One of the fundamental principles of material life is limitation — in particular the limits of our faculties and the resources they act upon. For example, we can live for only so long without food, and there is only so much food to be had in the world. Nothing is without limit; not even the whole universe could satisify an unlimited number of people who all wanted the same thing.

In society, positions and luxuries are even more limited than the basic necessities of food and water. Many people want to become doctors, for instance, but universities and medical schools have only so many openings available. Many may dream of a sports car, or a mansion by the sea, or just a warm house with a healthy family; but the fact is, not everyone who dreams of a thing can have it. It’s only those who work hard, or have some natural, cultural or social advantage, that can gain access to the limited number of rewards available.

As a result of this fact of life, children are brought up with a sense of the critical importance of education to their future happiness. There are advertisements on television telling them that high school dropouts make less money than those who go to college; only the best grades can get a student into Ivy-league schools; a diploma is the only sure way to reserve a spot in the coveted echelons of white-collar society. Success is very much tied to our ability to secure for ourselves a place in the ever-dwindling real estate of luxury. The rest is the lot of the common man, who must toil until the end of his days “just to make ends meet”.

Since this is a reality of social life, we are faced with it almost from day one. We can hardly rest for the sense that others might snatch up the opportunities if we let them pass by. First, we must do well in primary school, then on to high school and deciding a major, then fighting our way into a good college and a prestigious program, then to find a young, pretty wife or husband before “all the good ones are taken”, then a job in competitive markets that never seem to have enough positions, then a house in a good neighborhood before housing prices go through the roof, etc., etc. We are racing to beat out others who might find the better deals before us. Not being content with second or third place is a frequent subject of books and movies.

In such an atmosphere, it’s no wonder that we continue this image of life into the next world. Nowhere is it written that heaven has limited real-estate, yet I remember at least one Christian movie that described a “well of souls” — where the souls of babies come from — that will run dry with the coming of the Last Days.

Driven by our sense of competition, Heaven is imagined as a place that only the holiest, most devout may reach. It’s almost an exact comparison between attending school to find a good job, and “working on our virtues” to secure a place in paradise.

But is this an aspect of spirituality at all? If I were to discuss heaven with a farmer from the slopes of Costa Rica, what would he imagine? Maybe a place where crops never fail, and grow without toil; but would it be as colored by the sense that not everyone may experience it?

Or take prayer as another example. When I talk to my friends about their concerns and ask if they’ve prayed about it, some say they do. Then they express the hope that God will hear their prayer — as if maybe He doesn’t have enough ears for everyone. But why wouldn’t He hear us? Does He have a limited attention span? Does He allocate assistance only to a certain number before it runs out? If a person thinks he or she is “not good enough” for God to hear their prayer, my response is, “Good enough for what?” To make the grade? To beat out others who are praying on the same day? To say it loudly enough for God’s ears to pick up the cry?

As far as I’ve read, God and heaven are utterly without limitation or end; these are primary factors distinguishing Them from our present reality. If this is the case, wouldn’t it imply a fundamentally different economy from what we experience here? Yet our upbringing has presented such a concrete sense of what life’s about that I think we project this understanding forward, as if what’s coming next is just an colorful extension of what we’ve already known.

Assuming for a moment that God and heaven have no constraints, what does that imply? Well, it means that God can do anything whatsoever, for one thing. I remember one day talking with a friend, and I proposed the idea that God might wilfully govern the movement of sub-atomic particles, thereby continually expressing His will through the medium of creation and assuring that at each moment all things work out for the ultimate best. My friend was shocked at the implication that God would waste His time on such mundanity. He preferred a model where God had designed the world so perfectly that He simply “turned the key” at the beginning, and since then we’ve been operating on natural laws and principles, freeing the Creator from having constantly to watch over it.

This is actually a fairly common idea of creation, but it begs the question: What could it possibly mean for God to waste His time? Does He really have only a fixed quantity of it, such that by misusing it He would waste it? Is His attention span so limited that watching every atom would have an impact on the infinite span of His mind?

Consider an example: You have a thousand dollars. A friend comes up to you and says he needs eight hundred dollars to satisfy a debt. But giving him eighty percent of what you have leaves you with very little to work with. It means you can’t really do much with the money you had hoped to spend on other things. Maybe you say yes, maybe you don’t, but certainly you will feel the loss.

Now imagine you have about two hundred billion dollars. This is enough money that if you blew five million dollars a day, every day for a century, you still wouldn’t finish spending it all. Now your friend asks you for eight hundred dollars again. Would you even notice it among the five million others you spend each day?

If you can, project this to trillions, quadrillions, to absolutely ridiculous sums of money. At a certain point, you could give a billion dollars to every baby who would ever be born, until the expiration of the Sun, and still it wouldn’t dent your pocket-book. These are absurd, practically useless riches, they’ve become so large.

Now consider that this isn’t even an atom within a drop within one of the countless oceans of Infinity. If God commands resources of this kind, the concept of “resources” flies out the window; it becomes laughable to imagine that God doesn’t have the time to personally and fully attend to the concerns of every individual who has ever been. He could watch over the movements of every atom of billions of universes, and it would be less for Him than it is for us to laugh at a small joke.

The idea of competition belongs to this world. I don’t believe there are a limited number of spots in heaven, or to God’s attention. I doubt even there really exist highs and lows where infinity is concerned. If the Writings of God talk about gradations of heaven, perhaps it refers to gradations in our capacity to accept and perceive them, than to any real separations in such a place.

In fact, I think Heaven is going to be the biggest culture shock of all! I mean, what if gold were unlimited in this world? It would suddenly lose all its value. We prize what is rare, and have developed a society around the acquisition and accomplishment of things that not everyone can do. Within Infinity, value must be based on something far different than rarity.

All of this is one result of a cultural upbringing that focuses us so much onto a path of progress and ascent. It’s what we’re about, and what moves the engine of Western civilization. So we imagine an after-life that is essentially an extension of the same thing in its underpinnings. But it is divine. What this truly means is something I think none of us can accurately perceive yet.

Lately I have been thinking a lot about culture and how our cultural upbringing dominates our interpretations of very basic things. Where this interests me most is in how it affects our understanding of spirituality and our relationship to the world of the unseen and to God.

One historical figure who keenly appreciated this was Socrates. As the story goes, one day a person went to visit the oracle at Delphi. He asked the oracle if there was any man in the world wiser than Socrates (who was probably well known for his witty discussion and his humor by that time). The oracle responded, “No”. So the man went to Socrates and told him what the oracle had said, at which Socrates was shocked. How could it be me? he thought. To test the truth of the oracle’s pronouncement he went around asking people difficult questions about profound topics, to see if their answers were better than his, or if he really was the wisest man alive.

This caused Socrates, for example, to go up to a lawyer and ask him, “What is justice?”, or ask teachers what knowledge was, or the philosophers of the time (the sophists) what wisdom was. Each time they gave their answers, Socrates would consider it and probe its implications. Over the course of their discussion they would invariably be forced to refine their answers as Socrates found more and more cases where not only did they not apply, but they had contradicted themselves. Finally each person gave up in frustration, claiming that Socrates was merely playing with words, or tricking them into saying things they didn’t mean. “It’s obvious what Justice is and everyone knows it, there’s no reason to ask such questions!”, was a typical reply.

What Socrates discovered is that no one really knew what they were saying, they just repeated what everyone else had said about it. In the end, he decided that what the oracle really meant when she claimed him to be the wisest man is that no one was truly wise, and only in recognizing this could wisdom begin. Everything the people held as obvious and true about life was based on a set of cultural assumptions that most people left unquestioned. Rarely did Socrates present his own definition of things (though he does try to define justice in his best known work, “The Republic”); instead, he wanted people to own up to the fact that no one knew what life was about, and that by assuming they did they prevented themselves from ever approaching wisdom. Such an approach came to define the Socratic method, and today people still use his form of argumentation to peel away layers of assumption and gain insight into the foundations of what we claim to know.

His success as an individual failed socially, however, because the elders of Athens did not like the way he encouraged the youth to question tradition and the canons of social opinion on subjects such as truth, virtue and knowledge. People favored the public definition of these things because they fostered social stability, whereas he began a movement which very much destabilized what others had long regarded as sacrosanct. For this they condemned him to death; and believing in justice as greatly as he did, he complied with the judgment and administered their poison himself.

What was then true of society remains so today. We are brought up with basic notions of life, existence and truth which many claim to be self-evident but few can define. I have witnessed people bring God Himself to task based on such empty ideas — when in fact their disagreement really boils down to, “Things aren’t going the way I want them to”. Take for example the laws of God, which are clear enough, but are constantly redefined to be “inapplicable” if they disagree with a person’s desires.

