July 14, 7:00pm (Kevin Westling)
The ground floor of a spiritual practice involves arranging the furniture, so to speak, so that we get clear with ourselves about what to trust and what to pursue and what to embrace as REAL.
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Trinity @ 7
July 11, 2010
by Cam Miller
“No boundaries,”
“the dead eating peaches”
and the “oft-lost secret of life”…
what can possibly be said about such things?
What can be said,
is that the eye of beholder
is not only powerful, it is blind to what is un-beheld.
Think about the concept of dimensions –
you know, how many dimensions there are?
We are comfortable with the idea of 2D and 3D,
but are there dimensions we do not see?
Upon this question
physics and religion converge –
with utterly different tools and goals
but who knows about the outcomes?
A dimension…
is the minimum number of coordinates needed to specify each point within it.
Our nervous system
has evolved in such a way
as to allow us to perceive some of those dimensions,
but not all of them.
A single eye, for instance,
can takes in visual data from two dimensions,
and two eyes receive data from three.
But it is also possible that these dimensions we observe are not actually they appear to us,
any more than a 3-D movie can be
seen in its fullness without 3-D glasses.
String theorists, as in the physics of String theory,
claim there are 13 dimensions to the universe;
other physicists claim there may be zero dimensions.
Then there are physicists that say
there is an infinite number of dimensions
while others believe that
what we see as different dimensions
is just an illusion of perception.
When we see something with our eyes,
our brain takes the information
sent from those windows of our soul,
and creates a spatial image with the data
in the visual cortex of our brain.
All of it processed so rapidly
and as such second nature,
we have no sense of its miraculous-ness
or any time lapse.
Unless of course, we see something
we don’t know whether or not we should believe.
Anyway, this process allows us to perceive objects
and relative distances in 3D.
Yet, even though we can see in 3D,
we never get to see a whole object all at once –
we never see the full three dimensions in real time.
Right now, I see the front of your faces
from your smile or grimace to your ears,
but I do not see the back of your heads or backs.
All of which is high sounding, pseudo-scientific rhetoric that comes down to this:
We are still left to decide for ourselves
if what we see in our dreams,
or the dead we see in our wakefulness,
or the absence of boundaries we experience
in a moment of stillness, are actual experiences
merely our perception, or a factual event.
On the ground floor of spirituality,
before we can elevate ourselves to higher ground
or other dimensions,
we must discern the difference between
fact and truth;
which requires that we be grounded
in our sources of authority.
How do we know what we know,
and what sources of knowledge do we trust,
and how much clarity do we require
before stepping out onto any particular truth?
Kabir writes,
as do many mystics,
about the absence of actual boundaries.
In the moment, he says,
in that special place of increased perception,
the borders between dimensions collapse
and the absence of depth
reveals an entirely new,
some might say unitary,
dimension to everything.
I dare say
that every one of us here
has had such an experience.
You have at least had an inkling of such an experience,
or a titillating taste of the collapse of boundaries,
if not a falling in
and getting drenched.
Do we trust our experience?
Do we trust
what we see and hear,
and feel and know
and dream?
Do we embrace those collapsible moments,
as true events,
moments of facticity even if improvable
and non-replicable?
Or…
do we dismiss them as tricks of the mind;
fleeting movements of color behind our eyelids;
and meaningless in any real sense
to our real lives?
The ground floor of a spiritual practice
involves arranging the furniture, so to speak,
so that we get clear with ourselves
about what to trust
and what to pursue
and what to embrace as
REAL.
That seems a simple and obvious task
but I dare say that there are some folks here,
well into their years and lives,
who have not done so,
or who need to do it again.
Because the truth is,
we need to come back to it over and over and over.
We often do not trust our own experience,
and there are many competing voices out there,
that recommend we not trust ourselves;
or insist that we do not trust ourselves;
or seduce us into thinking we cannot trust ourselves.
It is to the advantage of others
that we trust them
more than we trust our own experience;
especially when it comes to
what we perceive as real
and true
and meaningful.
But, in fact,
when it comes to God and the holy…
when it comes to the moments of stillness
when the boundaries and dimensions collapse
into one…
when it comes to inklings of that power
or those powers greater than ourselves…
the one that is reaching out
and touching us…
when it comes to that stuff
and it’s truth
and real-ness
and meaning…
We really do need to trust our own experience.
We need to trust ourselves deep…
deep, deep down in our guts.
So tonight,
as we light candles,
let us reach down in our guts,
reach way down there
where we know that truth is rooted, and say “Yes.”
Light a candle to your own experience tonight…
and say “Yes.”
