a moment

i may have done it again. i may have tapped into that thing i used to be able to find once upon a time. when i lived in colorado, i could do it. that's where i figured it out. i guess she taught it to me in a way, if i am honest. it's difficult to describe, but i'll give it a shot.

there was a point where i could take solace in my insignificance. that sounds very depressing, but i do not at all mean it that way. there are those who speak of enlightenment as an expansion into the everything, growing until you feel like you connect to it all, all of creation humming together as the great om inside of you. i believe this to be my version of that. it is more subtle than i would have expected, less of a powerful realization and a choir of angels than a tickling at the base of the soul, but one that fills that soul up from the bottom in a way that you may not realize is happening until you have emptied out again.

i played in snow. for anyone who lives with snow, this is a meaningless experience, i suppose, but i was born where it snows and spent much time in a place where it does not. boxing day was magnificent. great, huge flakes fell slowly and softly, the ground was already covered with enough snow to keep my feet from meeting the grass beneath no matter how hard i stepped. the air was crisp, cold and clean. the world as white, and there were snow angels to be made and king of the mountain to be played. i watched the cheeks of my children turn to apples, watched their breath turn to fog, watched them wiggle with delighted discomfort as the snow found the weak spots in their clothing.

i took 5 minutes for myself while they were winding down, and i left them with my aunt. i needed a few moments to be alone with my childhood in a way, to be the kid i was once and had forgotten, or let go, or had taken, or whatever. i needed a moment to enjoy this, to be happy. i went around to the front and stood in the front yard in which i had played often as a young boy, let the wind whip me and let the snow fall on my face, and it happened. every flake hitting my face said 'you are here. you are here. you are here.', and i understood what those flakes were telling me. i felt the world all around me, the whole of creation all around me, felt so small and noticed, truly noticed where i was in it all. i felt my own smallness, my own part of the wholeness, saw myself as part of it.

i felt those flakes tell me their brothers and sisters were landing all around and covering so many other parts of the same world, that their cousins the raindrops were coming down somewhere warmer, that their further relatives, the rays of the sun and the moon, were touching those places not being coated with precipitation, and that those i loved everywhere were being touched by them at the same moment, and that i was no different than the rocks and the trees and the grasses and, yes, the very snowflakes themselves, as i was being covered with no less and no more than they. i was small, i was a part. i was tiny and felt the hugeness of it all. it was magnificent.

i have no idea how long it lasted, and as quickly as it came upon me it was gone. i did not mourn its passing, strangely, like i have mourned the passing of so many of my moments of opening up. i was simply glad for its having visited me, happy i could have been part of everything for that brief span, thankful for the time playing in the snow with the kids preparing me for it. later in the day we would go sledding, and it would not be the same. it was to be just joy, just fun, just worldly good time, but even then i did not belittle it for its lack of grandiosity, but was simply happy to be there for that time, wind whipping me as i raced down the hills and snow fighting me as i dragged my exhausted crew back up them. life would intrude again as it always does, but for a time i had it again. i understood the beauty.

a whole new woooooooorld....

oh dear. sorry for that. but it's been stuck in my head for some unknowable reason, and i thought i'd share that little earworm with all my readers - both of you. in reality, i do know why it's stuck in my head, and it's a long and winding road that takes to here from where i began. so i shall spare you the trip and simply go back to the start, which is the germane point anyway. a whole new world...or is it?

i opened the door to this a crack with my last post. i'm not at all sold on the idea that we have but one dance in this existence. i know, i know - i'm a methodist christian, and that faith (indeed, pretty much any christian denomination) leaves essentially no room for interpretation on this subject. regardless of whether one prefers to take everything paul wrote as truth or with a grain of salt of biblical proportions (see how i did that? i tied it back into itself! ha.), or if one even wants simply to pare it down to accept only the words of jesus himself, there's nowhere to go with that line of thought. once, and that is it. unless you're unitarian universalist, but they only sort of count as christian by virtue of growing out of a christian denomination in the first place. anyway...

i'm finding that i don't much care what the history of my faith says, which seems on one level to negate it as my faith, i suppose. that's been coming for much of my life, though, so please do forgive me if i'm not exactly wearing a hairshirt and sackcloth over it. i'm not rescinding my membership in that club, but likewise i am not seemingly on board with all the bylaws. in any case, i have developed a nasty habit (to hear some tell it) of cherry-picking what sounds right to me and what does not. i am comforted by the notion that i am not simply choosing the easy rules, but just passing on the ones that make little sense in light of what we know of history at this point and that are at complete odds with faith systems that were around for millennia before abram became abraham. i do not claim to be right, but only claim that i do not know, and any who might write me hate mail for this paragraph will be wasting the parenthetical gap between the health of your wrists and carpal tunnel syndrome, for i have no intention whatsoever of engaging you in debate.