Because these basic concepts remain unexamined, they can sometimes take on the role of mystical symbols which shy from definition. I have seen people on television claim unbelievable things in the name of “God’s will”, or “justice”, or “destiny”, as if the power of these words themselves requires no further understanding. In fact, conversation about their real meanings is avoided, and why? Would it lessen the magic hold of “God’s will” has over people, if they thought it meant illumining the world with the spirit of His love by way of action and example? A far less versatile buzzword that would be!

How much does our package of cultural assumptions affect the way we see the world and experience of God and spirituality? Is our understanding of these terms really an understanding, or more an inchoate “sense” passed down to us by family and friends? Might the real truth be so foreign to us that — as people throughout time have always done — we would reject the very Prophets of God Themselves should They arrive on our doorstep and proclaim loudly the answer to our hopes?

What is this “sense” of truth we hold to so dearly that it provokes such virulent debates, yet likely blinds us from the beauty and simplicity of Truth itself? I have known too many people whose joy was ruined by the demands of religion, whereas in His Own Book I find such declarations as these:

Were men to discover the motivating purpose of God’s Revelation, they would assuredly cast away their fears, and, with hearts filled with gratitude, rejoice with exceeding gladness.

My counsels and admonitions have compassed the world. Yet, instead of imparting joy and gladness they have caused grief…

It behoveth them that are endued with insight and understanding to observe that which will cause joy and radiance.

In further entries I would like to examine this effect of our culture further, because it appears to condition our attitude toward some of the things that matter most. My entry next week will look at “competition” in society, and how much it determines our views on the next life.

I woke up this morning from a very powerful dream; the feeling of it is still with me. In its details it was rather simple, but in its feeling and meaning it was very profound for me.

I had somehow come to a complete understanding that human souls are granted by God the freedom to experience whatever reality they most believe in. This took particular forms in the dream, but in the clearest, I was seated in an empty, white room, eating a phone book. A co-worker stepped in to wonder what I was doing, but I had no way to explain that for me, the room had everything in it I could ever want, and that the phonebook was actually a very tasty lasagna.

Later when I thought about this it occurred to me that a phone book, of sorts, represents an particular ideal of knowledge: a single book that’s a compendium of irrefutable factual knowledge, well organized. Meanwhile I was eating this book as if it were a tasty meal. This brought the following quote to mind:

Although to outward view, the wayfarers in this Valley may dwell upon the dust, yet inwardly they are throned in the heights of mystic meaning; they eat of the endless bounties of inner significances, and drink of the delicate wines of the spirit.

In another scene, I was driving on the freeway, which was filled with traffic, yet I was somehow feeling the most intense peace and joy to be alive and experiencing such a place. I wondered, “What if hell is our real home and this life is just a respite? That would completely alter how we experience existence here.” That is, we seem to want something so much better; what if this life is actually fantastic, and we miss out on that reality because we believe in something else?

At the end of the dream I was trying to tell a group of people this, even lifting myself into the air to shock them into accepting the possibility that things might be other than they seem. I remember saying to the group: “Our culture has so completely determined the life we experience, we can’t even separate what we’ve been told from what we know ourselves. Imagine if the basis of all our understanding begins with the number two. No matter how much we add to that foundation, we will never comprehend unity. We need to subtract from what we started with to achieve that understanding. We’ve been set up in such a way that Truth is simply not perceptible.”

Then the dream ended and I felt as if anything were possible provided I truly believed in it. It might appear one way to those who see me, but how I experience it is something completely up to me.

There is a wilderness underfoot
and I hear the branches crunching…
Somewhere, the deer are watching me,
in soft, silent contemplation.

There is a shore nearby;
the hush of waves draws closer.
It leaves me wondering only:
when will my pilgrimage end?

Along the way, in this exile,
sunlight survives through the branches
In muted forms that cast a glow upon the trees.
And the mosses, they point me north.

Here and there there are clearings;
and once even I found my way to a spring.

They tell me a City lies beyond,
just at the edge of the blue and the green,
on fine sands where forest leads to ocean.

I trek on, ever watchful.
It could be I am just around the bend.

Life hammers its minute nails
into the houses of bone in which we live.
Did you think your coffin made of wood,
awaiting construction on some future day?

It should be so easy to see:
this coffin I carry around with me:
206 tiny timbers sewn by ligaments
waiting for me to die.

pain reaches up
fingers of nettles
a hand from a dark and bitter pool
deep within

as it wraps around
our bright, present moment
and begins to squeeze…

our mind is a flaming torch
held high in that hand
a tribute to the joys of tomorrow

A while ago, when talking about the light and dark sides I think we all have, I was saying that while the light has direction, the dark has energy. So it’s not too strange that if left alone, the dark will do what it decides to do — while if left alone the light will not! In fact, it takes energy to stop the dark and motivate the light; they react oppositely to the influence of determined force. Which raises the question of where the light gets its energy to oppose the dark? This would seem to come from four very plentiful sources, means by which the dark willingly grants its energy to the purposes of the light: internally, from self-admiration and self-loathing; externally, from love and hate.

For example, the light’s is a world of discipline and control. The more a person feels in control of themselves, they more capable they feel of acting out the plans of the light; the less control, the more they feel susceptible to stirrings of the dark. But where does the energy come from to maintain all that discipline? I find from watching people that it is either from deep self-loathing: they hate who they are and wish to govern it — or admiration: they love who they are and want to further the good parts. Since these forces originate in the dark, they of course both have the taint of “self” (from the light’s point of view) and secretly make the light feel ashamed to use them. Isn’t there a source of energy, it wonders, that might be utterly disconnected from the dark? Pursuing that end, it might seek energy from other people, or purely external motivations like social dictum. But in the end these too must be enforced within the individual, and so the dark has to play its role. There is no escaping the dark side, even though at times it seems like all the light wishes to do.

I’ve even found that you can hear in a person’s voice, and see in their eyes, which part of themselves their sentiments are coming from. The “pure light” sounds strangely tinny and high-pitched, like something with little depth. When a person speaks in that voice alone, I’m almost certain that whatever they’re saying will not come to pass. The “pure dark”, on the other hand, is deep and dusky. If they speak in that voice, I’m almost sure it will come to pass, even if it’s something the speaker fears to happen.

When the two reach common cause, however, their voice has a real timbre. If the dark is a lump of black iron, and the light a concept of steel, the two together can become a keenly-tempered blade. It’s like we have these two ingredients and the real challenge is to learn the correct admixture. It’s a difficult balance to achieve, but the results make it worthwhile.

So when people recite to me a new litany of discipline they’ve introduced into their lives, I think, “There’s the light side again, seeking to regain its dominance.” I can hear how the effort will tire them out, how they will spend furtive evenings indulging themselves as a way to release the inner pressure. I also listen for whether their motive is from loathing or admiration, since these two have very different dynamics.

On the other hand, if they talk about new plans for gratifying some wish, I think, “There is the dark side, racing to escape its prison.” I hear how freeing and exulting the release will be, but also the nights of worry, and self-recrimination for straying from the path.

It seems that none of us can live on one or the other side for too long, without mental or emotional repercussions. And thus what I really listen for is the person who seeks to marry the two sides: to serve a higher purpose in a way that brings them continual joy. I am always listing to hear such tones from my own voice.

I have spoken to a few of the wise ones
who journey after God.

They speak often of the length of the journey;
of its perils and subtle trials;
of their longing, and deep ardor.

So many, it seems, are on their way;
so few, it seems, are arriving.

Perhaps the problem here
is that they sought what they sought;
for what man can discover God?

Perhaps the answer lies, instead,
in seeking what He seeks…

If a child wants truly to learn of
the world of his father,
he must put away childhood
and become a parent.

But in doing so,
though he learn the lessons of fatherhood
it is no longer the child who knows it.

There is no way for one world, so apart,
to become another.

So too, a man who would find God
must leave himself to begin that journey.
Yet it would no longer be him, when he arrives.

Does a parent long for the child
to leave his own state
and join him in his?

Or would he rather be a parent
spending time with his young ones…

In truth, he wants what all fathers
wish for their children:
that which best suits the child.

One world, looking over the other,
fulfilling itself
by wishing the fulfillment of the other.

I think all this journeying of the wise
is to a place with no reality:
like a seed wanting to know the Tree
who ceases to be in that knowledge.

Such a thing is a long, impossible journey
for the seed.

Perhaps it were better
if we sought what seeds should know:
and in this Way,
learn the mysteries of growth…

This theory has been part of my thinking since it first occurred to me several years ago. As I remember, it happened while I was still working a regular job. Back then I was very interested in planning and how to arrange my life to be most effective (which is still an interest — just not in the detailed fashion of before).

As I sat and made my daily plans, I saw very clearly what I intended to happen each day. The days were part of a progressive plan that moved from month to month, ostensibly toward some specific goal.

