person in a state of despair? I believe there is. This is the presence of God. It cannot be worked out intellectually, but if you are in a state of despair and everything you believed or held on to has proved to be an illusion, learn to be quiet. The mind and its clamouring chatter certainly cannot help you in this situation. But if you are quiet, a way may open to you which will show you that despair was itself an illusion, and a much greater reality lay ahead of you if only you could have glimpsed your own state of rather selfish unhappiness.
That was the situation with Job. Once everything had been taken from him, he had nothing to do but anticipate, and rather look forward to, death. But he stayed the course and was ultimately saved. We shall consider Job again in the next chapter. The point about anguish is that it teaches us that we have to know more and more about ourselves and to depend less and less on other people, in terms of the help they may give us. I am not saying from this that other people are unimportant, but what I am saying is that they are useless to us when we are in a state of hopelessness, and have lost our bearings. They do not know either us, or more importantly themselves either. This applies as much to those who follow a religion of one type or another as to those who depend entirely on the power of the human mind. Only when we know nothing, may we come to see despair itself and the anguish it causes as the way to our knowledge of God. The mind can never know God. I have said this on a number of occasions already. God may be known by love but never by thought. There are two types of God that are registered by the mind. First, the God of the real religion, who shows himself to us, and we know of his presence by the fact that he is a living god, and one who can converse with us through our own being. He does not converse by speaking to us, but by opening our minds to a greater reality. The other God, very popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was what was called the god of natural religion, or "deism". It was a god conjured up by the human mind to explain the mechanism of the universe. Noteworthy deists were Isaac Newton and John Locke, neither of whom could be called Christian in any meaningful sense of the word, but they could plausibly explain the existence of things by believing in a being who could create. Deism leads straight on to atheism unless one is sensible enough to see that the god of deism is a mere mechanism created by the human mind to explain the mysteries of the world, which it cannot understand in any other way. That is why this kind of god is ultimately the god of meaninglessness in human relations, one without love or compassion.
Only when we see these things clearly can we begin to understand what God is like. That is why you can try quite fruitlessly to prove the existence of God through his creation, for proof is ultimately inadequate because so much of creation is cruel, pointless, and very savage, at least intrinsically. Obviously, the type of God with whom Job conversed could not possibly have given him the answer to his problems. But through being still a new awareness came to him and God spoke to him directly, challenging him, and showing him the marvels of creation.
The marvels of creation do not depend on what we can see and hear outwardly, but on what we can see and hear on an inner level, and know as part of our own being. This is why the proof of Jesus in terms of his miracles is so inadequate. Conjurors, magicians, and charismatics can all on occasions produce effects of this type quite astonishingly. I am not saying that these people are to be summarily dismissed, but that none is of the nature of God. He lifts you up on to a higher level, and you see life in terms of Divine creativity, and you will understand how God's spirit sanctifies his works; a true miracle. Even now, if I could produce a marvel in front of you all, and it was a genuine phenomenon and not just what passes as sleight-of-hand, that would not give you any understanding of God. It would, at most, show you simply that I was a very remarkable person and that I could do things that other people could not. But this would not be the God of our Lord Jesus Christ. Only the God who moves us from our limited human understanding to ultimate reality can be the God who is the Lord of Jesus and the God of life. God sees into the depths of the human heart, and sets us free from ritualistic illusion. People in the time of Jesus demanded miracles, but they were easily deceived by anybody who had the capacity to produce something out of the ordinary. The real miracle is life itself, the human being, and their creativity. Here you get an individual who can create, doing something that makes a person real in terms of their humanity. This gives us an indication of the true quality of a miracle.
Anguish, on the other hand, shows everything that you had relied on to prove the existence of reality, to have been merely illusory: whatever you thought was the beneficent power of creation is shown to be a childish error, and has turned out to be a mistake, so that finally you can only give up hope and say there is nothing positive in life whatsoever.
Job did not reach this stage of disillusionment. He knew that creation existed. He could not possibly give an answer to the meaning of creation, let alone its suffering. The reason for this was that he was at the centre of everything he experienced, his ego demanded to be satisfied, and when this could not be done intellectually, he relinquished hope, and relapsed into despair, and then left things as they were. When we realize we are not the masters of the universe and that on our own we are very frail creatures and have very little to give, we begin to see things as they really are, and our lives can turn to face a reality in which we are important in our own right because of the individuality we have been given.
I am crucially important as an individual not because of any mental or other gifts that I may have, but because of the fact that I see things, including the universe itself, in my own particular way. The way I relate to people could be completely unique also. My relationships to others could never be mimicked by anyone else, not because they are in any way special and irreplaceable, but because they are mine, and what I can give, no matter how humble it may be, may help other people in their own lives to be and give what they ought to give. If I see myself as irreplaceable, as completely beyond any change or growth, then I am in trouble immediately. Nobody is so irreplaceable that the world cannot exist without them, for we all have something to offer, and when that has been removed from us, then we know the meaning of anguish. When I know anguish, I realize that I cease to exist as a full social being. I may still be alive in the same way as a worm might be, but the basis of my living and my creativity has been removed. It is a terrible state, and one which many people have to understand. It probably finds its fullest expression in conditions of mental disease of one type or another, particularly when the person involved does not have a complete understanding of what is going on in the mind. It is a terrifying state when our mind does not register properly, and we do not see reality in truth. Then we are in very serious trouble. Nobody is in a state of complete unapproachability. Each has their own place and we all have to pass on in due course - not merely to death, but to giving our work and lives to other people, so that they may inherit the work and we may rest and reveal ourselves in a much humbler manner. But if we cannot relinquish our task, then we suffer an increasing amount of anguish.
