January Challenge: Awakening Experiences

February 6, 2014
by Michael
comments 26
Christ / Course Ideas

This post is part of a series on the subject of Awakening sponsored/inspired by Barbara Franken—a January Challenge that has claimed the first week of February as it’s own as well…

* * * * *

One of my favorite descriptions of awakening comes from the book Dialogues on Awakening by Tom Carpenter.  These are Tom’s recounting of conversations he has had with his friend and brother, Jesus, that grew out of his daily practice of the teachings contained within A Course in Miracles.  After a time, Tom came to recognize Jesus’ presence and developed the faculty to sustain a type of inner dialogue with him.  This quote is from Jesus in one of these exchanges.

“What is it like to be enlightened or awake?  It is when you see only God as cause and effect being you expressing Him wholly.  You will no longer feel the need to see your mind as separately identified within the whole Mind, but you will feel its presence there and you will recognize your Self in it.  Fear of any nature becomes unknown.  Joy abounds with every thought as Love is once again remembered.”

This is a good place for me to start because I studied A Course in Miracles quietly for a good decade or so, and Jesus never talked to me like that once.  (Ha!  Laugh with me, for such foolishness has passed…)  That’s obviously a statement fraught with difficulties, so let me rephrase and simply say that I never had that type of experience on my end.  I used to wish that I had, though, on many an occasion.  When you’re staring down the barrel of meaninglessness and coming apart at the seams, decked out in your “Love is real” paraphenalia—fake beard, t-shirts, wrist bands, etc.—and making a really good show of it, inwardly hoping against hope it isn’t all just an exercise in self-delusion, staving off the inner “I told you so” voice that already has it all figured out (and not for the better), you really want the forces of Light to make an entrance somewhere in your story and roll out a little razzle dazzle—put paid once and for all to the notion of doubt being a reasonable consideration.  Offer something irrefutable.  I did, anyway.

And when it doesn’t come, the hole just gets deeper, the confusion surreal, like you’re watching it in slow motion.

My continuing journey towards awakening has been largely absent the lightning strike experiences you sometimes read about.  The irrefutable and obvious moment that drops out of the sky and affords one a fresh identity and a clean break with history has been like that tree alone in the forest.  It definitely dropped, but, did it make a sound…?  Did I miss it?  I can’t say when exactly it dropped.  This process was (and remains) more like a sunrise in slow motion.  Sometimes I’m not even sure it’s happening.  Then I think about it, and realize it’s a lot brighter out than it was before.  When before?  I don’t know.  Before.  This type of slowly-building Recognition has brought me to wit’s end on numerous occasions, but has simultaneously been a beautiful and extremely powerful process to live within.   It has indelibly stamped into my being a number of admissions and discoveries I think are valuable and worth sharing.

The first one is that comparison is so, so very useless.  Life is not a contest, and every life has a rhythm and a tapestry of meaning that is all its own.  I have ultimately begun to trust in the wisdom of my own experiences, and while that may seem an obvious and natural thing to do, I can only say that when one is in the grip of fear, it absolutely is not.

And there is that fear thing, so what of it?  What is it to be in the grip of fear?

Does having fear in one’s inner vocabulary mean we walk around all day petrified?  I don’t think so.  (Until one day, when we do.)  Life may be fine for a good long while, but then it brings us back to this precipice.  Suffering arises.  Confusion.  Fear.  A dilemma.  Call it what you like.  Once we face it—whatever “it” is—squarely and it lunges at us, it can be difficult to stomp it back into its cage, and even if we succeed, we can’t keep carrying this caged animal around with us forever…  I think fear is probably one of the most useless words in the English language because it fails to address the depth and complexity of this experience of separation we have dreamed up.  We like to say we’re afraid of something in particular—like falling or failure, or being vulnerable or trusting in our relationships—but fear is not necessarily so particular.  We can fix all these one-offs, and still, a moment arises and we find… we are at odds with something inside ourselves again…  Fear is living inside of a conflict we don’t even know exists, a conflict that seems it just might swallow us whole.  It simply haunts us.  If it were obvious what to do about this, we’d do it.

In A Course in Miracles Jesus speaks periodically about the fact that the natural state of our mind is wholly abstract, and it took me a good long while to grasp hold of that one.  Love is abstract in the sense that it doesn’t really require any particular object or attribute to identify with in order to be what it is. We are like that, too, we just aren’t familiar with identifying ourselves with this type of being, and I think that the specific object of our fear is similarly irrelevant.  Fear in its most abstract or generalized sense, for me, is the sensation of being on the wrong side of what is real.  There’s no such thing as being on the wrong side of what is real, but if I had known that, known it absolutely in my bones such that living it was the most obvious and natural thing to do/be in the face of any event or circumstance this crazy world can concoct, then I’d have known I was truly real, and really true.  I wouldn’t have been thinking I was alone, and been trying to– even as I feared doing so– invoke the razzle dazzle.  Fear may not have permeated my daily experience, but I found I could not prevent this sensation of being on the wrong side from what is real from creeping into and slowly discoloring my world, chipping it away into bits and fragments, and eventually I realized, I’m crippled inside.

I’m not operating at full strength here.

Realizing that personally, and hungry for this experience called “awakening”, I wanted to call in some air support to set things straight.  It’s like I was in jail, and hoping Love would come bail me out.  Surely Love would do that for me.  I felt I was ready for a storied ending.  I waited patiently, but… I never made bail.  Even though I knew this reality of Love was real, I felt (at times) completely abandoned or alone, left to my own devices, and plagued by uncertainty.  Other people seemed to be having this and that experience, but I was confronted by this confounding enigma we call a self.  I was confronted by all the things I had asked this self to be.  No more.  No less.  And I felt intensely and extremely conflicted.

In addition to not comparing one’s experience to that of anyone else, another big one for me was the realization I was being told something very important with the silence that seemed to greet every desperate plea for an obvious sign of redemption.  In the particular form of validation I sought, which never quite came as requested, I was being shown, directly and gently: the jail doesn’t exist.  What need for redemption do the already redeemed have?  When I realized this was perhaps “the message” all along, Love’s seemingly empty silence transformed entirely into something solid and dependable.  I realized She’d been veritably drowning me with the only answer I had ever needed.  I was knocked over.  There were some things I had thought that were simply incorrect, and could not be validated.  There were lines that couldn’t be and would never be crossed and I was too confused to know them.

Love wasn’t going to spring me from a trap that wasn’t real to begin with.  To do so, at least on the terms I had set, would have been akin to acknowledging that the trap in which I was so utterly convinced I was stuck, was indeed real.  The possibility of dwelling in a state of peace that surpasses all understanding hinges upon Love’s inviolate position in this regard.  Even though we take the bait sometimes, Love never does.  Jesus is a specific representation of this principle: of dwelling in an error free state of mind.  This, I have come to discover, is true power: to remain in perpetual communion with the Truth.