What I noticed, however, is that my life — as seen from month to month — betrayed a very different character from what my planning led me to think. I knew who I was, and the choices I was making day to day, but somehow another creature was appearing between the lines: a personality who lived only from month to month.

This concrete, well-defined, daily me became my Short Man — the person I see over short time-scales; the other is my Long Man, who strides across the years. Sometimes they are very different, having opposite goals and means; other times they are harmonized and we work together.

Have you ever noticed how sometimes you do things without explanation? An impulsive word or deed, a sudden change of plans, an inspiration following from a dream or a sudden moment. This is how the Long Man acts; he slips between the moments of our otherwise ordered lives. Nor is he easily put off. You can deny his existence altogether, but he still finds ways of accomplishing his ends.

At times the Long Man has scared me to death. Do I want what he wants? Why is he moving me down a certain road? Who does his thinking? Other times he’s given me a sense of security, because although I have no idea how I will achieve certain things, if the Long Man wants it also, I can be pretty sure it will eventually happen.

Nor is the Long Man necessarily a moralist like my Shorter self. He seems to play out a deeper life of the heart, which may go against what I believe to be right. Other times he will stop me — in the end — from denying what I truly believe in. He is neither good nor evil, just inexorably true to my heart.

Lately I have even begun to think there are many Long Men: one who walks the months and years, another who passes slowly through the stages of my life, and another who encompasses the whole and whom I might call Destiny. And beyond these, there might be another who spans a greater whole — my part in the zeitgeist of mankind — and yet another who expresses the most basic desires of my species. I even wonder if it does not continue, until I would find that my Longest Man, the Infinite Man, is none other than the role I play in God’s Being.

To see the Long Man in action requires either keeping a long diary, or having a good memory and enjoying self-reflection. I first noticed the Long Man when I started seeing certain things coming to fruition in my life, mostly regarding career and relationships. I realized that these changes were complex, and required too much “planning” to have simply happened of themselves. There are times when one can even sense the Long Man in another person, which prompts us to feel like we know what the flavor of their future will be, despite what they imagine for themselves.

Both Long and Short Men seem to express facets of one personality with many strata. They are only incompatible if there is doubt and conflict in the individual. A harmonized mind (in my experience) tends to move in a more synchronized fashion, as if we possess the capacity for multi-level, simultaneous thinking spanning multiple time frames. It’s amazing to me that the Long Men “think”, but they do seem to express a coherent intent. This is a side of myself I have wanted to cultivate and enlist the help of, because some of my desired personal changes are daunting to the Short Man Alone. To harness the power of all our dimensions would allow us to grasp for futures which deny immediate comprehension.

Then one day I was reading a book by Greg Egan titled Quarantine, in which he played with the idea of human’s control over the function of quantum coherence in the observed universe. He suggested that life naturally exists in a state of superposition (cf., the movie “What the Bleep do we Know?”), but that humanity possesses a unique capacity to collapse these states based on our intention. For this reason, the rest of the beings in the universe quarantine us, so that our particular biases and prejudices are not allowed to decide what the rest of the universe will look like.

The main character in the book is surgically altered to be able to exists in a natural state of superposition, only causing a collapse when he consciously chooses. In this way, for example, he is able to open combination locks by trying every possible combination simultaneously, and “collapsing” the desired result. But, he wonders, who chooses what is “desired”? He is separately conscious — through superposition — in every one of these possible states. In all but one state he experiences frustration and failure, while in that chosen state he knows success. What troubles him is that there must be another entity, a state of unity higher than all the separate states, who chooses the outcome most profitable to the whole. This “super identity” exists beyond nature, beyond superposition, expressing its desires through the choice of which superimposed state to collapse.

This sounded an awful lot like the Long Man I was experiencing! The Short Man always looks at immediate details, while the Long Man seems to choose which set of details his counterpart will face. Are we at each moment presented with a multitude of possible futures, our Short Men confronting them all, while a deeper aspect to our being — beyond place and time - decides which of these is incorporated into our realized future?

Perhaps there are even Shorter Men than the immediate will: the decisions of my organs, cells, part of cells — even molecules. Looked at this way, I see myself more as a pan-dimensional being, my feet in the raw stuff of my body and surroundings, with my head and heart reaching up through levels I can barely visualize. At this point, thinking of “I” is like taking a slice through a being who crosses multiple potential realities. Is the function of my soul a cohering aspect of Infinity to bring out Its colors and flavors? Is my “self” just the experience of witnessing that effect?

Peter had asked, “I understand the power and value that Faith itself can bring to a man, but what does it really mean beyond self-induced freedom from uncertainty?”

Dear Peter, It is the posing of this question, inwardly, that creates the dilemma, and the “split” you feel between two paths: one of a resigned (yet putatively false) certainty, and one of an active uncertainty. The former feels less than truly human, as if one had “stopped” and given up everything to an illusory Super Power; while the latter is more true to our condition, but comes with all the attendant anxieties and concerns of that condition. The former is ideal, pretty, maybe even heavenly; the latter is real — and in that reality lies the more potent allure.

I have no interest in a God of the unreal, or in my mind coming to a halt. So how do I resolve faith/acceptance/delighting in the Khidrs of life, with introspection, questioning, searching, and that wonderful thirst which propels men to greatness?

The answer is: I do not resolve it, because I do not face this question; and that is because I do not seek freedom from uncertainty.

What is happiness? To me it is loving the current day as it is, and not looking forward to its end, or another, better day to follow it. I know I am happy when the current hour is absolutely enough, when I count myself lucky for having lived, and when the people in my life fill me with awe and wonder that I know such wonderful souls. This is not always because life is perfect and rosy — often it is bumpy, like today when I missed my flight, and then missed my metro stop and had to walk a mile in the cold dark of a San Francisco night — but because I choose to appreciate the wonder of life itself. I think happiness is found in living — consciously living. It is not an external state later applied to life, but the very condition of living itself. It is only when a person does not see this, precisely because they are seeking something better, that they face a constant disappointment.

Now, actively appreciating life, looking with wonder at the sky and wondering how molecules bond to form solid surfaces; thinking and thinking and thinking about the beauty of things and how they work: this is an active mind, an alive mind. It is not a mind resigned to the world, or one that says, “As long as God knows how butterflies stay in the air, that is enough for me.” I want to know, to understand airfoils and laminar flow, pressure gradiants and thermals, and everything else. I want to keep learning and questioning because this very process is my mind’s life. To resign myself to a world that I don’t understand and then move through it like a blissful zombie is not life; that is just a sweet death. And to wonder over an over again where happiness lies and quest to find it: this is not life either; it is missing the point. Neither path is what I seek; neither bondage in certainty, nor freedom from uncertainty.

What I want is what life is, uncertain, unsure, full of questions. My faith is that this uncertain and unsure life is pretty cool. It’s interesting. I like being alive. I don’t own much, I’m not famous, I’m not wealthy, but I feel like a child most of the time and I get excited very easily. I don’t have questions about what Truth is, because I’m not looking for Truth anymore — for Truth is all around me. Life is truth, living is truth. The fact of using your mind to look for truth is truth. It’s not seeing this which makes the whole thing so damnably complex. We are looking for what’s right under our nose, and then we wonder why it’s so hard to find.

I question always, not because I’m hoping to find a final Answer at the end of all that questioning, to put to rest all my doubts and fears, but because the questioning itself is fun. Finding new answers is exciting; learning new things satisfies my mind. I do it for the experience, not the end or what I might “reap” from the effort.

In our culture we look so much to the end, the product, the conclusion. We think Truth is something we can find, and that once we find it our search will be over and we can put it up on our mantle for all to see. Now, we think, our suffering will end, our uncertainty will disappear, we can finally go to sleep. At the end of a hard day, one deserves a rest, no?

Well, in a way our suffering does end: when pain ceases to hurt so much — when Moses pierces the lesson of Khidr — in a way uncertainty does disappear: when not knowing becomes part of the adventure. But in reality there is no end; the experience of living never ends. It only transforms from one form to another: from child to adult, material to immaterial, from experiences of the body to those of mind and soul. We are always changing, moving, becoming. This itself is the truth of living; not what we imagine ourselves to be heading toward.

So to me, God is like a best friend who’s given me consciousness so that I might enjoy the beauty of His being. However, His being is not beautiful in any textbook way, like a single Mona Lisa hanging on a gallery wall. That’s idealized, refined beauty. Rather, God’s beauty is so infinite and broad that it requires training the eye to see it all. And the more we train and educate our souls, the more of it we will perceive.