so, back to it. recent events have opened me up to some...impressions that i may have had for a long time but was never in the right place to ponder. something about being in a psych ward leaves one with a number of philosophical conundra. perhaps it's all the extra time one has while hiding and praying that the more dramatic expressions of mental disease aren't communicable. regardless, a lot of introspection has been going on, only some of which has been shared here, and it has brought about the concept of the 'familiar' to me.

i have dipped my toe into this already, but the 'familiar' has become kind of my name for those people with whom i am immediately comfortable. 'soulmate', the word i originally used, seemed both too strong and limiting at the same time, for while it connotes a depth that may go beyond that about which i am speaking, it likewise has a colloquial meaning that would presuppose a singular pairing, and the familiars number more than one. and so i have been trying to make some sense of this fact that there are people who to me simply seem immediately non-threatening and my impressions of whom are instantly exempt from my own mind's fears. how does this happen? why are these people, with whom in many cases i have no reason whatever to be comfortable, so quickly trusted? is there a single common trait that they all share, something that i can recognize in them and by it know that they are not like anyone else?

and it struck me while i was in my bed one night in the ward, and it struck me again a day or two after i was out, and i ignored the thing until i was talking to one of them and it struck me again: perhaps the word 'recognize' is what it's all about. i don't mean to imply that there is necessarily any such thing as my coming to know that once upon a time this one was my wife, or that one was my best friend, and that one day with enough work and regression therapy we might realize that we have known each other as joey, susan, theodorus and grok. but if we do cycle back through here, what are the chances that we retain no impressions of our past experience? i do not speak of memory, per se, but of retained experience on some level that cannot be accessed by our consciousness while informing our new experiences.

i was reading a brief article on the recent death of the most studied man in the history of memory science. he had had an operation at a young age to remove a segment of his brain, and with that segment went his ability to consciously remember anything long-term. he could remember things for approximately 20 seconds, until it was time for that information to move into long-term memory and then it was gone. at one point he was subjected to a series of repetitive manual tasks, and each time it seemed to him to be a new task. but he slowly grew more adept at the task with repetition - his muscle memory was still working even though he had no idea that it was. he remembered nothing, but his body built that memory for his conscious mind. that is a solid analogy for what i am trying to get across. that though we are never consciously aware that we have shared our lives with someone before, that there is some metaphysical analog to muscle memory that is seated in the soul and allows us to 'recognize' those in whom we have placed our trust in the distant past.

i also do not mean to imply that we are stuck recycling the same friends over and over again. this is a big ol' world, and once one adds time into the equation perhaps things don't line up terribly well. we also must allow for the fact that we develop new friends. i have, i know this to be true. but these friends may be the ones that have taken me time to trust, and in that time has been built a friendship that may well transcend this life and wander off into another when we bump into each other again.

i am coming to think that possibly we all have this ability, that it is just part of the human experience, but that i am sensitive to it because it is so hard for me to trust anyone that those with whom i quickly feel safe stand out in the starkest of relief.

mysticism?

somewhere along the way this blog was bound to shift a gear or two and get away, at least on occasion, from my musings on my own mental state. that's probably a good thing, as anyone reading this thing is likely bored to death of the topic, and i myself weary of it from time to time. that said, this was not an easy thing for me to do - i've sat and written and rewritten and mulled over whether to begin a second blog instead in order to keep this one purely about the depression experience. in the end, i have decided that had i really, deep down, wanted this to be about the depression experience i would have called it 'the depression experience'. instead, i went with 'nothing to see here', so obviously i wanted this to be an open forum for all things me. yes, that's self-deprecating. and funny. admit it.

in any case, the thing that has been pulling at me the last day or so is the mystical experience and how it all works. or, more to the point, what it is that might make it not work. why is it that some people can do it and some can't? there are those who would argue that anyone can, and i suppose they're probably right, but there is psychological and psychiatric genetic research being done that suggest there is an inherited component to one's religiosity, a notion i find both repugnant and compelling. i've admittedly not read too much on the subject thus far, but i would not be surprised if i were to discover that it is ultimately not the religiosity that is at issue, but the ability to feel the presence of god (please feel free to use whatever term you like here - i will use god because it's the term i find falls immediately to hand and because it's very, very short. and i am lazy). what i am getting at is the idea that one's religiosity is not necessarily defined by one's genes, but by one's ability to have a mystical experience that allows one to be religious.