In realizing Love’s message to me, I discovered as well that I can’t figure this stuff out on my own.  I didn’t have the wherewithal to know, as Love does, how to properly interpret my experiences in this world.  A Course in Miracles was a lifeline for a period of time as it provided the type of powerful clarity I needed in this regard.  Many other sources of information as well.  For me, it has been about piecing this together, with tremendous help, one breath at a time.  This path for me has been a million tiny quanta of lightning that collectively are assembling into freedom.  Now, the training wheels are steadily coming off.

Now the sunrise has gained enough momentum I’m pretty sure there’s no going back.  Awake or not awake?  I don’t know.  It’s a huge relief to be at peace with not needing to dignify questions such as these with an answer.  The sun is still enfolding me, enveloping us all.  I think some sort of merging awaits, some relinquishment of final barriers, but the reality of such a relinquishment seems less of a question than an inevitability.  It will come.  It is happening.

I found ultimately that regardless of what we think, believe or experience, we live on the right side of real.  That’s one choice we don’t get to make, and thank God for that.  Because I thought I knew something about myself once, and I was quite mistaken…  To walk away from ignorance unscathed is the outcome we are guaranteed.  It is humbling to begin to accept that such things are truly real…

* * * * *

Next up in the series is aMusing Spirit.

Trending Towards Holiness

February 3, 2014
by Michael
comments 27
Christ / Course Ideas

At the tail end of this last week I came down with a pretty decent sinus cold, my third in about four months.  I invite you to listen to the voices with me, some inner, some outer…  Taking vitamins?  Getting enough rest?  Gotta’ be stress-related.  Your system is weak.  You need more balance in your life.  I take [insert the product here] and I never get sick.  You should probably get more exercise.  You’re not eating enough green vegetables.  Think positive thoughts.  The trend is not good.  Believe you are invincible, and you will be.  Damn, dude, that sucks.

On and on it goes.

I rolled up all that mumbo jumbo into a ball, soaked it in model airplane fuel, and lit it on fire.  I’m working on giving up on tactics altogether, by the way, since I realized you can’t just have a little bit of a strategy and leave the rest to Grace.  When the smoke cleared and I quit coughing like a Vicks Vapor Rub beta tester, I asked Hafiz what was going on.  That helps me keep in mind the fact that everything happening is holy.  (Have you read that one?)  He told me the Beloved was sending me a few people who needed my help.  He told my they arrive in the night, or when I’m looking the other way, bearing their packages of pain and discomfort, and they crawl inside my heart to take refuge.  Then they’re pain starts wicking out, and I feel it oozing through me.  He told me to stop calling it a symptom.

They need your help, he said.  He told me to think of myself as a doorway to the sea beyond me, and dissolve them.

Easy for him to say.

So, I have been care-taking these beings.  Getting to know them a bit.  Sometimes I lose the plot and start giving them informal lectures about getting back on track, or an exasperated litany of what-for’s, but mostly I just sit with them, like a sky holding an earth.

Eventually you realize, these guests are not strangers.

* * * * *

Prayer for me has long been the mental reaching out into expansiveness.  I invite the presence of Love for a visit, and then listen.  I reflect upon the connotations of the word “holiness.”  I take a few moments to forgive every useless thought that dares to make itself readily apparent.  I imagine what it must be like to slog through eons of empty space and almost crash into a planet like ours, with billions of holy insanities crawling all over it, many of them with wires running out of their ears.  I place the word “Jesus” into my heart, and in a magical instant all those wordless, intangible sensations I have come to recognize as His Presence fill the room, as if that word was a seed dropped into the planter of my heart, which took root, and produced an entire orchard.

These practices are like queries of the unknown.  Like the sonar array on a submarine, I ping the unknown.  I jostle the darkness.  Then… my heart can hear the response.  I feel that flutter of recognition, that twinge of knowing, that pause in the flow of time that wasn’t supposed to be there.  My prayer is like going outside periodically to get a feel for the temperature, or dropping a knotted rope into the water every so often as the boat slides along.  It keeps me in contact.

Buddha.

The sensation of a vast emptiness arises.  Good.  It is right here beside me if I need it…

When the guests of sickness arrived, and I chose to suspend day-to-day operations briefly to tend to their needs, I realized… there’s reading the flyers, there’s glimpsing through the window, there’s visiting, and keeping in contact, and then there’s permanent residence.  The latter, I believe, is what we are called to accept.  I realized each time I visit Love, but hold something apart, that something wanders around this world unattended, then eventually gets found seated near the highway, counting cars in a base 2 number system or some equally crazy madness.  These parts are gently sent back to me by the Beloved, in desperate need of care-taking.

What is needed here, is to step into Love, but hold nothing back.

* * * * *

We have the sensation in our daily lives that even though we can contact the places we hold most dear, the world we inhabit can still contact us.  So we practice the ever so refined art of ducking and weaving.  Drink in Love.  Avoid the fried food.  This is living in between.  Our circumstances can still happen to us.  We still have a lot of management responsibilities.  This feeling of being vulnerable, of being susceptible to what is not wholly desired, is our clue that our desire isn’t quite yet whole.  We’re split somewhere, and maybe we don’t even know where.

We’ve done nothing wrong.  I knew one thing even prior to spelunking through the Unknown in search of a post, and that is this: there is no cosmic force that metes out illness or suffering of any kind on any scale in direct proportion to any type of opinion, judgment, observation, perception, or intention.  Our pain simply comes home, looking for a way back in, like a lost child in need of warmth and attention.  If you’re like me, you’re still not entirely convinced the business end of Creation is you and I.  It’s a bit much to get into the realm of practicality.  But we ping this concept with our imagination, and our heart says, “Yes!” when the echo returns.  Then we go do something else for a little while.  Then we ping again.

How long do we do this?  What remains for us?

Acceptance.  Acceptance of all of it.  Acceptance of power.  Acceptance of grace.  When all our lost selves have returned home, been welcomed and fed, and dissolved into the light of our presence, I am convinced we will remember where we have always dwelt.  There will be no distance any longer.  Prayer will not be a ping out into the darkness to verify our current range to Love, but a continuously flowing recognition of the Reality that we are, and have always been.  This is what I heard from a friend, before he dissolved.