However, I do not train my inward eye toward some final end, some cessation of the training; I do it for the sake of the beauties I see. And in always wanting more, I continue on, never seeking rest and never begruding this movement ever-upward. I don’t play the game for the final longsword +5 at the end — but because the graphics are cool and the story is fun. The playing is the truth of the game; the seeing is the truth of beauty; the living is the truth of life. Forget the Truth of schools and scholars; Truth is in your reading of this e-mail right now.

Do you feel it? God’s nearness around your shoulders and in your chest — like your body itself is a creation of His love? Question if you have a desire to question, but because you want to question, not because people have told you to seek answers to endless questions.

To desire certainty is like wishing not to be part of this existence; to loathe uncertainty is to loathe the basic condition of life itself. Why should Faith be something to take us away from what life is? God created life. In my mind, what He desires most is for us to dig in with all we’ve got that we might appreciate and experience the many moments of wonder He’s placed there for the seeing — like an endless procession of beautiful longwords in an infinitely varied game.

If life doesn’t appear that way, then I say: look again. Are you seeing what’s there, or seeing what’s it not, like looking at an existential negative? Look long and deep, and when you find yourself lost in the vision, you will know at that moment what truth and happiness are.

Peter Lee sent in a comment and question regarding the last few blog entries, which I found so well expressed I asked for his permission to post it here. I will follow with my response to his closing questions tomorrow. Here is what he wrote me:

“I’ve also just begun my adventures on NWN [Neverwinter Nights] a couple of days ago, it is a remarkable game. :)

“However, I must admit that I am quite baffled in how you drew the parallel of such fantastic journey with our own.

“I find these games to be of such delight precisely because it is so different than how life really is. Such games always imply a positive experience, i.e. your progress is an absolute function of the additive. I currently don’t find life to adhere to the same formulae… although it is quite likely that you may disagree.

“For one, I have no idea what I’m living for. Well, that is not entirely correct. I do have ideas about what I’m living for, I just do not truly understand those very ideas. Not only that, I am not certain if I will ever fully understand those ideas, so my life’s quest always converges to a single idea: a quest for Truth.

“Living for Happiness, Love, Joy, Acceptance, Understanding, Freedom, Success, Wealth, Comfort, etc. ultimately falls back on what you consider those ideas to mean. But what is Happiness? What is Love? How do you know if you are on the right track to attaining these ideals? How do you even know if your understanding of these ideals is satisfactory enough to lead you to better understanding, ultimately taking you on the right path for finding them? Even if you are not certain what it is that you seek, is it possible for you to have found it?

“Here you may entertain a concept of God. In His grace, you are exactly where you should be. In His wisdom, you substitute your ignorance with His guiding hand. In Him, you graft perfection into life. In Him, you find raazi.

“But doesn’t that mean there is no more quest for Truth? We have found it. Truth is divine, given by grace and guidance, in His mystery it is endowed, and in His humor it is made known. In prayers you express your intent, and in His intervention, you are given what you seek… even if you may or may not understand what you thought you were seeking has been made known to you because who truly understands the mind of God?

“This is the fork in the road that I have been staring at for some time now. In one, I seek God and re-engineer life to operate in the fantasy adventure world formulae, the absolute additive, always progressing forward, looking for my next sword, since in Faith I can rest in comfort that I will find it. I will seek Khidr, ultimately to wield my blade in absolute authority of the divine. In another, I seek what is Undefined, following a path with infinite sign-posts, accepting the unfortunate possibility that I will never find what I am looking for, and that I may never find my next sword. I will seek Moses, except bear my questions with unflinching conviction in the properness of its utterance.

“I must admit, this is not the first time I’ve been at this fork. I have once embraced Faith without question. But it is a hazardous and difficult path to follow. I have tasted of peace, but never free from the question of its origin. That I may have Faith in any of my own choosing to serve any of my own ideals has shattered my fantasy time and time again, throwing me back to my quest for Truth.

“I sometimes miss the innocence of my Faith, the comfort of completeness that it offers. Deep down, I feel a stirring whenever I entertain thoughts of His voice, bringing endowment of divine purpose and knowledge, to have Truth be made known and to call me forth from the multitude with a command marking me His… such fanciful dreams of empowerment and freedom! What wonder if my Faith was Truth! Yet I am continually repulsed by its premise, the self-evident nature of its dogma, that it grows with power in acceptance, not in questioning.

“John, how do you resolve your inner conflict of the meaning and the Truth of Faith? I’m simply referring to your act of Faith, not what that Faith is actually composed of. I understand the power and value that Faith itself can bring to a man, but what does it really mean beyond self-induced freedom from uncertainty?

“A world without God is a frightening and an unsettling place. Some may even call it “meaningless”. But as far as I can tell, it still is the same world. Only the lens of reflection has changed; of what I may see and find that Faith may have blinded is the current quest of my choosing.

“I wonder what will be my next sword?”

I love to play fantasy adventure games on my laptop, especially right now Neverwinter Nights. In those sort of games, it’s typical to start out as a fighter character who wields a plain, simple sword. It’s a good sword, capable of doing a fair bit of damage, but there’s not much sexy about it. Just a long piece of metal for bashing in the heads of a few kobolds. Next kobold.

As you journey on, sure enough the character undoes enough kobolds to begin raising in levels, until the amazing day when he finds his first longsword +1. At the beginning this is a wonderful event, because, you see, it’s a magical sword. It almost glows with possibilities. It’s likely has very little weight, and shines with its own light when you wield it. It probably has its own name.

It reminds of the day when I traded in a Toshiba laptop for my first Apple PowerBook. It was like going from a longsword to a longsword +1. (There are many changes in my life which bear a striking similarity to the feelings evoked by adventure games).

A few days ago I decided to upgrade to one of the newest PowerBooks, which were announced this past week. I made a little table to determine how much “better” they were, and found they had improved in no less than fourteen categories. Yes, I had found my longsword +2 — with added fire damage!!

So as I was saying my prayers at the end of the night and getting excited about the new laptop — friends who know me well understand the spiritual connection I have to computers, which are, for me, a mystical window into the worlds of the mind — it occurred to me that in every game I’ve ever played there has always been a longsword +4, and a +5, and so on until you find a weapon named “Demonslayer” or some such, with abilities so amazing it makes it hard to sleep at night.

It was at this moment I realized: we are always heading toward something better. I don’t mean “better” in the sense that what we have is no good; a longsword +1 in the hands of a level 3 fighter is a fine thing, and it’s worthy of much appreciation the first day you find. But as a character progresses in ability, he will need better equipment — and lo and behold that equipment is always there to be found. There may be challenges and difficulties along the path, but after every mountain is another valley full of new goods and magic items.

This realization tempered my excitement somewhat — now knowing each new thing is stepping stone, there to be treasured until giving way for something better suited to our future — and it also showed me there is never a cause to worry: what is needed can always be found.

I suppose this is a matter of faith, since my belief in these things is tied to my belief that God is willing to provide them. It both detaches me from seeing each new longsword as the “end all, be all”, and fills me with a sense of excitement at wondering what each new sword will look like — whether I find it in this world or the next. It gave me a distinct feeling that things will never cease becoming more wonderful.

What if progress along the mystical path toward God is measured by our capacity to love our own creation? According to what I called “the reflexive principle” a few weeks ago, this love gauges the amount of love I have to offer the world around me; and which sets the bar for my faith in how much God loves me.

This faith has to do with my certainty that my prayers to find Him will be answered; or that He wishes to assist me; or that after asking for something my attitude is not, “Why would He do that for me?”, but rather, “Why wouldn’t He?”

I don’t mean self-love by saying this, which is usually love for an imagined identity rather than the real stuff of who we are; I mean love for all the beauty and ugliness, the imperfections and the things we do well; I mean sitting down to prayer at the end of the day and thanking God for having made this the seat of my awareness.

In a way, it’s about being raazi concerning those aspects of my being which are largely beyond my control. This opens an eye (the eye of a lover, who sees beyond all “flaws”) to who and what we truly are.

The opposite of this is self-hatred, where is most of the focus is on who we might become. In fact, we hate even our efforts toward it, such that we hardly believe we can accomplish the perfections we’ve set for ourselves. We are rotten at the core, and only by shunning our creation, and bending it to some nobler end, can we hope to salvage something from this ruined existence.

Thinking on it, I found that some religious and philosophical institutions have enshrined this mentality, becoming a sort of institutionalized anti-humanism. They see us starting from a point of sin, or lack, or ignorance, and most of the “point of life” is in escaping that original condition. By validating a sense of self-loathing, and indicating that this journey is the only hope of redeeming a being who otherwise shouldn’t have been, they lock people into a fervent wish to escape their own skins.

But by loving our own creation, I mean to say that we began whole and perfect, as a seed begins perfect. Everything the tree is meant to be lies within the seed, it only needs tending and nurturing to bring out all of its fruits. What it needs is warmth and encouragement, not the prodding sense that as a sapling, it’s hardly grown enough. What child would respond well if constantly compared to the adult who it was yet to be?