obviously there are other factors in play. i'll be the first to admit (and accuse) that not every religious person has any ability at all to feel any mystical experience. in fact, there may even at some point be an inverse relationship (witness pedophile priests, thieving pastors and whole hate-mongering congregations). but at the base, beginner level, doesn't it make sense that without a predisposition to feeling the presence of god one is less likely to be involved in any religion and therefore be 'less religious'? and stop and look around at your own circle. if you look at everyone you know does it seem like the more analytical and less emotive someone is, the less likely that person is to be a member of a religion? and is the converse true?

i touched on my reasoning for this train of thought in an earlier post. i don't know that i am necessarily on the 'genetically predisposed to be religious' list. i don't meditate well. i don't pray well. the corporate worship experience does not open me to an experience with the almighty and i am not expecting any divine visitations anytime soon. but when i play there's something that happens, and so i wonder if we all really do have some way to tap into that flow, and if it's just a little more difficult for some than others.

to be certain, we haven't made it any easier. the ages of reason and analysis have subsumed the age of experience and art and mysticism for so long now that our modern society has little to no way for someone to gain a mystical insight without great effort. even those who may be more prone to those experiences have few outlets into which they can plug, and the available outlets are frequently unattractive for reasons of bigotry, exclusivity, threat of violence, fear of judgment, hypocrisy or just age-old boring traditionalism. in older cultures, mysticism was part and parcel of life. it was what was real. our own advancements in science and rational thought have killed our ability to believe in anything beyond that which we can touch, and without that ability we are even less able to open ourselves to any religious experience because we are less willing, and there are things that simply must be believed to be seen, not the other way around.

it strikes me that we as a human race were born into experience with the innate ability to have that mystical experience. most these days think that early cultures' belief systems are simply signs of their inability to rationalize and their lack of scientific knowledge, ghost stories to explain away the universe around them, and perhaps there's something to that. but every step we take down the rabbit hole of quantum physics and string theories suggests that perhaps our own scientifically-based ideas make less sense than we think, that the picture is much, much larger than we can see, and so i wonder if maybe we have, with all our learning, unlearned something that might be more fundamentally necessary and more fundamentally true than all the science we can muster. after all, if we find through the current trends in physics that there are myriad universes and dimensions and that every choice we make creates a fork in the road that generates a new pair of existences, doesn't that lend credence to the hindu and buddhist notions that reality is but a dream and the true reality lies beneath it, underpinning it while at the same time undermining it? and every time we turn around we find that there's another variable we missed in the equation, and we have to manufacture dark matter, background energies and rays and constants and other artificial balancers just to make the math work. why is something as creatively-named yet as unobservable as 'dark matter' more valid than a god experience or explanation?

i think perhaps that we have, in our zealotry for science and reason, fallen easy prey to plato's allegory of the cave - every bit as easy prey as any primitive belief system. and i don't mean to suggest that any particular religion is necessarily more accurate or has walked around the rock to discover the fire and shadows. but i personally find a lot of beauty in the acceptance of the fact that we are in the cave and that perhaps there is a different explanation than what we see. that acceptance can be born of the ability to feel something larger than just one's neurons firing and the effects of group-think. when i design something there is a feeling more of 'uncovering' something that already exists and that wants to be revealed. when i play music there is a feeling of going to someplace where that music already is and bringing it back for others to hear. these feelings may be illusions, certainly. but they may also be factual, or they may be beautiful analogies for some universal mechanism we will never understand.

this existence is not a simple place, and there is far more in play than quarks and leptons. even science admits that. and so i wonder if, in discounting the mystical experience, we are discounting something as important as science. hell, i sometimes wonder if we are discounting something more important! but my greater concern is that we are training and breeding out of ourselves the ability to experience that deeper world. i worry that we are actively destroying our own ability to relate to the universe around us on its own natural terms. instead of dealing in the language the universe natively speaks, have we created esperanto in an effort to do it better? are we speaking a language that is dead before it ever was alive? i don't know. but i do know that human history is filled with wonderful allegory and myth, and each step we take in our modern society seems to remove us further from our own roots. we are a world full of people who cannot understand our own religion because its intellectualism is beyond our capacity, and we are losing the ability to believe in the simpler explanations, dammit.