Stare Down

January 28, 2014
by Michael
comments 6
Course Ideas / Poetry

I could say I wasn’t afraid.
But I was.
Me and that feeling looked each other in the eye,
and I looked away.  Shrugged my shoulders.
Flicked up my collar.
Kicked the dirt.
Got a hobby.
Next day shipping, of course.
Ran half way across the world.
Whatever.
I was desperate to tag out,
to sneak out of the ring,
maybe get into promotions,
have an office with high ceilings,
be famous or happy or something,
but I found nothing but the types of thoughts
you paint on top of the world’s skin when
you’re running, suave as a neck tie,
from the moment you keep finding,
your moment of being caught red-handed,
my moment of Reckoning.
I could say I wasn’t afraid.
But I’m not a liar, too.

Once you get found out,
you can finally begin.
What you find is that
you always did want to get found out,
but your terms and conditions weren’t accepted.
I wanted Love to throw a rock
at my bedroom window
and sweep me off my feet–
line the landing strip with candle-lit paper sacks.
Instead, I got silence thick as the
fear you feel when the boat springs a leak,
or the river starts rising.  Or both.
I was surrounded by thoughts
I used like shingles to try and keep the rain off,
not ever realizing that all along
I was being shown what thinking really is.

Then I had to face it:
the river was rising, and
the rain was still coming down.
If I don’t make a stand here, then where?
Me and that feeling looked each other in the eye,
and I tried like hell not to flinch.
The water came up over the lip of the pier.
I was cold and hungry.
I just looked in it’s eye, and I said to myself,
“I must have this all wrong.”

“Prove it,” said the dark.

If you’re going to do this,
I should tell you straight out:
you start small and build out from there.
One right idea is enough,
if you just keep working it.
Anything contradicts your right idea,
you put it in your rear view.

My right idea had two parts:
Power exists.
Power knows me.

That Idea came and stood on my side of the ledger,
stared back into the dark with me,
turned it into a feeling of home.
Together, we did some redecorating.

You might still have questions.
I know I do.
But they don’t really matter.

If you’re going to do this,
I should tell you straight out:
you are the right idea.

Spontaneous Revelations

January 25, 2014
by Michael
comments 18
Christ / Course Ideas

In A Course of Love, Jesus notes that “the animation of form with spirit is an ongoing aspect of Creation.”  He says this is not a timebound dynamic.  This is every moment.  It was there at the Beginning.  It is there right now.  It will always be there.  It is what is happening…  Spirit is peeking out at us right now from behind and within everything, including the stale self-concepts I jam like boulders into the stream at the heart of my being.  If we’re lucky, our stream-damming concepts are being outflanked on a daily basis, and hopefully it is not too painful.

(If it is, let go of the boulder.)

When I think of this process of spirit animating form I think of Bénard-Raleigh cells.  I think of them as a massively incomplete but insightful representation, in physical form, of exactly what Jesus is talking about.  Don’t ask me why.  I just do.  This is part of what makes me me, and not a so-called normal person.  If you find a normal person by the way, capture him or her immediately.  Rarer even than the fabled yeti, the recovery of a living specimen of Homo Normalis could well be worth the Nobel Prize in Anthropology—if there was one.  We could call it the Normal Prize in Anthropology.  Maybe this would incentivize the Committee to get off of top dead center.

Moving on.  In Bénard-Raleigh cells heat is applied to a shallow pan of water.  As the energy flows upwards through the water, the molecules start shaking and vibrating faster and faster.  Really hot ones at the bottom of the pan become less dense than the cooler ones at the top.  This is like standing on the platform of a subway station in a major city during rush hour– one of the stations that is the intersection point of five different lines, wherein everyone is trying to transfer and get on and off of all the trains at the same time.  The hot molecules want out of the train.  The cool ones want in.  The result is chaos.

The Greeks thought of chaos a little differently, BTW.  They saw it as the formless void state preceding the creation of the universe.  I think we’ll see shortly a convergence between the Green definition and the rush hour example momentarily, through careful study of the Bénard-Raleigh cell.

So, at some point in the process of applying heat to the pan of water, and creating a flow of energy through the water itself, the chaotic mad dash of hot molecules for the top and of the cooler molecules for the bottom suddenly self-organizes into ordered convection patterns.  From chaos, order.  This link is decent if you focus on the pictures.

They call it self-organization, but physically speaking it is a type of resonance, a delicately tuned state in which many opposing forces are exquisitely balanced.  It is a beautiful example of the manner in which nature is capable of birthing pattern and complexity out of disorder and chaos.  I wouldn’t take it to mean that the riddle of creation is solved, or that the existence of the ever mysterious Homo Normalis can be wholly explained without slipping Love into the equation somewhere, but still… it is worth a footnote.

In the metaphor I am painstakingly developing, spirit is the energy source, and the universe of matter is a pan of water.  I would like to add one technical wrinkle to the experiment, and ask you to imagine that each molecule of water in question had a choice about whether or not to receive the heat from the pan below.  Let’s say they had the choice to insulate themselves from the heat, to make themselves invisible to it so that it could just drift past without any real interaction.  Now what.

No Bénard-Raleigh cells.

I invite you to take one more step with me.  Let us imagine that the water molecules themselves were even smaller Bénard-Raleigh cells, self-resonating patterns of energy we would describe as hydrogen and oxygen.  Self-resonating, but not self-existing…  They are fractal Bénard-Raleigh cells “one level down”.  A certain amount of that spirit energy from the bottom of the pan flows through an even finer chaotic medium, engendering the very pattern of choice and consciousness they think is the mark of their own independent existence.

This is, I think, about as far as I can stretch the metaphor.  This is by and large where we stand today.  There are major patterns of creation we haven’t even considered yet, because until we allow the energy of spirit to flow through us unimpeded, there is no way for those global patterns to emerge in the pan.  They remain dormant all around us.  Meanwhile, we try to hide from the heat while using our isolated powers of thought and will to change the nature of what is happening within the pan, to fix it, give it order, to eliminate the hot spots, to create a constant temperature distribution, to spread the wealth equally, etc., etc. and so on and so forth.  Little do we know, these efforts are a form of resistance to the world that is waiting for us.  We fail to comprehend the fact that the world doesn’t need to be transformed…  If we would just let it be what it is…

It’s working perfectly!

The world has all the built-in resonances it needs, as do we.  It simply awaits our acceptance, our willingness to allow the energy of spirit to flow through us, and then…  Voila!  Phase change.  Music.  Light.

One thing to keep in mind…  We get excited about what this means for our individual lives.  We will be freer.  We will be wealthier perhaps.  We will be healthier.  Leaving aside specifics, we will enter the state of authentic abundance, whatever that means to each of us.  I believe that is entirely true, but I think the emergence of a new pattern in Creation will eclipse many of our specific concerns altogether.  They will be rendered moot.  They are the exact type of concerns the molecules in the pan of water are burdened with before their whole world suddenly becomes a dance hall.  It takes real effort to get to the top of the pan by swimming.  It’s far easier when that is where the current takes you.