I wonder even if we don’t halt ourselves along the path of our true growth by that loathing, like a plant hidden in darkness. Can we open our arms fully to the sunlight when we don’t believe we’re worth it? Or is real happiness found in being pleased with what is.

I was asked recently what I thought about the nature of beauty and truth. Since these are typical questions for Philosophy, I wanted to know my presents thoughts on the matter. After a moment’s reflection, I replied that I think the experience of the present moment is all we can ever know of truth and beauty. Anything beyond these — such as the principles and ideas we abstract from experience — exist in the realm of human concepts and limitations, creating an impression of the real world which my uncle calls “the phenomenal world”.

But thinking further, my opinion has changed. It is not the present moment which holds beauty, but a capacity of the present to reveal it. It’s like looking into a mirror: you see whatever is reflected at that instant. Take the mirror aside, apart from what’s showing, and there is nothing but your own face staring back at you. Is beauty “in” the mirror? No. But it possesses a capacity to reveal it.

Then what is it that we look at? I remember seeing an old castle in Germany, which had been standing for many centuries. It was in good shape, with huge stone blocks and impressive, iron-banded doors. It presented a convincing image of strength and stability.

That perception of strength and stability is what my uncle calls the phenomenal: existing only in the momentary experience of those who perceive it (however they perceive it) — a trick of time and shape (cf. Qur’an 27:88, comparing mountains to clouds). Peel aside the glossy exterior of most buildings and likely there are veins of rot, rat warrens, insect burrows, and other things we’d rather not know about. As the veil of time is lifted — moving into a distant future — that castle is already crumbling into dust, its memory fading away until the space is only an empty field again.

That we are beings of phenomenal experience makes this perfectly okay, since we’re not asking the castle to endure forever. Or are we? The image of the castle certainly feels almost like a promise — and we want the physical object to make good on that promise. We put a certain degree of trust in it, invest some of our heart in it. We begin to have faith in it. And this is where I think we go wrong.

It’s not that the phenomenal world is a sham — any more than a mirror is a sham, though its images might still amaze — but that we buy into it, expecting it to become something more. Even if we’re told it’s just smoke and mirrors; that the whole, pretty world we know is only dust and energy in manifold forms; we still want it to end up real in the end. Because if it doesn’t, where else can we turn?

The man who stores up wealth in his bank account wants that phenomenal wealth to somehow turn into real wealth, since the phenomenal wealth of gold and dollars seems to hold a certain promise. Yet it doesn’t. Christ warned us of the easy susceptibility of mortal wealth to decay and theft. But it just feels so real and solid; can’t we believe it is?

This hoping — a faith that the mirage will become the real river — leads to a constant sense of dissatisfaction with life. It’s just never turns out “as it should”. Every generation for century after century has expected better times around the corner: religion, philosophy, science, poets, have written and dreamed that one day, the phenomenal world is going to turn around and finally become what it promised to be. In that day, decay and theft will either be gone or mitigated. If it doesn’t happen in “this life”, it’s believed to happen in some other life. But the consistent idea is that present reality just isn’t quite right, and that we’re all waiting for existence to finally get its act together.

A natural consequence of the failings of phenomenal reality to satisfy is the belief that it has failed because somehow we failed: either by being essentially unsuitable for a better reality, or having failed in the prerequisites to achieve it. The falsehood of the phenomenal becomes a criticism of our own hope in it; and this, I fear, can only lead to an condemning cycle of self-hatred. When the world itself is a constant reproof, to where can a person turn?

But I think this is a problem we’ve created for ourselves. In wishing the phenomenal to be more “real”: more enduring, permanent, grand, perfect — those eternal qualities we glimpse in the ephemeral — we’ve created a dissatisfaction which demands an answer: Why shouldn’t it be? The mind tries to resolve this flaw in the world and comes up with the idea that we screwed it up: that we didn’t get it right and must labor to right those wrongs. Religiously it becomes a perception of moral flaw; scientifically, a flaw of understanding; artistically, a flaw of technique or inspiration. The imperfections of the world around us become our imperfections in our own eyes, and this, because we believed it should have been better.

What is the real world? Plato’s “real real”? When we see past time and space, past distinction and multiplicity, what presents itself to the mind’s eye? What is it we keep wanting the phenomenal to become? The alchemists wanted to reach it, to discover the secrets of capturing the real, in order to restore the arts of perfection and ever-lasting health. They wanted to bring its quintessential nature into the human sphere so as to correct the flaws they perceived in the world around them. Who hasn’t been striving to “bridge the gap”, to reconnect the soul with the reflections of God it perceives in the mirage of life?

In some way, I think everyone is trying to bridge the phenomenal into the real, or imbue the phenomenal with its qualities. They want the facade of granite and steel to become a real building that can never fade; they want their wealth to become an unassailable quality whose value does not decay; they want their ideal to reflect truths that are as unyielding to argument as truth itself. In so many ways, we take the phenomenal to be real, and then try to patch up the weak spots so it somehow becomes the real.

In all of this there is a critical misjudgment, which I think begins with believing in the images of the phenomenal, and mistaking the forms for their essence. It’s not that any one form contains the essence, but that the essence lives by the infinity of its forms, a kind of Aristotelian home for Plato’s perfections to dwell in. It is all one masterpiece, not a broken promise. We make the errors in it that we see, by demanding something of the eye it can’t deliver: a perception of flawlessness in a world where flaw is the salt of beauty.

In Arabic there is a word which means: accepting, contented, pleased with, satisfied, acquiescent, agreeable. In mystical texts it is found in connection with a believer’s status toward the will of God, as in “raazi be-qazaa baashi” (“be thou content with the Will of God”), or “raazi be-rizaaye-khodaa” (“being content with whatever pleases God”).

Becoming raazi, however, is a profound journey. It involves not only the mind — to perceive the will of God — but the heart, in accepting and being pleased by it. It is the difference between knowing that “God works in mysterious ways”, and being comfortable with the strangest and most mundane of those mysteries.

For example, God knows that our future can take innumerable paths, and He is always affecting our circumstances to lead us down the best path. I know that some don’t believe in such an “interactive God”, but I think the efficacy of prayer implies a divine responsiveness to our present condition. At any rate, who knows what each of our possible futures might hold? In one, I get home after a long drive; in another, I might experience a fatal accident and the end of my life and chances. The difference between the two might be only a few seconds — mere moments!

And so, not wishing that my life end today, God slows me down by those couple seconds I need to survive. The form of the slowing uses whatever is at hand: possibly a car to cut me off, causing me to brake suddenly. If one is “far from the mystery”, the event seems like an aggravating, momentary thwart to my plans; yet maybe that car just came between my future life and impending death. You never see the car you didn’t hit you. So I wonder if that car cutting me off is not “the hand of God”, holding me back for a few seconds in order to craft for me a better future — using the least amount of interference possible.

Becoming raazi seems to mark a dividing line between knowledge and understanding, between `ilm (knowledge in the head) and `irfaan (knowledge in the heart). A classic example of this distinction is found in the Qur’an, in a story where Moses meets the deathless prophet, Khidr. I’ll retell that story here in my own words, based on what appears after verse 65 of chapter 18:

One day Moses and one of His servants were walking between the “two seas”, when they came upon one of the servants whom God had endowed with knowledge (whom commentators believe was Khidr).

Moses asked Khidr if He could join him in his travels, because he hoped to learn something of the higher truths God had taught him. To this Khidr replied, “You will not be able to hold patience with me, for how can you be patient with something when your understanding is incomplete?”

Moses replied that He would be very patient with Khidr, and would not disobey him in anything. So Khidr allowed Him to follow him, but asked that He say nothing about whatever He might see — unless Khidr himself should start the discussion.

They went along together until at one point they were in a boat, and Khidr suddenly opened a hole in the bottom of the boat to sink it. Moses exclaimed that he was trying to drown them, and how very strange that was! But Khidr only said, “Didn’t I say that you wouldn’t have patience with me?”

Moses regretted this outburst, and asked Khidr to forgive him for forgetting his vow. So they continued, until they met a young man, whom Khidr instantly slew. Moses shouted, “How could you slay an innocent who has done nothing? What an evil thing you’ve done!”

Again Khidr replied, “Didn’t I say you wouldn’t be able to have patience with me?”

Moses again regretted his criticism, and said, “If I say another word, remove me from your company, for you would be fully justified in doing so.”

Then they continued on, until they came to a town whose inhabitants refused either food or hospitality. But when they found a wall on the point of falling down, Khidr set to work and repaired the wall. Moses said, “Surely you could ask for recompense after all that work!”

But Khidr only said, “This is the parting between you and me; though first I will tell you the meaning of those things which tested your patience.