When I am in a state of anguish, I am in a state of egolessness; not the state that the mystic knows, but the state that the fully egoistic or human knows when their self-importance is thrust away from them, whether they like it or not, and they see only uselessness in front of them. It is essentially a state of being in which one ceases to be a recognizable member of society, but is now part of the dregs of humanity. Nobody is in any way beyond redemption, but many of us will not be able to see ourselves in another form which we would not voluntarily take upon ourselves. To be in this state of anguish is to know that all the things that we held on to with such vigour and tenacity before, even our own family and friends, are now removed from us irreversibly. It is a shocking state of desolation. Now at last we are obliged to see ourselves as we really are, no longer hidden from other people. This, indeed, is the experience of hell.
Can I ever see myself as I really am, apart from my relationships with others? That is the crucial question. If my relationship with others depends on my forcing myself on them, or depending on them, or making myself in some way irreplaceable, then I am a most unhappy individual, because all these states are illusory. But if I can be quiet, still, and give of myself, then I will never be far from positive relationships with others, and I will never know personal anguish.
Anguish can take a mental or a physical form. In physical anguish some essential function of the body fails, and we are moving close towards death. It happens inevitably after strokes and heart attacks, and with terminal cancer. Whether we are to survive or not depends not only on the medical attention we may receive, but also on our own state of being and hope so that we may proceed together with those who are helping us to a new life.
Mental and emotional anguish is related more to our understanding of our place in the world, society, and our relationships with other people. It is much more delicate and subtle, and here again our work is to learn to remain silent and not to blame God or any other supernatural power for letting us down, and wait patiently for the outcome of our dilemma. If we believe that we have a special purpose in life to fulfil, this illusion will be taken soon from us, not because it is necessarily wrong to have such a view, but because it usually means that we know what this purpose is and our self-regard gets in the way. Then we may feel that we have great potentialities in one or other form of existence, but we tend to move in the way and we cannot do what is expected of us. What is that which is expected from me? First of all, to be a reasonable and decent person, giving in such a way that others may receive knowledge of God through me. It also means helping other people to be as efficient and God-fearing as possible. To be God-fearing does not mean fearing God, but loving God and no longer clinging on to our own disposition or emancipation. None of us is indispensable, but when we see this clearly we can begin to understand what God wants us to do, and then we can stop clinging on to our own supposed indispensability, and start doing the work set out before us with proper abandon and joy as well. In other words, anguish is the negative side of joy and freedom and an understanding of God's purpose for us in life and we cannot have the one without the other. It could be extremely boring and unproductive, as well as selfish and showing a lack of understanding of the deeper issues of existence, always to be in a positive frame of mind, because we could not understand and be of assistance to an unhappy person.
Only when we can be quiet and still, and listen to the voice of God in clear silence, may we know what lies in front of us. The god of deism (natural theology) is not a living god and there is no purpose behind deism at all. This moves on inevitably towards atheism in which we can do without God entirely, and we can be a god in our own right. We know where this leads to in terms of human relationships.
But if we are to know the way of God, we have to be still and listen. We cannot dictate or in any way interpret according to our own understanding. We can only listen and be transformed. That is ultimately what religion is about: it leads on to spirituality in other words. Religion is a way of life which moves beyond our own understanding and dictatorship of the world as we would want it, and teaches us what is real or illusory, but until we know the humility that comes through intense suffering and self-annihilation, we cannot know the way to God. Job himself had to tread this way in his path to understanding. During the latter part of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the period of Enlightenment, as it is sometimes called, human beings realized that through scientific knowledge they could interpret life and the meaning of the world increasingly as they wanted and how they wanted to do it. But the result was a break in human relationships and an inevitable movement towards the dominance of the human mind, with its enormous power in research, but not unfortunately in insight, or great human sympathy. The result has been a terrible disappointment in our own lives.
Religion, in its own right, has very little to recommend it, for we all know that in terms of the history of religion, the human being soon creates a god in their own image. According to my own religion, I will interpret god according to that religion and see that my god is the only right one. So religion itself does not lead to God, but without religion we do not know God at all. The basis of religion is really that of a spiritual discipline, to keep us quiet by means of spiritual exercises, so that we may learn to move beyond ourselves, our own desires and fears, our own anguish as well as our own ecstasy, in other words, so that we may begin to know the truth that sets us free from many different illusions.