From the near side of this phase transition, we want to see and predict, perhaps control the patterns that will emerge in the pan.  We want to make sure they don’t leave out the cup holders we want, the house in which we grew up, or our favorite shade of blue.  My guess is, all expectations will be richly exceeded.  And the real humdinger is this: they will simply dawn upon us.  We couldn’t create this pattern as individuals if we tried.  A heated pan of water suddenly shifts into ordered convection cells because the conditions are ripe, and it is wholly natural.  I think it will be the same with us.

Our job, if I may use such a term, is to ripen.  To simply open up, and flower.  To accept the flow of spirit through us.  To accept the nature of the opportunity that is afforded any reality that is backstopped by Love.  The rest will take care of itself.  Our individual accomplishments will be nice, but they are not why we accept this…  Yes, we will heal.  Yes, we will find peace.  Yes we may unleash some long under-utilized creativity.  Our individual unfolding will be wonderful, but it is not the entirety of the point…  From where we sit, in a quiet pan latent with potential, our individual self-realization seems like the desired “outcome”.  This is a misperception I think– a view still largely informed by viewing ourselves as isolated pieces.

Self-realization is not only an end, but also a means—both at once—as accepting who we are causes the entire pan of water to transform.  What it means to be a water molecule will never be the same again…  We cannot really see what this means until we live it…  That is what we are doing…  Individual self-realization is not an outcome at all, but a choice to participate in spontaneous revelations without end, to let the Whole take up residence within us.

In A Course of Love, Jesus says the journey from separation to unity is an individual one, because as separate beings we have no basis for understanding unity, or even conceiving of it.  As we come to know ourselves, however, and to discover who we really are, we find the presence of Love alive within us, and this leads inevitably to the awareness there is no such thing as separation.  Paradoxically, this Self-awareness shatters the concept of an isolated self.  As we do this, one by one, and accept the flow of Creation alive within us, at some point the whole pan of water will spontaneously self-order, and we will swim in holy meaning once again.

What is the Meaning of This!?

January 20, 2014
by Michael
comments 22
Christ / Course Ideas

If this world is not an accident- the fortuitous product of its own basic uncertainty, or strictly speaking the ramification of a series of serendipitous oscillations in a quantized electromagnetic field- well, then it must be on purpose.  We are left with no acceptable alternatives.

Well… it could have been a mistake, but that is a scenario we hardly ever entertain.  That would really be a head-scratcher wouldn’t it?  To have been brought into existence as the work of a great and vast Awareness, albeit the nervous type who inadvertently spin off worlds when caught off guard, is just no good at all.  It would go something like this.  God, in the throes of learning His trade, is sitting at the work bench with His magnifiers on, etching a world onto a grain of cosmic rice, completely in a flow state, when the front door whips around on its hinges as if Thor is practicing the hammer throw on the front porch.  BAM!

The rice grain goes flying, cleaved in two, the small half sticking to the ceiling.  “Je-sus Christ!”

Whoops…  The sound of angels hitting a high note with impeccable harmony.  There’s a world…  Oh, boy…

Jesus is caught flat-footed by his Father’s glare, which is streaming like infrared beams over the top of the magnifiers.

“Sorry, Dad.”

Young Rumi and Hafiz, a little preoccupied with an incessant whirling competition they can never seem to be without, crash into their friend in the foyer, giggling, as the boy Buddha, ever observant, neatly sidesteps the three car pile-up and says, “What’s up, Mr. Maker?  You got any new ideas?”

God sighs.  He can’t stay angry for long.  “Come close boys.  Let’s take a look at what I’ve just done.  Jesus- you know not to surprise me like that while I’m working…”

They all peer over the rim of the world.

“Wow…”  “Cool…”  “I wish I could live there…”

God chuckles, looking at the sight of happy children- usually it’s just stars and space, maybe some weird-shaped rocks, but they love it every time.  Then He leans over and takes a look…

“Oh my…”

This one is a little different.  Something out of the ordinary.  They watch, as something skitters across the sand.  “Look!”

“What was that!?”

“Let’s go boys!”  One by one, they dive into the world.  God, too…

* * * * *

Maybe it could work…

* * * * *

What I like of this little escapade is that God dives in, too.  God is touched, surprised, intrigued by what has come into existence.  I’m not saying that is an accurate or complete description of the state of affairs, but I’m also saying the notion of a God who already knows everything at the level of what television shows will be on the air next season may not be entirely accurate.  God will be there when they air.  God will be there when they are conceived.  God will be with each viewer.  But still… it might have a Life of it’s own…  This is ongoing.  We live within the moment of Creation.

I like the feeling this idea engenders within me- the notion that Creation isn’t done yet, the notion that it’s an outpouring with no end in sight.  It’s like the instant you try riding the bike without training wheels the first time.  It’s a little loosey-goosey.  You feel caught in between states, like you’re suspended on a chair with four legs, one of which is a tad too short.  The experience has been freed of a few parameters you once thought were vitally important: such as the idea that God knows precisely what’s going to happen next.  Maybe She doesn’t.  Maybe we don’t, either.  Maybe no one does.  How would that be?

That feels ecstatic to me right now.  Being part of something like that feels like being up to divine work.

For some, however, I acknowledge this could feel scary, just as launching across the pavement on two in-line wheels without a pair of stabilizers could be too much to take on some days.  If you remove the training wheels, something awful could happen.  This whole thing could go right off the rails.  Isn’t that how we think?  What is the difference between being excited about not knowing what comes next and being panicked about it?

The difference is knowing the only thing that matters: there is only Love.

Let’s drop the concept of God altogether, or if you insist, I’d like to suggest we borrow the concept Jesus offers in A Course of Love, which is the notion that God is the Relationship of all things to all things.  Maybe we can just say Love, though technically in ACOL sense, God is more like Love with a plot, Love stirred up and boiling over in funky shapes.  To know that One is Love, and there is no other One, and there is no Other Love, is to know everything.  Nothing else can ever exist.  It is the Knowledge that no event or circumstance could ever change your Reality.  This is shockingly good feeling, and it keeps going to work on us…  We never get to the end of it.  It is like delicate snow falling through the mind that perpetually falls, and never grows deep…  Each flake is a holy Idea…  A saving grace…  A quantum of healing…

“Holy !@#%”

When this realization sets fire to your mind, you cannot help it: you want to tell somebody about this.  Have you heard?!

I think we live in the midst of the telling.