“As for the boat, it belonged to certain men in dire want, who used it to ply the water. I rendered it unserviceable for a time, because there was a certain king after them who seized on every boat by force.

“As for the youth, his parents were people of Faith, and we feared he would grieve them by his future rebellion and ingratitude, so we desired the Lord to give them another son who would be pure of conduct.

“As for the wall, it belonged to two orphans in the town. There was a buried treasure beneath it to which they were entitled. Since their father had been a righteous man, the Lord desired they should attain full maturity and recover their treasure — which would not have happened had the treasure been found too soon.

“This is the meaning of those things about which you could not be patient.”

Sufi writers have referred to this story as an illustration of the difference between two kinds of men who devote themselves to God: those who are conversant with the Law and obey, like Moses; and those who see beyond the Law and rejoice at the wisdom of God’s ways. Moses was inclined to judge the actions of Khidr by His own standards — according to the word of the Law — while Khidr acted out the greater plan of God (which sometimes contravenes the lesser).

I don’t think the purpose of the story is to say that mystic understanding confers an authority to act like Khidr, which some have believed, but that if we were to meet with Khidr along our Path, perhaps we might appreciate him as a servant of the better good, rather than judge him harshly.

What form does our Khidr take? Perhaps he is that car which just cut me off on the road — seemingly acting one way, but to another purpose.

If we meet our Khidr — in the shape of our enemies, disappointments, and apparent cruelties of God — should we react as Moses had done? Would we be able to keep patience with his company? To be raazi means that we could, that we have gone from `ilm to `irfan, and that our reactions are no longer governed by the limitations of mortal vision. As Bahá’u’lláh wrote of a lover who had been ruthlessly chased by a watchman (his Khidr) into the court of his long-lost beloved:

Now if the lover could have looked ahead, he would have blessed the watchman at the start, and prayed on his behalf, and he would have seen that tyranny as justice; but since the end was veiled to him, he moaned and made his plaint in the beginning. Yet those who journey in the garden land of knowledge, because they see the end in the beginning, see peace in war and friendliness in anger.

I asked a key
who had found his lock:

  “How did you know?
  What did she say
  to convince you?”

He looked at me a while,
then told me:

  “It’s wasn’t so much
  what she said —
  as what she didn’t:

  a seamless joining together;
  a lack of noise
  to proclaim ill-fitting;

  an absence of effort
  where before
  there had always been.”

An idea I’ve been working with in my spiritual pursuits lately is something I think of as “the reflexive principle”. It’s basically a formula which states that how I treat myself is generally how I will treat others (over time), and how I fundamentally believe God treats me.

For example, if I am strict with myself, I will tend to be judgmental of others and believe that God is strict with me. This is because I would be espousing strictness as a form of truth, which lifts it to a universal experience of the character of life. If I work on the principle of generosity and bounty, meanwhile, it only becomes a natural expression of my inward state when I am generous with myself. This tends to open up my generosity to others, and my faith that God is willing to be generous with me. The reflexive principle reflects a triune relationship in my connection to God: that how I see God, how I see myself, and how I see others are all elements of one thing. I think we have only one central bias — at the deepest levels — which expresses itself in these three channels concurrently.

I use this principle in several ways, such as finding out what my heart really thinks about God, myself and the world. If I’m harsh with myself, I discover the belief that God should be harsh with me; if I’m truly happy with others, I see that I’m happy with myself; if I view God as authoritarian, I find society to be filled with laws and requirements. Every combination seems to express this reflective principle, to the extent that I wonder if the three are actually separate.

What if I am my self, my God, and my society? I mean, my perception of the three can only dwell within myself. As purely external entities, they don’t exist for me as objects of perception. In other words, what I see is a reflection of myself upon those things, and thus what the reflexive principle tells me is that I can find out more about my essential beliefs by looking inward.

That the God I relate to is not found in my professed beliefs at first surprised me. The reflexive principle says that I can only believe in God as a friend insofar as I’m capable of being such to myself — even though my Faith says that He will always be more so. It is not about what is, but what I have faith in as being. Thus I improve my relationship to myself, people, and God always in lock-step. One leg of the triangle cannot outstrip the others, without some degree of falseness creeping into my relations (i.e., a belief about God I don’t have faith in, a belief about myself that doesn’t reflect how I treat myself, etc).

In one sense, I see this set of relationships as a fractal design: where God is the fractal itself, Infinite in scale; the world is the diversity of its patterns; and my self is but one point within its immensity: individual and yet nonetheless infinite as well, possessing the same inherent design as that reflected in the whole. That one small part wants to understand itself can be done by looking to what’s around, and finding that within myself is a mysterious, complete identity with the Whole: “He hath known himself who hath known God.”

Yesterday I drove up to Aspen, Colorado on what might have been one of the prettiest days of the year. The weather was cool but warm, the trees were changing color in indescribable patterns of brilliant gold and yellow and red… I was able to capture just a few pictures, although it does nothing to equal the beauty of the trip itself. One a day like that one, I realized that when men grow tired of the world, it’s the world of men they’ve had too much of. Beauty like this seemed like God’s face, cloaked in the form of leaves and branches. It was among the most beautiful drives I’ve ever taken.

Been having lots of fun with the new camera lately. It seems that shooting from a tripod greatly improves the quality of the images (which is really no surprise). So here are some new images from the “Garden of the Gods” in Colorado Springs. Also, a few more pictures have been added to the Chicago gallery.

On the subject of spiritual things, I think that true religion always brings with it joy and happiness. Whenever these two are missing, something has either been lost or not yet found. Spirit is like a vibrant, beating heart; a shining light glowing from the center of human life; a palpable energy that reaches out and touches hearts. Religion educates us how to experience this reality, how to draw on its energies and share them with other people. This “plugging in” would produce the abundance of spirit and joy I keep reading about in the lives of the martyrs.

But how to transform? Without this spirit, people are like unlit lamps, or mirrors in a dark room. Human reality is one of the most beautiful things in existence, but it must be “turned on” to reach its potential. Spiritual transformation kindles the lamp, and turns the mirror to the sun. It’s like unveiling a masterpiece so that everyone can see how truly wondrous it is. And I believe people have this beauty within them at all times; it only waits to be awakened. Turn a mirror toward the sun and even if it is dusty it will glow brightly.

Transformation, then, is not changing, but a shift of focus. When the heart is concerned with material things, it is dark and forlorn; when it turns toward the Divine, it becomes bright. Whatever the heart is occupied with, it reflects. Thus, when a person is fully concentrated on God, they will begin to manifest godly things.

The real trick is what is meant by “God”. If one’s concept of God is too abstract and separated from the world, focusing on it will tend to turn people away from the world too much. They will not appreciate the beauty of life and will tend to forget about others. They begin to see material things as “bad” and their heart slowly turns sour.

Because the joy and happiness are missing, I would say that such an idea of God is wrong. We know God is near when we feel the melodies of heaven reverberating within us. God is heat and light: can shadow ever be its substitute? I think real attention to God would result in a deep appreciation of the world — such that even the smallest things are cherished and seem valuable. And it will turn the heart towards people.

What kind of “God” would produce this transformation? If spirituality is falling in love with God, and virtue simply the natural behavior of a lover, then love of what God would produce a Bahá’í both in spirit and deed? It would be an idea which gives value to the world, which reveals people as glorious and wondrous in nature, and which unveils secrets within the smallest of things: by which atoms become lights and suns, and drops reveal the mystery of oceans: in terms of which nothing is ever meaningless, and every moment of life reveals a deep and everlasting love. What form of belief yields this?

I’m not sure it can even be named. What my heart turns toward, can I ever tell it? Any attempt at words would repeat the very mistake I mean to avoid. God — as He relates to human life — is something profoundly alive, brilliant, warm, full of hope, bountiful, and glorious. When I say “Allah’u’Abha”, I’m not just saying that God is most glorious: I’m actually defining for myself what God is. Wherever there is glory, I see His face; whenever I feel wonder, I am touched by His presence; at whatever time I’m lost in awe, then I know He is near.

And so I believe that spiritual transformation does not happen by effort alone. Our efforts do not make us into something we’re not; they open our eyes and purify our heart so that we can see what is already around us — and has always been with us, “standing within thee, mighty, powerful and self-subsisting”.

Blind thine eyes, that thou mayest behold My beauty; stop thine ears, that thou mayest hearken unto the sweet melody of My voice; empty thyself of all learning, that thou mayest partake of My knowledge; and sanctify thyself from riches, that thou mayest obtain a lasting share from the ocean of My eternal wealth.

When we reach this state, we become a pure, receiving organ, capable of detecting the fragrance of God from great distances:

So great shall be the discernment of this seeker that he will discriminate between truth and falsehood even as he doth distinguish the sun from shadow. If in the uttermost corners of the East the sweet savours of God be wafted, he will assuredly recognize and inhale their fragrance, even though he be dwelling in the uttermost ends of the West.

