Month: September 2016

I love getting older.  Getting older has meant discovering a new appetite for life I never knew before.   Can I say it has been an exuberant discovery?

How fortunate I feel that this is a realization I have now, and not in the dire moments of my final breath when I might suddenly realize what could have been.  I don’t expect a final moment filled with painful regrets and a desperate grasping for roads not taken.

Now is the time I feel free to put off the constraints that have restricted my jumping into life.   It is a time of joy and exhilaration.   Unlike what is expected for old people, it is not a time of putting aside, of regretful separation from what I can no longer do.  I only feel the pained limits of my aging body.   But even that is not as bad as I had anticipated in my grim imagination.

I have been nibbling life around the edges and now I can embrace life with open awareness and penetrating abandon.   I have been planting flowers with care and watched them grow with pleasure.   Now I am part of them, smell them, feel them, grow with them, wallow in their glorious beauty.

I have walked a narrow path in the woods and found delight, never realizing I could wander through the wild flowers and roll in the leaves.

 

 

As I grow, my Father has aged, grown pale and faded away.  My image of him has served me well, but perhaps for too long.  In time he became my Mother as well.    Then the image of my Father / Mother which was so clear and present in my world, receded into the mist, and was no longer present as my Father/Mother.

My heart had reached beyond my mind, and I perceived a presence that included everything.  I was at once very alone and part of everything.    Father-less and Mother-less, I had changed from the youth that could never grasp this reality.   I could never experience it as long as my Father / Mother was at my side, in my world.   By becoming alone in my world, I am very much not alone.

It is as if some days are filled with new magic.   An unseen voice is whispering in my ear an extraordinary hidden truth.   The wordless voice swells within me,  spreading an enveloping energy.  With a sudden flourish, the veil of reality rises to disclose a simpler, deeper, more beautiful order.

I have protected love like a cut rose brought inside to bloom in a vase.  And so it fades.  All the while a bush somewhere thrives and fills sunny days with fragrant and glorious blooms.

I’m a very lucky guy.   There is hardly a day that goes by that I don’t fall a little bit in love.   Sometimes it gets kind of mixed up with desire, but most of the time not.   Some days it happens a lot.

I have the very pleasant experience of opening my heart and someone rushes in.   It seems to happen when I notice someone walking onto the bus, and I pay attention to them in a special way.   They appear to be truly there, right in front of me.   And suddenly they are part of me.  Sometimes they linger there.   Sometimes I think they can see me, but most of the time they don’t.    But they are still part of me,  whether they know it or not.

Most often, these men and women are what you might call unsavory.   Sometimes they are  delightful.   Nevertheless, my heart does not get full with them.   Rather it seems light, airy and full of energy.   The space expands to take all entrants.

This also happens with plants.   I’m a lucky gardener.

My imagination can make an anticipated future experience appear as if it is happening right now.   And so I respond to it.   I react in delight, anxiety, fear, etc.   It seems so real, as if I am in one of my vivid dreams.

My imagination can as effectively bring up memories of a past event,  modify parts of it, make it appear real.    And so I respond, and my reaction is part of my now.

Which illusion do I choose to live in, the past, future or now?  It seems I can only effectively respond to what is happening right now.    My now can have a lot less imagination involved, and is the only true reality.   The imagined future does not yet exist, the imagined past does not exist.    Only the now.

Is it really better to live in my now than my imagined future or past?  It seems I want most of the time to get beyond what my imagination says.   It is a different experience  which I can truly be part of.

Sometimes I escape from my now by entering someone else’s imagination by watching a movie or reading a story.  While that helps me see my now in different ways, I am still trying to live in someone else’s dream world.

What if my eyes did not respond to photons but instead registered any one of the assortment of other particles penetrating the bedroom wall in front of me?  I would not “see” what appears to be a solid object shaped by the photons bouncing off it.   I would recognize the wall as the illusion it is, formed by the photons reaching my eyes.

Instead, what would I see? Would it be a shape defined by some particle or wave or field of energy?    Would I “see” a shadow of a wall and a shadow of the tree beyond?   What if I could see both, and also infra-red?   What would that vision be like?  Just as I can hear thru and beyond a wall, could I see thru and beyond it as well?

Solids are not solids at all.   They are an illusion of impenetrable matter, “seen” because they can bounce photons.   They appear as solid as a hologram sending photons to my eyes .   Given a choice, I think I would like gama-ray vision.

For  such a long time, I’ve struggled and resisted the word “God”.   The term  has so much baggage that comes along with it, no matter how much I have tried to rid myself of the many associations, such as the old guy with a beard.  “God” is a person, just like us, made in our image.  What could be an alternate word for “God”.   For me, it is important because I experience and sense that there is more than our five senses casually tell us.  The word “God” trivializes that reality.

I would like to use the word “Force” but that has too much association with the movie.   “Spark” doesn’t quite catch the dynamic.   I don’t like “The Divine” for the same reasons I reject “God.”

I like “Humming.”   The Humming is in all reality, animates and enlivens all things.   The Humming is perceivable with my intuition, the Humming can be felt, seen, heard with an open heart.   The Humming is not a wave, field or particle but is maybe all three.   The “Humming” suggests music, the beautiful harmony in all things.  The Humming is beyond intelligence, not a person like us, yet we can know its presence.

“I’m sure” is a very self-limiting expression.   It usually means I am certain about something, and I have no doubt about it.   Certainty means that I have put aside the fundamental ambiguity of reality, the principles of quantum physics, the uncertainty principle that permeates everything real.  Most important, it means I have closed my mind.

Awareness emerges out of the gateway of doubt, not out of the rigid artifice of certainty.   Doubt is a gateway to discovery and understanding.  It opens my mind and heart to realities that  exist beyond my avowed knowledge.   Far from being a creature “plagued by doubt”, I embrace my friend Doubt and am grateful for her blessing.

Celibacy has been an issue for me, on many levels, for a very long time.   As I embrace and look forward to a new life as a non-coupled person, I see myself as  taking on a new celibacy life-style but with a different focus.

For me, and for much of western civilization, celibacy has meant “no sex” front and center.   I think that the core reason for celibacy, however, has been the importance of not being coupled with someone.   Not being coupled with someone meant that the celibate person was more free to pursue a spiritual path or provide a spiritual service to the community.

The issue of no sex was more of a consequence than a cause of celibacy.   If someone is not in a coupled relationship, the culture and its norms meant no sex…….  as they say, “no sex outside of marriage”.   St. Augustine had a major hand in this cultural drift.   It reflects a significant influence of Christianity on our thinking.

I see for me that being part of a couple has had some practical benefits.   It has been good for raising children, it has provided a structure for setting up a home and resources, and it has sometimes offered the security of a place of intimacy.   Coupling has also been a distraction and a disruption to my effort of being the kind of person I intend to be.    In fact, I don’t think I am a good partner in a couple.   Not good for me, not good for my partner.

So I am deciding not to be coupled.   That doesn’t mean no relationships, no intimacy, no sex.  In fact my new-styled form of celibacy, no-couple celibacy, may make me a better person to be intimate with.   I certainly expect to be a more aware, mindful and loving person.