We are whispering it to each other.  This is our holy work, and Meaning comes from telling our piece.  You have a piece no one else has, and it is important you allow it to be told.  You have a piece to heal no one else can heal, and it is important you allow it to be healed.  I think this is what we are up to, and I think it goes somewhere, but it’s a lot like tying a rock around your waist and jumping off a steep mountain that goes all the way up.  You can give up the worry about hitting the ground.

So, as we were saying, this Creation business… It was no accident.  It looked up its sleeve and found a big fat Nothing, and pulled out a rabbit.  There’s just no end to what comes next.

Love At a Glance

January 18, 2014
by Michael
comments 13
Christ / Poetry

Let us begin.
The room is dark and empty,
and filled with silence.
Keep in mind:
this is not the type of silence to which we’re accustomed,
a silence that is the inverse of noise,
the silence that pervades space like a
Propensity For Action lying in ambush.
No.
This is before that type of silence.
This is emptiness.

It is not even a room actually.
It is not even space.
Space, you see, has properties.
This is awareness without properties, so you
have to calibrate your mind to imagine this
by telling it to stay out of this one for a little while.
Just watch, is what I’d tell it.
Dimensionality hasn’t even arrived yet.
Tell it that.
That’s like throwing the bone
way outside of the yard,
over the fence,
(while calling subtle attention to the open gate… !*$&!),
beyond the sea,
past the sunset,
twirling into the horizon,
still going-
in plain view of your constant companion,
your devoted, furry puzzle solver,
who looks at you oddly for a split second,
head cocked to one side in an effort to comprehend your motives,
then dashes through the front gate barking like a maniac
in hot pursuit of nothing whatsoever.

This, by design, could take a while.

While your thinking mind runs to find the bone,
to put it in its mouth, and shake it back
and forth while growling and pumping its cheek muscles,
to teach that bone a lesson,
right up until it gets bored,
you have some time to your Self.
That’s exactly what we need.

Let us begin.
The room is filled with Love.
(We could stop there, if we wanted.
That would be enough for one day.
But in case it’s another three lifetimes
before we stumble into a moment such as this one…)

Love is.
Love doesn’t think, but
She does have something to say.
So She created a world.
That was the most obvious way to say it.
Here’s the problem:
the world was so deeply ordered
we thought the thing about a world
was that it could run on its own.
You know, according to its own mechanisms.
I like the word ‘bootstrap’ for this type of discussion.
That is like saying Love is optional.
Well that is just plain foolishness, I know, but still…

Look here, for instance—
You don’t need Love to make two hydrogen atoms
fuse into helium and give off energy.
You need immense gravitational pressure is all.
Everything points to that conclusion.
And yet…

You and I both sense it:
Love is real.
We sense that
deep acceptance of Love could change the world.
We also know, stars twinkle in the night sky
according to fixed laws.
Thus, we ask ourselves the question:
where does dimensionlessness interface with dimension?
Where does freedom interface with order?
How do miracles sneak into this world?
(Like thieves in the night?)
(Do the laws cease to be for a brief time?)
(Was somebody bribed along the borderlands?)
(Where are the clandestine points of entry?)
(Can we go there and watch?)

It seems like everything works like this:
one thing begets another in a never-ending sequence.
That doesn’t explain how Love did it, though—
created a world from scratch.
That doesn’t explain how Love still does it—
how She sometimes crawls inside the world
to shake the pipes,
cross the wires,
or flash the high beams on and off.

Inquiring minds want to know:
how does this happen?
Where is the point of contact???

With this in mind, let us begin.
The room is dark and empty,
and filled with silence.
Love has Her eyes closed.
Love discovers She has something to say.
She tries to smile, but there isn’t even any space to bend.
Love wants to start laughing but there is nothing to shake.
She opens her eyes, and suddenly, there is Light.
(Space with properties,
Silence that can jiggle,
ALL that, too…)

Then Love looks in the mirror and sees you.
How did you get inside There!?

Quick!  The barking is getting louder…
Before the puzzle-solver returns…
Just Say It!
We can answer all the questions at once!

The Redemptive Move

January 13, 2014
by Michael
comments 18
Christ / Creative

Sometimes a day arrives in which the thing to do is just see what it has in store for you.  It’s a day free of obligations, a day book-ended by important affairs and thus inopportune for embarking on projects that must be finished once they’ve begun, a day on which taking stock means discovering how you really feel given the space to do so, a day for partaking of simple pleasures.  I chose once, on such a day, to take a walk in the park.

A winter thaw had brought the air up to a humane temperature, and snow was melting in ways undetectable by the human eye– shrinking inch-wise, everywhere at once, in a creeping, parametric withdrawal from existence.  Movements like these in the world around us– the subtle and unceasing workings of Nature– fly below the radar of our attention.  When we finally catch on, we wonder how they could have escaped us.  When we find that we are ourselves occupying an embodiment of the same phenomenon– have been ever since we were born– we become forlorn.  We reevaluate, mistaking perpetual transformation as the prelude to a desultory ending.  We crack apart.  We turn to the advice of experts.  We demand to know reasons why as well as the schedule of most probable outcomes when all that is asked for is our return to an endless, subtle knowing– to melt a little bit each day, like the snow.

No one played a trick on us.  We’ve been sliding into this apocalypse of recognition all along.

* * * * *

The sky was gray and overcast, almost white, and crackled with the wet undersides of dormant tree limbs.  The birds were sitting silent upon them, keeping their vigil, monitoring the receding snow.  Other people must have had days more in keeping with the modern intention, because the trails were quiet and serene.  The sounds of the city a few hundred yards away were the sounds of normalcy, though muffled and pixelated– droning cars, the patter of footfalls, a shrieking horn, a whistle, belts in need of tensioning, tires scrunching bits of windblown debris, flags rippling in the wind.

I was starting to think about the things a life is ultimately driving at, the questions about trying to become an absolute in a world of relatives, when I turned the corner and found myself confronted by a veritable crowd.  In the summer this particular square was always sprinkled with chess players, but never quite like this.  Just one table was in use, but it was enclosed by a deepening circle of curious patrons.  The players themselves were hidden from view.

As I approached, two doves took flight from the center of the cluster, winging upwards into the sky amidst a sudden and collective intake of breath.  It was as if the whole world had paused together, except for the doves’ flight.  Their eyes were both distant and clear as they settled into the trajectories they sought, the ones they felt calling to them from the inside, and they flew with the urgency of holy messengers.  The moment quickly melted as consciousness caught up with visceral understanding.  As the doves disappeared into a foggy beyond composed of barren trees and snowy hills, the surprised silence was replaced by contagious applause, and a flurry of localized commentaries.  I watched the two travelers shrink in my vision until I could no longer see them.  I was profoundly curious about their sudden appearance, and turned back to the scene at hand, squeezing in close for a better view.  I wasn’t sure I’d be able to see, but I found myself quite easily able to slip into a position with clear view of the proceedings.