At that point, the seeker goes into the world and searches for his Beloved. Where will she be found? What form will she take? He seeks and seeks, casting away every idea and conception, waiting until his heart thrums with nearness to his Love.

I think this is why it cannot be told: because every seeker must find this Reality for him or herself, must go through the process of purification and discovery before he can fully appreciate the Truth. Yet after a person finds the Beloved, He becomes the point and origin of all transformation and virtue: “Whensoever the light of Manifestation of the King of Oneness settleth upon the throne of the heart and soul, His shining becometh visible in every limb and member.” This is gaining access to the world of spirit, and discovering how to “soar in the air even as thou walkest upon the earth”. `Abdu’l-Bahá says:

Those souls that, in this day, enter the divine kingdom and attain everlasting life, although materially dwelling on earth, yet in reality soar in the realm of heaven. Their bodies may linger on earth but their spirits travel in the immensity of space. For as thoughts widen and become illumined, they acquire the power of flight and transport man to the kingdom of God.

These are a people whose happiness does not come from effort or “trying”, but as a result of the world they experience. Their vision has been transformed, not their substance. Once a person sees the glories which have been deposited in human reality, and witnesses the miracles attending every second our lives, how can he not be overwhelmed with gratitude, and at every moment repeat the tradition, “O Lord, increase my astonishment at Thee!”

Getting to this point does require some effort. Bahá’u’lláh says, “Labor is needed, if we are to seek Him; ardor is needed, if we are to drink of the honey of reunion with Him…” Yet once the fire has been lit, it does not need to be lit twice. It will burn as fiercely as the fuel you feed it. If every created thing, if every atom became a door leading to the Ancient of Days and a cause for wonder and amazement, how brightly such a fire would blaze!

So in serving people, I do not want to “try” to serve them anymore. I want it to become impossible not to serve them. If a person you loved entered the room, would you be able to sit still and not look after their interests? Love generates virtue as a fire produces heat. This, to me, is the secret of transformation: find God — I mean, not an idea but the true, spiritual reality — devote your heart utterly to Him, and the rest of life will fall joyfully into place.

Is the sound of sorrow
limited, like a voice’s cry?

Or does the soul’s suspiration
heed no boundaries of space or time?

The winds of late have seemed
to hold a deeper tone;

More than just the capping of waves
along the rolling blue.

Was that your soft weeping I heard?
or were those salty drops the ocean’s own…

The other day I had a chance to go hiking with my father at the Seven Falls park in Colorado Springs. There are several photographs from the hike we took here. And no, there are no people in the pictures! As a few have noticed, my artistic side resonates more with the idea of an empty landscape.

The past few months I have been working on a theory of personality to help me understand some of my behaviors. It follows roughly from a few earlier thoughts — when I wrote about a house divided — where I hoped to find a method of self-improvement that did not require a constant, inward struggle.

I think the pressures of modern living have placed demands on us to act a certain way before we understand the reasons for those actions. This is especially so how because people’s lives interrelate so much that there isn’t great deal tolerance for odd behavior.

Faced with one set of impulses and desires, and another set of prescriptions for living filled with expectations, we learn to fragment ourselves very early in life, presenting our best side to the public and hiding our darker side until even we can’t see it.

This darker side is dark, not in the sense of evil, but because it is hidden from view. Sometimes its contents are indeed horrible, but probably not always as horrible as they seem. As a result, this side is left unexamined, making it very hard to form accurate judgments about is character.

One thing for certain though: the dark side is filled with energy and potency. It exists because our actions are at variance with our deepest urges. Conversely, the “light” side of our nature can lack genuine spirit if it is only a prescription with no connection to our urges. All of the dark side is to some extent desired, but only a portion of the light side overlaps with our basic interests. These areas of overlap between our desires and the accepted forms of behavior provide us with an outlet for creative energies — otherwise the individual finds himself frequently indulging the dark side to find sufficient release.

The light side — often socially and morally determined — is famous for priding itself on being “selfless”, and thus not only failing to consider the individual’s desires but actively ignoring them. It may even reach the extreme of choosing the exact opposite of what the heart wants, believing there to be more merit in rejecting what the self desires.

Since there are two origins of behavior: impulse and determination, I think health lies in harmonizing the two — blending short-term desires with long-term goals; enough release to know daily joy, but enough control for overall happiness and direction; and neither to excess.

Further, the dark parts that must stay dark — the desire to harm, for example — are not condemned, but found an accepted channel, perhaps only in fantasy. I don’t believe guilt is an effective way to “keep on track”, except to the extent that it makes us aware of our decisions and their consequences. There is no reason to loathe any of our impulses, simply to decide how to express them. Also with our moral choices, not to make them in defiance of the self, but in reference to what will complete us and integrate us best with the world around us.

Based on this division, I find in myself the greatest power and energy come from my dark, less evident side; but my best wisdom comes from my light, determined side. This is why my passions sometimes override what I know is best for me, because the two sides experience momentary conflict between short-term and long-term interests. Whichever side “wins” is sometimes a coin toss, because I don’t want either side to have absolute dominion. Who knows, sometimes making a mistake is the best way to learn. What seems to matter most is fairness and making the best decisions when times matter most — not striving for an illusory perfection that I always feel guilty for not achieving.

As the two sides reach a greater respect for one another, I start to see them as two aspects of a unity rather than as opposing sides. At times they fight, but more often they find ways to cooperate: for the dark side to offer its energies in service of the light, and the light to choose options that consider the dark. It is not necessarily a position of compromise, but of mutual interest. A compromise would satisfy neither one for long — such as a morally ambiguous but pale indulgence — but rather to find among the fields of possibility options to satisfy more parts of me at once. This happens when I serve society in a way that excites me, for example. The crusader-type moralist would look down on this as a concession to self-hood, and the rebel-type might see it as dancing to the tune of the Man, but I see it as a fulfillment of self within a greater field than self alone: something that benefits all parties, and not just “self” or “not self”.

In my earlier essay I had wondered how to achieve inward unity while aligning myself with an outer purpose. I think the answer lies in marrying the two — engaging self in the service of society. This creates a perpetuating cycle, so that the energy source for activity is constantly available and replenished and one’s motivation is at its highest: both external and internal. It’s a framework that must also remain flexible: sometimes a selfish indulgence, sometimes a selfless correction, but which on the whole leads consistently to a better end. Anything else seems to me so far to be either too inhuman (a quest for perfection) or too dehumanizing (giving up on perfecting anything).

O Nasim!
gentle breeze of the Merciful
delight to eye and mind
beauteous form of intellect
a sharp arrow
flying through the fields of hearts…
You’ve trapped me.
I think of you often now.
When will I feel your breezes again
to lift this building heat
O Nasim?

Something that’s been puzzling me a lot lately is my reaction to possible romantic relationships. When I was younger I remember wanting to meet someone very much, and getting into relationships almost as quickly as they became available. But I realized in the end that either my personality is not very amenable to living with another person (something I still think may be true), or I’ve been finding women who don’t really want the kind of person I am.

These days I’m averse to any sort of relationship other than friendship. When things start to get closer, I pull back, sometimes harshly so. The mere thought of it depresses me, and I find myself getting unhappier the more things might develop with someone. It has led me to believe that I might have been made for the hermit’s life, spending most of my time with thoughts and other interests. But last night a realization struck me with all the force of the truth, and I think I understand now why I’ve been avoiding it — other than the usual reasons of fear and uncertainty.

What I was thinking about was love. Most of the poems I’ve written about love start with the thought of a particular person (or persons), with real inspiration coming from the translation into the spiritual dimension. I’m thrilled by the reality of love, and find my happiness wherever it occurs: love for beauty, computers, ideas, people, food, etc. It doesn’t really matter what prompts my experience of love, since they all seem to share common traits that I connect back to their origin in God. In this way I experience God through my love of the world.

It’s been my life’s ambition to learn how to love all things. This is no easy task — many things still bother me and I wish for them to change, as if to wipe them from my experience of life — but month by month I learn more, and move further down that road. Life as I experience it today is incomparably richer than what I knew as a young person. It’s a labor I dream of, and I feel as if untold worlds await me behind each new moment.

I describe this as a pursuit of universal love, or true love; but the world’s romantic ideal seems to credit only exclusive loves. Everyone I talk to wants love, but often they want only one or a few forms: love of a person, career, family, etc. When I talk about universal love, some suggest that it’s impossible for mortal beings, or flatly state they don’t want such a thing! Of those who want it, many retain the thought that it lies always beyond reach. But I intend to find this universal love, this complete vision, or die having made of my life an earnest attempt. Yet this also where I run into problems with those who want the typical ideal.

