This isn't how I planned my life. Back in 1979, I applied to UC Berkeley to finish my Electrical Engineering degree. In my application essay, I wrote I wanted to be an existential engineer borrowing the term from a book I had been reading about engineering.

In the winter of my junior year, I played a game of chess that was unlike any I had played before or since. Having played many, many games, first as a boy then as a member of my high school chess team, I had a wide range of experience both winning and losing. As I played the game against a much stronger opponent, it felt as if the moves appeared effortlessly in my mind, as if I was being directed as to how to play that game. I won in 26 moves. Whatever happened to my brain as I played that February game at the Berkeley YMCA, it was very stimulating, memorable and opened up an experience of consciousness that was new to me. It started me on a path of inner exploration that led me, six years later, to study for the ministry and continues to drive me today.

Many of us enter these doors seeking answers, as radio host Garrison Keillor often says of his character Guy Noir, seeking answers to life's persistent questions. The search for truth and meaning arises from an inner longing for understanding, an aversion to modern life's meaninglessness and illusion, perhaps a fear of death and a desire for inner peace.

And there are many, many purveyors of answers from the Catholic and Protestant churches, Jewish synagogues, mosques, temples, ashrams, cults, and gurus to name just a few. Believe in this prophet, visit this shrine, chant these words, sing these songs, hold this pose, eat these foods, do these good deeds, and you will find the satisfaction you seek. They all promise some form of salvation if you follow the recommended techniques and actions.

Many of these religious paths begin with the answers that are being sought. God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son and those who believe in him will be saved. Love the Lord thy God and love thy neighbor. We are a people of God's Covenant. Allah akbar - God is great. God dwells in you as you. Believe in the power of the guru, surrender your life to him and you will find salvation. My purpose this morning is not to question the value of these religious traditions. I only want to point out that most religious paths start with a system of revealed answers toward which the devotee must strive to realize those answers through some effort or action. The seeker internalizes an external message, giving the message greater truth value than one's ordinary thoughts and experiences. Once you take Jesus as your personal savior, he will begin to work within you to cleanse your soul of sin. One's inner life must be brought into conformance with an outer revealed truth or divine order.

Again, my purpose is not to judge the value of these religious paths. They work for many people very well. I've worked in interfaith situations with devout Christians for whom I have a great appreciation. I have no reason to doubt the faith of our Habitat for Humanity partners.

And this religious path doesn't satisfy many here this morning.

Thankfully, this isn't the only way to approach one's religious life. There is another way to deepen one's knowing and expand one's loving without beginning with a belief in God or accepting a revealed scripture as authoritative. I'm calling this alternate path, Agnostic Spirituality.

First, a definition of terms: spirituality, as I'm using it this morning is independent of the belief in God or the soul. I hear most people in our congregation who find meaning in the word spiritual using it to express a desire to cultivate their spirit, to cultivate the vital principle that animates living beings.

There is nothing supernatural in this definition of spiritual and the definition gives a dynamic quality to the word. The definition expresses a range of spirit from a hyperactive preschooler or an energetic teenager bouncing off the walls to the exhaustion of debilitating illness or the despondency of despair. The strength of our spirit, our life energy isn't constant but can be intentionally developed. Individuals like the Dalai Lama of Tibet exhibit enormous presence, penetrating insight and disarming love. The vital and animating principle in such individuals extend our conception of what an animating principle can be. These qualities of presence, insight and love are potentialities in all of us that can be developed and expressed more fully in our lives. When I hear people saying they want more spirituality, I hear them asking for a way to develop and enhance the potential of the vital principle that gives them life.

Some believe that this vital principle comes from God. Agnostic spirituality does not presuppose this is so, nor does it reject the idea. It may be the reality that the Holy Spirit is actually at work in our lives without our knowledge or awareness. The practice of an agnostic spirituality will be independent of belief in or dependence on a supernatural being for its efficacy. Agnostic spirituality belongs to the liberal tradition of following the guidance of people like Jesus rather than worshipping their image and asking for their intercessory support.

An agnostic spirituality will be dependent on a belief in direct experience. Rather than accept others understanding and interpretation for what is good and true at face value via revelation or institutional authority, the agnosticly spiritual individuals will want to find out for themselves trusting their own eyes, ears, sensations and mental processes. It may walk like a duck. It may talk like a duck. It may even look like a duck. But only when it the phenomena are investigated and directly experienced, can it be truly known to express duckness.

This may seem like a trivial illustration until you substitute some religious terminology for the word duck. A lot of religious language such as grace, faith, prayer, salvation, sacred, and worship are loaded with associations that obscure the reality they were intended to express rather than clarifying it. Could grace be a description of an experience of human consciousness or a fiction used to oppress and control people? Agnostic spirituality encourages a suspension of judgement and an encouragement to personal investigation.

