Month: September 2016

I grew up expecting miracles.   It was close to a daily occurrence.   I would pray, and just because I asked, I expected that the order of the universe would change to fit my preference or my design.   I never realized that it would have been more effective if I just changed myself and my expectations to fit the order of the universe.    I would have been much more successful if I had just yielded to what would be.

I suppose that when I stand before the mountain, I can ask the mountain to change, to move just a little to the right so I can pass.    Perhaps just make the slope a little easier for me to climb.   Not let its rocks slide down on me.   I haven’t found it works this way.

On the other hand, there are times the mountain does change.   Not because I ask it  to, but because I change how I approach it.    I change, and so my encounter with the mountain changes.    And that becomes reality.

When I smile, do I affect the flavor of the Universe, do I adjust the Humming?  As I ripen, does the Universe ripen too?   For sure I affect my interaction and so determine my own reality.

I think I do move the Universe just a little.  I change the dial on the Humming, just a little.

Last evening I heard a talk by Mark that helped me understand some of what I have been creeping into this past year.  He described meditation as a practice of continuous mindful awareness.   It clicked.   That is what this mysterious experience I’ve been having is all about.   For me it was validating to learn that I have perhaps found a path others have traveled and benefited.

What if I could see everyone as they really are?  Would I be able to see them as the wondrous and exciting presence they really are?  Would I be able to resist the demanding urge to rush up to everyone and embrace them with the most loving embrace I can imagine?

Would I immediately feel the suffering that drags them down wherever they go?   Would I be able to find them in their retreats of false refuges?  Could I refrain from taking their hand and holding it, touching their shoulder, speaking softly, walking beside them?

How would I ever manage to walk the four blocks down Hennepin Avenue from my bus stop to the Light Rail station without hugging everyone along the way.   Everyone, the dirty and ugly, the clean and beautiful.  This would be interesting.

I remember how sixteen years ago we began a new millennium with the excitement of some huge cosmic clock striking another major milestone of time.  All the while I never considered that the measure of time in minutes, hours and days is a human invention dreamed up by old men who watched the sky a long time ago.    I never considered that each of them experienced time in their own way and a minute passing meant something different to each of them.

I live in my own experience of time, something only realized in the past century.  Time is relative.  Even within my own lifetime, my experience of time has shifted.   As I talk with friends, I am usually inattentive to our living in our own individual time zones.   Yet we seem to make it work.

I choose not to believe.   I no longer rely on belief to shape my interaction with the world.   I’ve come to realize that the word “believe” signals that I am entering into my own imagination or, worse yet, the imagination of someone else.

Belief actually interferes with my interaction with the world.  Belief messes up my relationship, and I distrust it.   By providing an imagined view of some part of my world, it distracts me from a real experience, from seeing what is actually there.   Believing is like walking into a room and turning off the lights.

I know this challenges the way of many religious traditions.   Unfortunately, most religions have put little emphasis on helping aspirants to open their eyes to themselves and their place in the world around them.   Instead, most religions emphasis the importance of living in the imaginations of someone who lived a long time ago or sits in a position of leadership.   Some religions demand precise forms of belief, specific surrender to someone else’s imagination, so that there can be unity in the same hallucination.

I am trying to put aside the illusions and constrictions of belief, and my world is becoming wide, wonderful and dazzling.   Much more than before.   It means I am turning the lights back on and experiencing the animation in us all.     It is an interaction I could not have with my eyes closed or the lights turned off.   It is an evolving, changing interaction without the illusions of belief.

I am grateful that, as a human, I have this ability to feel.  For so many years, it was an ability that mostly lay dormant and hidden in me.    Occasionally it would show itself when I peered into the night sky, walked in a lush woods, listened to stirring music, had an intimate conversation.   These were rare events.

I don’t mean the emotions that arise in me.   I mean that deeper feeling that lies beyond and below emotions.  I mean that deep sense of presence like the one that comes when I walk into a vast and awesome space.  All my senses tingle, my body yields to a surrounding energy,  I float in the calmness of a sea below the waves.   It is a little like the satisfying feeling that comes after a good sneeze.  But it lingers longer.

My realm of feeling has largely been inaccessible, to me or anyone else.   I would go there by accident,  in a manner unplanned, unprepared and largely unaware.

Now that place is becoming much more familiar.   I can request an invitation just about any time that I want, and I can go there frequently.   I often forget that it is a place that welcomes me home.   Then I remember, smile and settle in.

The past is a drama acted  out on the stage-set of my imagination.  The action, with all its emotional entanglement, is provided by my shifting memories of past encounters or those memories of someone else.

The only reality is my interaction with the memories of those encounters. Many people before me have written or told stories in order to pass on the memory of their experience.  A select few of these that have survived are available to me in sacred writings.   How well these sacred writings accurately represent the experience or intention of the original authors is always uncertain.   Like a well used library book, all of them bear the marks of the hands of the scribes and translators, all of whom have added some of their own interaction with the spiritual content.

When I read these writings in any spiritual tradition, I try to listen for the voice of the many people who are trying to relate the fullness of their reality, their interaction.   It seems I often hear many voices, and it is hard to distinguish any individual.

I would be in error if I somehow saw any of these eye-witness accounts as a true description of what took place, even if I had the exact description by the original writer.   If I saw them as more than a good representation of what the eye-witness encountered, I would miss the point.   Instead, they are the next morning memory of a critic who experienced some past drama and that moved them to write and describe their interaction.    The drama takes on a new reality in the telling, and that becomes the substance of my own interaction.

The stage is set in my imagination.   All else is an illusion.

It has finally hit me between the eyes:  reality is interaction.    Interaction is the only reality.    It is a whispered message out of the swirling, mysterious world of quantum mechanics.    It is the between-the-lines message of everyone who has told me that the only reality is the NOW.

It explains my experience that yesterday’s blooming zinnia only exists as an image in the photo I took and now look at.   It exists only as the memory that left an imprint on my mind.    It exists only in my looking at the photo or my imaging it in my memory.

It explains why I have been pursued by the conviction that I shape my own reality, because I am part of the reaction that creates that reality.

Do things have reality outside our interaction?   I think so, because of the interaction between all things.   The tree falling in forest does make a sound.  But things are part of my reality only to the degree that I interact with them.