There is no truth that embraces only the intellect. If I think that my religion is the only right one, I am sure to come into conflict with others very rapidly and the results will be mutually destructive. If, on the other hand, I feel that my god is the god who has created all things, I move into a world without caring and in the end I am the agent of a mechanistic genius, who performs nothing except with selfish ends. This is the nature of atheism: since there is no personal god, I can easily usurp the creative powers of such a god, and I will certainly be destructive, if you interfere with my particular plan, which I am sure is the right one. We cannot in our present state of culture, which I think will go on indefinitely, pretend that we know the answer to the eternal problems of existence. How can we, when we do not even know how to relate one to another? When we do not know or understand the mystery of life itself, or its deeper nature in death, or how to come to terms with death or what follows death? These are the crucial problems involving all living forms, and we in our own simplicity cannot begin to fathom them with our own native ignorance. When we are still we may begin to learn and to know something of the nature of reality. One thinks of the sentence: "Be still and know that I am God", in its proper context (Psalm 46.10). We know that we ourselves cannot understand the nature of God or his purpose until we are still and listen, rather than put our own interpretation and wishes first. The more I wish for things, or will things according to my own desire, the more I will begin to hate other people who get in my way, and the more inevitable does war become at one time or another.
All this proves is that human beings are still in a juvenile state of development. We know what we want, but what other people want becomes unimportant if, indeed, not an embarrassment, and we are concerned to move beyond them, so that what we want may be ultimately fulfilled. In the end, their desires have to be completely annulled. When we can face this situation in truth, we can be in charge and know the world, and then our state of anguish can be relieved. Unfortunately, this fulfilment produces anguish in other people, whose view of life is different from ours and whose experience in life has been different as well. None of our experiences are particularly pleasant in the end. I spoke previously about the Job experience, and this is exactly what anybody who is a real person has to undergo. One person has to undergo a destruction of health at an early age, another will lose a close relative or someone they love very deeply. Someone else will find that all their hopes on a personal or material level are dashed in the very process of life, and everything that they had lived for vanishes from their very hands, as it did in the case of Job. Then they have to realize that they have nothing to stand on at all, on a material level; it is only then that the God of true religion can come to their aid.
What is the true God? Can we say that the God of Christianity is better than the god of the other great religions, remembering that Buddhism on this level is atheistic and that it does not believe in a personal god at all? In fact all the particular views of God are right in their own way, and even the negativity of atheism is not exactly what it seems. The Buddhist simply says that god cannot be known and whatever one says about him is untrue and therefore it is better to be quiet. Once one is sure that one's own view of God is right, only war can prevail. This is certainly true of theistic religion - the religion of the Jews, the Muslims, and the Christians. Hinduism and Buddhism know more about the power of silence, in which a truer understanding of God may be given to them. They all know that they of themselves are nothing at all, but the real God comes to them in their ignorance and their humility. So if I in my particular religious frame try to bring virtue in a particular way of life, I am simply trying to prove to you that my understanding is right and that your hope of success or life itself depends on your holding my particular views. This leads inevitably to war and desolation. That God is not the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; it is the god of myself. In such a situation I can cause a tremendous amount of havoc, being the supreme arbiter of religious orthodoxy and truth.
Therefore nobody can know the fullness of God, whether the God of theism or the God of one of the great religions of the East, who are so silent in terms of this great mystery, but are not ignorant by any means. As we have already said, Hinduism thinks of God as "not this, not that", while Buddhism knows of God as the "great emptiness (or void)", but in that emptiness the fullness of reality is contained. It is not anything in our understanding of the meaning of the word: nothing is rather the idea of "no thing". The Buddhist understanding of reality is indeed "no thing": neither this, that, nor anything else but, rather, a void, as it is sometimes called, in which everything is contained: you, me, the world, the universe, it is so vast that it cannot be contained by any one living concept to the exclusion of any others. If I were to try to convince you that my understanding of God, according to, say, Christianity, which is my particular faith, was far more accurate than the others, I would simply be trying to convert you to a particular point of view, in the course of which I would prove how little I really knew about the total God of humanity, and of Jesus as well.
Jesus certainly was not dogmatic about the nature of God. Rather, his life revealed God, during which he was not afraid at the end to cry out "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matthew 27.46), a tremendous cry of anguish from one who we Christians believe was God in human form. God could never really forsake one, because the Divine nature is always to have mercy, but in Jesus' state of anguish when he was about to be crucified, he saw that everything that he had stood for in his life had apparently gone up in flames, and that he too, like those before him, was about to be destroyed brutally and cruelly. But he went on in simple faith. In the end he won through, and was able to show the nature of courage and truth in the face of cruelty. It is, indeed, a terrible thought that through the centuries the same religion has been guilty of the destruction of so many people through crucifixions, pogroms and other forms of slaughter, when various groups have tried to prove that they alone have a monopoly on the right doctrine, and they alone know the true God.
If I were to try and prove to you now that I know God, and that only I could give you the truth, I would simply be saying that I am God and you should listen to me and be full of my particular knowledge. It would do you no good at all because I would not be giving you the truth, even if I was absolutely earnest in what I said. God cannot be named, nor can he be described, but he can be known in the soul by the change he produces in all of us and that change is a movement from dogmatic certainty to inward anguish, which ultimately is fulfilled in a new understanding of reality.
I believe the earthly Christ himself had to undergo this particular series of transformations until he knew the resurrection in its completeness.