And an agnostic spirituality will need more than personal experience. It will also need to draw on as much of the learning, wisdom and knowledge as the world has to offer because our senses cannot always be trusted. Discovering the truth of any situation is nontrivial, as any new police officer discovers when interviewing witnesses to an accident. Each person's mental state, vantage-point, attention and clarity of mental recall will shape the quality of their recounting of events. The human capacity for self-deception, for seeing what we want to see, is so powerful, it needs to be balanced by an awareness more expansive than our own.

The agnostic spirituality I propose is compatible with the scientific worldview many of us accept, as a way to discover what is true. It starts with the subject, the religious questioner, rather than an object, a conclusion to be attained. Much like John Dewey's theories of education, it supposes that we learn best by self-discovery. It is a way that has confidence in the capacity of each human mind to discover what is true.

For me, one of the greatest proponents of an agnostic spirituality was Siddartha Gottama more commonly known as the Buddha. Born 2500 years ago to a royal life of privilege and luxury, in his twenties Siddartha became strongly aware of the suffering component of life. The Buddhist folklore tells of his experience seeing someone who was sick, someone who was old, someone who had died and a monk. Protected by his parents from the travails of human suffering, witnessing these four men moved him deeply and he decided to seek answers to these vexing questions of life. He went to study with the greatest religious teachers of his age. None of them gave him satisfying answers to his questions. After six years of complete dedication to his quest and nearly dying of starvation from austere practices of renunciation, finally he decided he would have to rely on his own experience. He ate a reviving meal then sat down under the Bodhi Tree vowing not to arise until his questions were answered. As he sat, the Buddha discovered a way to encounter and experience reality that answered his questions.

Surprisingly, the method of meditation he discovered and advocated was remarkably free of theistic reference or reliance. The Buddha wasn't against the idea of God. He intentionally chose an agnostic position.

The oldest teachings of the Buddha report that when he was asked about the truth of the nature of God, he usually remained silent. When pushed, he would deflect the question and ask the questioner to sit down, meditate and find their own answer. The Buddha was intensely focused on one question: how can the misery of human suffering come to an end? Knowing the reality or non-reality of God, he said, doesn't help solve the problem. The solution to the problem of human suffering is within our own grasp by coming to realize the nature of consciousness in our own experience. The method he taught had three components:

The Buddha proposed that human suffering wasn't the result of our disobedience to some divine authority or the wrath of a vengeful or capricious god. Our problems arose from a lack of mental insight into the nature of reality. Learning about how the mind works while validating those workings in one's personal experience could provide the guidance for living a happy, harmonious existence.

The Buddha didn't ask people to have faith in him and what he had discovered through his meditation. He knew that faith alone would not suffice since now he knew that there were experiences of consciousness unfamiliar to most of humanity. Reason alone could not guide the meditator because the answers were not to be found in words, phrases or paragraphs. The experience of consciousness itself contained the answers being sought.

A simple example of how this works. Explaining, analyzing, and reasoning about juggling will not make one a good juggler. Juggling is learned by juggling. The coordination of hand and eye begin to develop in the experience of actually doing it. Great lessons in the capacities of human awareness develop in the same way.

Great as my appreciation is for Buddhism and what it has to teach the world, Buddhism is just one example of an agnostic spirituality. J. Krishnamurti who I quoted for the centering is another example of an advocate for a free path of inquiry into the nature of existence. Krishnamurti eschewed all techniques, rituals and practices that were wrote or rehearsed. His goal was to get people to abandon all their habit, reflex and conditioning to enter each moment directly. Rather than try to repeat the lives and awakening of the great teachers of the past, he encouraged us to discover the real right now, just as it is, stripped of our expectations and anticipations. To get to the ever fresh and alive core of being, one has to deconstruct all the projections from the past and the prejudices of the present, seeing them as mental constructs and not reality.

I introduce the idea of agnostic spirituality to encourage people to turn their awareness inward and discover who they are. One doesn't need to believe in a God or a teacher or a teaching to begin. All one needs to do is to refine the observation of what is happening now.

This is why I'm teaching a class on meditation starting this Tuesday night . While I'm not an enlightened Buddhist master, I've tasted just enough of the fruits of practice to get people started using meditation as a tool to refine and deepen their experience of living and a tool to de-condition the mind. It is my gratitude for the positive effects of learning to meditate that encourage me to pass it on to others. And it is just one way of many ways to deepen one's knowing and widen one's compassion.

I advocate an agnostic spirituality in this Unitarian Universalist congregation because I believe it to be one of the best ways I've found to satisfy the calls for spirituality in our midst. Because we have a mindset different from Buddhists or Christians or Jews or Moslems or Hindus, we cannot import their methods. We must find our own way. My proposition today is that agnostic spirituality is the best fit I've found to help us grow inwardly and outwardly.

I invite those of you who are so inspired to join me in developing this religious path by learning its ways and testing it in your own lives. Even though the insights of liberal religion are ancient, Unitarian Universalism is a very young faith. It is barely 40 years old, just a few years younger than I am. We are right now in the process of creating it. Envisioning an agnostic spirituality is my contribution this morning to that ongoing creation as I continue to respond to this inner calling discovered almost twenty years ago playing a game of chess.

Copyright © 1999 by Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore. All rights reserved.