Jesus was seated at an empty board, and opposite him, his friend Rumi.  Their eyes were twinkling.  They were smiling– jubilant– sighing as if they had just released their concentration from a feat of tremendous skill and dexterity.

“Shall we play again?” Jesus asked.

“You know I cannot resist your invitation,” Rumi replied.

“You want to be the Offering this time?”

“As a sun desires to rise.”

I was surprised to see the board was already set, and ready to go.  I couldn’t help but raise my brow as Jesus slid all the dark pieces off of the board onto a pile in front of himself.  Opposite, Rumi performed a similar maneuver with his small army of white figurines.  Then Jesus asked the crowd for a volunteer.

A girl came forward and Jesus asked her to pick three pieces and set them on the board.  One of them had to be the King.  Then the girl came around and picked out three of Rumi’s, one of which was also the King.

Jesus went first, placing his first piece– a bishop– onto a black square near the center of the board.  Rumi nodded and placed his pawn onto the board, just a few rows away from the board’s opposite edge.  Jesus sat for a moment, stroking his chin, then set his rook down a few squares off to the side of his bishop.  Rumi, who had never stopped nodding, who seemed to be standing along the border between two worlds, set a knight two squares down and one square over from the bishop.  Jesus placed his King in a remote position at the near edge of the board, and then Rumi placed his own King into checkmate.

The fellow next to me whispered in my ear, “That was the Offering.”

I nodded silently.

They began.

* * * * *

Rumi went first, sliding  his King out of checkmate.

“Pass me a rook, there, Friend,” Jesus said.

Rumi picked up the piece in question from his pile and handed it over.  Jesus set it down in the location of his rook, and slid his own rook a few places to the side.  Next Rumi called for the dark Queen, set her down in the location of his recently resurrected rook, and slid his miniature Christ to the near edge of the board.  Jesus picked up his rook and set it down further back and out of the way, freeing the center of the board for an entirely new landscape of possibility.

Rumi winked, called for a representative from Jesus’ stack of pawns,  slid his own pawn back and to the left, diagonally one square, and set Jesus’ down on the recently vacated spot.  Piece by piece, move by move, the board was populated, working its way back to the Beginning.  They never stopped once to think, never stopped bathing in ideas, never stopped surprising one another with the way one moment could build on the next, unexpectedly tumbling into place.  They never ceased the back-and-forth exchange on which a world is built.

The game built on itself as each revelation made the next one possible, each gift paved the way for another.  The complexity of the board multiplied turn over turn and quickly eclipsed my ability to trace.  Then, just as the crowd was welling up with expectation, at a crucial moment, the play slowed, and I couldn’t see how a move could be made at all.  The pair looked up and made eye contact.  Jesus began to laugh.  “It has found us again, my Friend,” he said.

“So it would seem,” Rumi replied, beaming.

Then Rumi swung his knight around and toppled Jesus’ bishop, taking a piece off the board.  I was caught by a sudden and holy sense of recognition, but blinded to what I had glimpsed, as if my entire life had been a dream and I had just encountered the type of moment whose logical outcome, when it finally came, would be the forgetting that anything tenuous had ever seemed to happen.

I looked quizzically to the fellow next to me, who seemed to be familiar with these proceedings.  “That was the redemptive move,” he explained.  “Every game I’ve seen these two play has one, a moment when they can no longer proceed as they have, and the only right move is the one the game itself offers.  It’s like the Game behind the game reveals itself.  The trick is to know when this moment has come.  Believe me, I know.  If you miss it, the whole thing just fractures, but these guys never miss it.  They recognize it every time, and they never question it.  They’re insanely good at this– true masters.  I could watch them all day…”

* * * * *

From there the Beginning was recovered quickly.  We watched in amazement as the board came together, click-click-click, as if a tangled ball of dimensions had been unraveled right before us.  As the last pawn slid back into position, we reached out with our hands to beat them together in applause, full of the most buoyant sensation, and the entire plaza erupted into a field of doves leaping into the air.  Our hands became a sea of beating wings.  We swirled around one another in a spiral tempest of pure motion, knowing perfectly well how to fly in a broadly choreographed pattern, how to sweep across a snowy field in formation, and the plaza was left quiet again– an abandoned patch of stone set amid the chill of winter.

Some days are like that.  Holiness strikes and then disperses, leaving the type of emptiness you can only find by living in a world.

* * * * *

A brief acknowledgment… The phrase “redemptive move” was given to me by Ptero9 in a comment she made on her blog, while, little beknownst to her, I was thinking about this idea of using chess in reverse as a metaphor for the way Creation seems to build on itself, by giving to one another in ways whose true effects we can hardly fathom.  The words when I received them sparkled in my mind, and linked quickly to this idea.  It struck me as a great example… of thoughts linking up… of ideas flowing back and forth…

Beauty Revisioned

January 9, 2014
by Michael
comments 5
Course Ideas / Science

A pitfall in our thinking is the notion that there is a fixed place at which we are destined to arrive- (I can’t avoid noting the obvious link between the terms destiny and destination)- a condition to realize that will be immune to change, an ideal state to occupy or embody.  Alas, there is not.  At the same time, I do think the Truth is constant.  Identity, properly construed, is constant.  I think that we inevitably discover in our Heart(s) a fixed Identity that we share, but we too often forget that what is changeless cannot be defined or bounded.  We mistakenly imagine Changelessness as something finite- the never-changing melody of our favorite song, the never-changing flavor of our favorite cola, the consistently-remembered circumstances of the favorite period of our life.  We too often fail to grasp the fact that what is Changeless is infinite.  It can never fully occupy a description, a concept, or anything finite whatsoever.  It won’t fit.  The word, the language, the place, the time, the personality- they simply won’t hold It.

To discover the Truth of who we are is to encounter endlessness.

In forgetting that the most effective means of giving infinite changelessness a voice is through the medium of continuous, finite change, we try to make the medium of communication- the clay- into the reality, instead of remembering that the Reality- the intangible Changelessness- is that which is being communicated, the boundless Heart of Creation.  This is the folly of misperception, and the underpinning of our belief in the validity of separation, for what is being communicated is always Whole, though the medium of communication is perpetually giving rise to the illusion of parts.

