Significance

I think it best to simply ask if Reality has significance rather than asking ourselves if we "believe in God'. For me the simple fact that there is indisputably something rather than nothing implies and argues for "significance". This rather than Reality simply being mindless matter in motion, a "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

 Once we start asking if there is a God or "One who speaks" (or any other such phrase denoting some "higher" being) then we are sucked into the endless dialectic of reason, its conflicts and confusions. One thought leads to another; questions, objections. And then "who shall untangle this tangle", as per the very beginning of the Visuddhimagga (the Path of Purification) by Buddhaghosa. The Buddha's answer was to be silent in the face of all metaphysical questions, simply because any "answer", clung to and "believed in", was inimical to the Holy Life, the path to the final end of suffering (dukkha)

The true path is pathless, beyond definitions, beginning where we are. Faith. But if we confuse faith with "belief" the game is up, at least as I see it. Faith is a complete letting go, which - strangely perhaps - guarantees absolutely nothing. 

 Just to say, regarding "significance", I'm not so sure that "significance" would actually imply a destination, an end product. At least not one that we could ever imagine. The heartwood of the Dharma according to Theravada Buddhism, is "unshakeable deliverance of mind" (Majjhima Nikaya). The Bible speaks of being set free by "truth". So it is freedom, a freedom beyond any "answers", "conclusions" or any ultimate terminus. Poetically, the "journey itself is home."

For me this all relates to the way of unknowing. Reality is mystery, but not a mystery that is hidden or unknown in darkness or which will be revealed or made known in the future. Rather, it is more a present intimacy, transparency, and vividness, this of thusness/suchness, for “nothing throughout the entire universe is concealed” ( Dogen) Nevertheless, this mystery of emptiness and thusness has to go beyond this: intimacy must be ever penetrated. Or as another has said, "the only extension to the present is intensity."

All this may well be why Buddhism is sometimes dismissed, even condemned, as nihilistic. Related phrases such as "casting off the body-mind" are simply not understood. Dogen, the 13th century Japanese zen master, began to understand when he was himself a novice in a Chinese monastery and the pupil next to him slumped forward and the Master struck the man with the keisaku (awakening stick) and shouted:- "How dare you fall asleep when you seek to drop body and mind!" Such was a moment of illumination to Dogen!

As a commentator on Dogen has written:-

To cast off the body-mind did not nullify historical and social existence so much as to put it into action so that it could be the self-creative and self-expressive embodiment of Buddha-nature. In being “cast off,” however, concrete human existence was fashioned in the mode of radical freedom—purposeless, goalless, objectless, and meaningless. Buddha-nature was not to be enfolded in, but was to unfold through, human activities and expressions. The meaning of existence was finally freed from and authenticated by its all-too-human conditions only if, and when, it lived co-eternally with ultimate meaninglessness.

Or, perhaps, as the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart has said:-

"Love has no why"