The modern romantic ideal envisions one person as the primary focus of our capacity to love (with a possible allowance for children, though some relationships even suffer when children appear, because it distracts from that singular mutual focus). In essence, one person becomes the “sink” of the other’s best energies, and they the “source” for replenishing them. By feeding each other in this way, the relationship perpetuates with enough excess that some degree of social involvement is possible.

Too much external involvement, however, deprives one side of the pair of what they need to replenish that lost fuel. One cannot be the focus of another who is too much outwardly occupied. This is the situation of an “unloved spouse”, who must turn to others to get what he or she needs.

This dynamic is what I grew up believing in, and I used to see no problem with it. I was even eager to participate. But I found in the end that my dream of universal love is incompatible with the romantic ideal, and I am unwilling to give up that dream. Why is it so essential to me? Because I believe that if I can discover true love for all things, then I can believe — with all my mind, my heart and soul — that God loves all things in me. This is a form of my quest for God, and it seems unreasonable and unjust for a person to ask me to give up that quest. There are things we should never ask of one another.

The thing is, I have many loves — programming, reading, thinking, photography, chess, and more — and almost all of them require significant amounts of uninterrupted time to achieve fruition. This fact has been called “selfish”, because I demand time to myself to complete what I love. (To those who’ve said it, my being “selfish” is usually paying attention to things other than themselves — though they rarely see how selfish this claim of selfishness is. If a man can never expect time to himself, how are people to get anything done?)

Under pressure to be less “selfish”, I have bent to the ideal before: the belief that all my love and attention should go to one person. But when my love turned again to other things, the word “selfish” returned, and with it various forms of jealousy: anger, resentment, vindictiveness. I’ve heard my laptop called “the other woman” more than once, because I chose to focus on it rather than the person I was with. When they’re around they want it all! absolute focus and attention; an exclusive love that ignores every other thing.

Exclusive love, however, is the anti-thesis of universal love. Rather than making progress in learning to love all things, I experienced a constant pressure to love one thing above all. However much I’ve heard the desire expressed to watch my spirit to fly, I’ve felt an unconscious wish to ground me. At times, it even seemed others wished to become my God: a focus of worship, origin of laws, setter of standards. If I happened to choose one of God’s laws above their interests, it provoked anger.

Faced with this demand to relinquish my universal dream, I have at times relented. I’ve bent as far as I could, until the bitterness of despair was too great. My dream and my romantic love became at odds: pursuing my passion began to hurt the one I loved. How can I withhold my heart in this way and still have something left to give? What in the world was being requested of me??

But I can no more sacrifice my soul’s life than I could violate my integrity in the name of a just cause. They want a passion from me that asks for the muting of all other passions. Unsurprisingly, I became more and more dead inside as this progressed. I stop writing, creating, seeing people. My life became an endless hope for escape. I could neither move nor stop. My existence began to decay.

And when things ended this way, I faced a terrible realization (this is what I became conscious of last night): Where did all my love go? I spent years trying to devote the majority of my heart and soul to one person after another — curtailing my writing, hobbies, and creative output — but where is that love now? As far as I can see, it was wasted.

Whenever I pursue the universal love, the results affect large numbers of people: those who use the software I write, who read my thoughts, experience my friendship or find beauty in my art. In this way I feel worthwhile, because people around the world receive the fruits of my love. If one doesn’t care for something, another will. I don’t have to tailor my work to one bias — there are as many perspectives as there are people. As long as I honestly love what I do, someone out there will appreciate it.

The demands of exclusive love are the opposite of this. Rather than benefiting whomever is receptive, I must aim my love at one mind, one point of view, one set of prejudices. If they don’t appreciate it, it falls flat; if they do, they might keep it to their own heart. The fruits of this love rarely reach beyond that one person, unless it’s an outward-directed activity we both share in.

As a result I can spend years devoting my heart to one person, expending time and thought and energy — and then one day they leave, and all of it is lost. There is nothing to show but what I learned from the experience. Even that does not go beyond the relationship, does not touch other’s lives, except insofar as I now treat them better. It’s like a mutual navel-gazing society to which no one else is invited.

In this type of scenario I feel my capacity as a human being is wasted. This is why I fear relationships that seek the romantic ideal. When I start dating someone, they don’t want to hear about my love of all things, about how sometimes I don’t want to go out with them but would rather stay home and write. They want to hear how I love them more than anything else, how they are more beautiful than everyone else, that I would give up everything for their sake. Hence my realization: that I avoid romantic relationships because I have a dream and don’t want to be pulled away from that dream, sucked dry by a heart who in reality is thirsting for God. I am not a surrogate God by any means, and do not wish to devote my life to anyone’s quest for satisfaction. Is it really “selfish” that I would rather benefit more people than just one? Each time I’ve been married, I stopped writing. But I would rather write and offer myself to whomever passes by, than lose my writing for one person’s sake; while the person who could join me in this endeavor is the one who would cause me to write even more.

In a dream I was climbing a long tower. I asked, “Where are we going?” and people said: “To see the Christ.” It was a broad tower with a spiral staircase in the wall — something like a lighthouse.

As I neared the top, a feeling began to come over me. It was a kind of joy that reached fingers through my body. At the end of the stairs I saw what looked like a picture frame, or a small mirror. This, I understood, was Christ’s reality. People were approaching the mirror and disappearing as they touched it. They were being transported to another world.

As I walked toward the mirror, my feeling of joy became overwhelming. It was more intense than anything I had ever felt before.

Meanwhile, in the distance, I heard someone sobbing. I drew closer and became intoxicated; closer and I began to fade and glow. At the same time, the sobbing grew louder and more insistent. Touching the mirror, I knew, would transport me into another life. I longed to reach it, but someone near me was in pain. What was happening?

At that moment I awoke and found that it was I, myself, who was crying… I wonder if my body could not endure the revelation. It was begging me not to touch the mirror. Ever since, this image comes to mind when I think about the “next life” — which in a sense is found when we die, and in another by our recognition of Him.

How do I know I’m in love?

If her touch steals time
and her breathing slows it
but her absence makes it long.

If her thoughts of me
are how I know myself,
her lips blurring right and wrong.

If my heart is her creation:
her smile saving me, he frown destroying me —
a gate to both world in her eyes!

If faced by the road of self-destruction
careless, I court my soul’s demise.

While reading further in one of my favorite books today, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (which takes a bit of getting used to, but is worthwhile after that), I came across a discussion of some early ideas about the divinity of Jesus Christ. What was so interesting about them is how the doctrine of the trinity was almost forced based on prevailing assumptions about the nature of the world.

For example, it was a strongly held notion around that time that divine substance (the quintessence) was something indivisible, perfect and beyond corruption. Anything divine was of the quintessence, such as soul, heaven, etc. Alchemy was a science devoted to discovering the relationship of quintessence to ordinary items, thus enabling the scientist to convert them to any other form, heal the material substance of the body, and live eternally young.

Now, based on the idea that divine things are of quintessence, it was impossible for thinkers to conceive that Christ could be both divine and yet of human form. They believed Christ had come from heaven (and returned to it), but they sought a model to allow for a visitation within the physical world of One who must have been a living form of the quintessence — otherwise His divine nature would be in question.

It is surprising how many theories evolved from the single necessity of requiring that Christ not be of common flesh in order rationally to accept His divine nature. A first group asserted that He never had physical form at all, but was an optical/auditory illusion who simply bore the appearance of a human being. In this way the Divine visited humanity without becoming “corrupted” by intermingling Its substance with the four elements.

Another group believed that Christ was in fact human, with the Holy Spirit being the real divine agency. It visited Jesus of Nazareth at the time of His baptism — which allows for His being an ordinary human being during birth and childhood, a very messy consideration (e.g., how could the Son of God have come through a woman’s vagina to enter this world?) — and left Him during His trials on the cross, immediately before His seeming exclamation of despair. This model invoked a dual nature to Christ which again permitted the Divine to visit humanity without the taint of mortal corruption.

Later this dual model evolved into a triune one, afterwards confounded as a unity to avoid the obvious problem that quintessence must be indivisible. But I still have more to read on that development…

What interested me is how strong the basic assumptions were — of the nature of things, and how mortal substance could not become the carrier of divinity because of its corruptible essence — and how these assumptions forced religious thinking down certain avenues in order to reach a compromise between what was believed about the world and what people had come to believe about Christ from His teachings.

Then what about the assumptions we have of the world today? In what ways is the same thing is happening now as then: the invisible bending of religious interpretations toward a believable model based on the context of our world-view. How we see things seems to put a range to the truths we can accept — those which fit the model somehow. Are there assumptions we hold of mortality and selfhood that run so deep, our view of God is not so much a form of truth as an inverted picture of how we see ourselves?