We can try to impose an alternate perception on events, but there is something about the Reality in which we are dealing that inevitably shatters false concepts.  Oh my, it is glorious to watch our false concepts crash and burn!  One way this occurs, is through the practice of science.  You may not view yourself as overly scientific, or find the topic all that relevant, but I will say two things about that: first, there is no way to return Home, to your rightful place as a changeless, eternal Identity, without a bit of cognitive discipline; second, science is a delectable mirror that very faithfully returns a picture of a culture or society’s ideals of Truth and Beauty.  Regarding the former, the power of science is it’s insistence on following a disciplined approach to engaging with the unknown.  There is power in adhering to principle.  With respect to the latter, our idealized images of Truth and Beauty are inevitably found wanting, and as every generation’s “Answers” to the ageless questions begin to crumble, we find ourselves looking down the loaded barrel of Truth once again, begging for a fresh experiment.

Science is like this Quixotic quest to understand what is, by beginning with the notion that what is, is measurable and repeatable.  (Gulp.)  Is not this very notion fraught with difficulty?  Difficulties aside, the process of following this thread to ground instructs us about who we are- if we would let it.  I am reminded of Ladinsky’s translation of a poem by Hafiz that says, “Few can escape self-made traps… And when a person falls into one, it is natural to call out for help.  If you attend such a plea, take someone like me along as a safety rope or ladder… just in case you slip.”  It is all about our interpretation, our perception, our willingness to read between the lines.  If we loosen the reigns of interpretation a bit, we find the residue of Formless Changelessness at every turn.

My introduction has gone on too long, but I want to offer an example of the way our very best science shatters false concepts, and suggests the primordial Purpose of using a medium of continuous, finite change to simulate our Reality of infinite Changelessness.  The physics at our disposal prior to the 20th century was both beautiful and deterministic.  The linkages between cause and effect were clear.  It was symmetrical in time- could be run both forwards and backwards with equal reliability.  Nature followed a perfect order, a mathematical precision, all ultimately linked by this mysterious “action at a distance”- an attraction of matter for all other matter that we called gravity.  It was both mystical and profound.  Is this not Love- the desire of matter for all other matter?  The memory of Connection?

We find in hindsight a worldview replete with the seeds of its own undoing- the suggestion that the connection we called gravity was communicated across vast distances with infinite speed.  We have to forgive our naivete, however, for even this made a certain sense.  Was this not the obvious evidence of a Divine Force?  It was beautiful…  We didn’t realize that to have a working simulation of infinite changelessness, you can’t have everything communicated instantaneously.  To simulate simultaneity, you need a Universe filled with lag.  It needs to be chasing its tail somewhat.  A problem with the Newtonian world was that such a world had no room for inexplicability, no means of deviating from the path laid before it…  The whole Universe was like a vast pool table: if we knew the starting velocities and positions of every billiard ball, we could predict with precision it’s outcome.  There was no room for uncertainty…  There was no way for us to be free…  At some level, we couldn’t accept it…

This image was exploded in the 20th century with the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics.  Regardless of whether we thought the previous world concept was beautiful or not, it was wrong.  The discipline of science required us to admit: reality was not so clean or straightforward as we had once thought, not so logical…  It was a wave that hit the shore in discrete, localized pulses.  It was tiny bits of matter that behaved, individually, like waves interfering with themselves.  The physics of the 20th century brought the introduction of uncertainty, imposed a speed limit upon the communication of gravity, and suggested that Nature at a fundamental level was governed by probabilities.  This stung, but we are resilient, and soon we were using this adolescent science to explain everything from luck to consciousness, such is our desire to know and understand.  Meanwhile, considerable efforts were made to preserve the integrity of our disturbing experimental observations without losing the deterministic, reliable picture of Nature we used to enjoy…  Soon, in definitive experiments, we found out: Nature is spookier than we thought.

What does that mean about us?  Are we the product of random chance, the hapless byproducts of intermingled luck and circumstance?  We abhor the thought that we are, fundamentally, random.  We abhor meaninglessness, and rightfully so!  I love, on the other hand, to reflect upon the fact that we are the living ramification of Inexplicability!

Recently, in efforts to explain how living matter could exist, or have emerged, we found that Nature is indeed, in it’s heart of hearts, a sea of probabilities.  It has been shown that when a lot of particles get together and interact, something strange can occur…  Every such system contains trap doors, hidden resonances we could not have predicted, that shift their dynamics into ever more complex modes of behavior.  The math of these resonances is divergent, meaning we can’t see inside of it.  We can’t see what they may contain.  What I find amazing about this discovery is that we have found that what shatters the predictable, Newtonian world into a world of probability is non-local resonance in systems, a resonance that arises and is communicated via sustained interaction of many elements together.  We still have something spooky here.  A “new” spookiness.

We have gained a messy world, a world with speed bumps, warts and unspeakable oddities, a world seemingly random and unpredictable- but is this not precisely the type of world an infinite Changelessness might require to engage within?  Doesn’t a world of seeming precision that is embedded with hidden points of access make a certain sense?  This is the science of anything could happen…  It is miraculous and beautiful…  And yet, if I stand on principle, I have to accept that this, too, maybe sooner than later, will be dismantled and replaced by new understanding.

But we should not be worried.  Our meaning is not derived from explanations of the finite.  As residual falsehood embedded in the old ideas is wrung out, our notions of Beauty will be perpetually in a state of revision… even as who we are is found to be eternally Changeless.  An irrascible Truth dressed up in matter…

The Mathematics of Hafiz

January 7, 2014
by Michael
comments 22
Christ / Poetry

Hafiz explained to us that,
given Mr. Findley’s unexpected absquatulation to Costa Rica,
he would be teaching the class for a little while.
Then he let go of a stack of books
from about eighteen inches off the desk
and when they landed
the sound they made was so big
it damn near blew the back wall of the room off.
After the dust settled, he winked at us.
“Mr. Findley,” he said, “was the Set Up Man.”
It was time for the Big Guns.
He told us the origin of the word Algebra
was the “reunion of broken parts”,
but on account of the fact that we
took that fact sitting down
he flung his shoe across the room
and dismissed us for the rest of the day
in exasperation.

The next day he began by saying
there is practical algebra,
like Mr. Findley had used to keep the dean preoccupied-
the kind you can use to figure
out how much fuel to buy per week if
it takes one quart of fuel to cut up
one tree into sellable parts and
you have property that yields a
hundred trees per year-
but then there is Real Algebra.
Then he winked at us.
We hit the floor instinctively,
but no footwear was forthcoming.

“As an aside,” he said, “the Beloved
asked me to spend some time with
physicists over the winter.  Those
are people who have taken a solemn vow
to abstain from dividing by zero.
Very devout, these people.”

“I have great respect for them, but…
“…
“…
(He liked to heighten the suspense.)
“…that is not my way.”
“The secret to Real Algebra,” he offered,
“is to divide by zero every chance you get.”
We jumped up and applauded,
but he jumped up on his desk and
cautioned us to be respectful.

