Author: barryschade@gmail.com

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.

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.