He said a coefficient was something
you could put into words, like “mechanic”
or “butler” or “shyster.”
He said a variable was something that
could be anything- like you or I… an infinity.
Multiply them together, and what do you get?
We looked around like unwitting savants.
A mechanic who can fix anything, he said.
We jumped up and applauded.

He said Creation was a vast, holy equation
without any numerical solution, so why bother?
Only something endless like a being
can crawl inside of it
and straighten
the whole mess out.
That, he said, was Real Algebra.

For our final exam, he asked us
an important question:
“Do you still believe there’s any meaning
to the term ‘broken parts’?”

Science and My Love of Being

January 4, 2014
by Michael
comments 17
Christ / Science

I love science- the way it pries open the mind, the way it reveals the marbling of connection that courses through world like a vein of sparkling ore running deep through a mountain, the way it points to a destination without ever quite arriving.  When- after digging through the till, sifting, examining, illuminating, testing, and finally conceding the point- we admit our befuddlement, and we dare to ask the types of questions our previous world concept couldn’t bear, sometimes, we are rewarded with the lightning strike of understanding.  A hidden logic, embedded in the world, flashes across our consciousness.  A deeper order is revealed.  We realize the world is not what we had once envisioned it to be.  Meaning emerges as a palpable sensation, a field of goose bumps, a brush with the electrically charged skin of Mystery.

This is the beauty and the glory of science.  After years of patience, longsuffering efforts, trials and error, keen observation and highly creative, abstract thinking, this is the reward- a moment of discovery and revelation that changes our view of the world, or some slice of it, forever.  To hypothesize the existence of an order lurking behind the scenes that no one prior would have dared to imagine existed, and then to find it- to witness one’s ideas unfolding before you, in the indomitable language of Nature- is to share a secret with Nature, to have whispered back and forth with Her.  This conversation tickles the very core of who we are.

I love science, but part of my journey as a person has been to fathom out it’s place in the hierarchy of my own thought.  For the practitioner, science is the study of measurable things- of matter and energy and the ways they combine and interact.  As a being, however, I have found that I can only make sense of myself as an immeasurable, born of and forever living within, The One Whole Vast and Never Ending Immeasurable.  I have found I can only make sense of the physical world in the context of its being an artifact, a residue continuously born of the undefinable singularity- the hive of all Possibility- that is the Immeasurable.

Jesus captures this viewpoint beautifully in A Course of Love, when he says, “All that you now see are but symbols of what is really there before you, in glory beyond your deepest imaginings.  Yet you persist in wanting only what your eyes can see and hands can hold.  You call these things real, and all else  unreal.”  This is a fundamental misperception, however- an unnecessary restriction on our definition of what is Real.  Jesus also says, “To truly see is to begin to see the formless.  To begin to see the formless is to begin to understand what you are.”

What does this mean for my love of science?  What is the relationship of the reality of form to the Reality of Formlessness?  For myself, I see my immeasurability as the truth of who I am, of who we are, and the measurables as the clay we are sculpting, the language we are speaking, the transitory phenomena that make the invisible, visible.  I think largely we are fooled, however, by the incredible, (inhuman?) precision and repeatability of particular patterns or ordered laws of nature into believing the physical world is the fundamental level of order on which all others are based, perhaps because we think, “Nothing that is the product of volition, intelligence, or desire could be so trustworthy, so complexly beautiful, so simultaneously indecipherable and obvious…”  This conclusion is but a reflection of our incorrect assessment of the steadfastness and vastness of the ground of being on which all reality is based.  It is a reflection of our incorrect assessment of what it means to be human, and to dwell in a land of Ideas.

Were I called to the carpet to demonstrate the way a motive Formlessness orders the domain of the material, there wouldn’t perhaps be any clear evidence for the existence of the proverbial magic wand.  I could speak of Jesus until the cows came home, of what I have seen in the places in my life when nobody else was looking, but put me in front of a room full of people and dare me to transform a pitcher of water into wine, and well… you know…  Detractors would construct straw man tests such as these and beg of me to levitate wooden blocks with my mind, or heal the terminally ill at my leisure.  Were these requests not met, would my position be untenable?  Would it be illogical?

Why, when those who have used all power given unto them to experience powerlessness are given what they have desired, do they insist it proves there is no power?  As any scientist should know, no experiments fail- they simply reveal how a particular set of conditions unfolded.  Were all of the conditions known?  Perhaps not.  Said another way, have all of the mechanisms and variables of the Universe been elucidated?  Clearly not.  We are not, ourselves, extractable from the milieux of phenomena we call reality, from the needs both called for and met by the confluence of matter and energy in any particular wedge of time and space.  Furthermore, the needless rift between form and formlessness has yet to be fully healed.  While the relationship between the two remains only tenuously grasped, how could we fully realize the possibilities inherent within it?

We continue to be faced with a Mystery- both within and without.  My love of science is implicit to my love of being, but it does not eclipse it.  When I read statements such as this, from Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine, whose work tickles my soul, my smile wanes into a cringe.  It is, for me, one step too far.  In his book The End of Certainty, he writes, “We see that human creativity and innovation can be understood as the amplification of laws of nature already present in physics or chemistry.”  The amplification?

(At the same time, please know that Prigogine’s work, and that of his colleagues, is profoundly inspiring to me.  This is the paradox.)

This is, for me, where science oversteps.  I see in the laws of nature echoes of what is real, finite symbols of what is infinite, reflections that cannot help but remind us of what is true and forever existing “behind the scenes”- (perhaps “incarnating within the scenes”)?  There is a myth in science- the quest for a Theory of Everything- that I think echoes our own desire to be complete and whole as fragmentary, finite personalities.  We wish to know who we are, as individuals, separate from the whole, because we think it is possible for us to answer the question of who we are once and for all, to end our confusion, and to live in the land of reliability.  We never arrive there, however, without accepting that Mystery lies at the heart of who we are, without discovering in our individuality the Whole, and discovering in and as the Whole that only in the embrace of the Formlessness at our core can we ever find the certainty we seek.

I see in science a symbol of this same dilemma, a reenactment of this drama, and I wonder, how much more beautiful would science be, were it to give up on the notion of reaching completion, of ever possessing a Theory of Everything to wield like a wand?  Is this not a Fool’s Errand?  What would it show us were it to embrace the notion that discoveries will continue forever, unabated.  I wonder how much more beautiful it would be if we recognized in the symbols of Nature the words of an unending dialogue we are having with ourselves, about who we are, and who we desire to be?  I wonder what would be possible if we didn’t allow our science to determine the boundaries of our experience, but saw instead within it’s historical unfolding the irrefutable evidence of the fact that we have absolutely no idea… what… will happen… Next…