June 2005 Archives

When I came out of the movie theater a couple of days ago, the sky was filled with lightning. I sat down to watch for a little while, and thought about how God hides from us. It’s like He wears a thick cloak made up of time, troubles and plurality. There I was, standing on the warm cement, looking at those awesome flashes in the sky, thinking about my friends and feeling the humid air blowing around me. Why are there so many different things? God isn’t in any one of them, and I don’t have the vision to see all of it at once. Why does He hide in the manyness of things? By giving me these eyes, He makes me to think that I’m down here, and the sky is up there, and all the space between separates us. It may be an illusion, but it is no less convincing.

So there He was, hiding behind the flashes in the sky, hiding in the time it took for them to join earth and heaven, hiding in the singular point of view of a lone mind standing on the ground. Hiding in the finitude and difference and color and thought. Separation can seem so obvious, it makes us feel that we are separated. Every object is a veil because it obscures its place among the other objects, since we don’t see things as a whole beyond time. By His very completeness, He remains hidden to those who live in parts. Our “self” lies in the very fact of possessing a point of view.

It struck me that this was the essence of hell: how hidden He can be. The more hidden, the more invisible, the more hellish our existence. This is the agony of a life with no purpose, when we have to invent a goal just to give our days meaning. And heaven is the opposite: its essence is His manifestation, as He becomes more obvious.

I think that when we die we’ll leave this world of hiding and enter another where He stands clear; but the essence of that hiding and manifestation are independent of life and death. If a soul perfects its vision, perhaps it can pierce the veil and discover a clarity of perception that can bring heaven into the heart. This would make the next world a concrete expression of that relationship, but it is in discovering God that the true meaning of heaven lies.

Then the thought returned to me: why does He hide? It made me think of a film called “Dokhtar-i-Irani” (“Persian Girl”). In that movie there is a man, Ali, who is the son of a wealth family.Ali is tired of his wealth and all the false attention it brings, so he leaves his family and takes up the lifestyle of a poor artisan making statues.

In the neighborhood of his shop there is a girl that he comes to admire, but she pays him little attention. The other girls at the shop make fun of Ali, saying essentially that he has little worth. ButAli falls in love with this girl, and begins making a sculpture of an angel using her face. He also does sweet things for her, and she starts to take notice. She herself isn’t interested in marrying anyone, but her family pressures her to find a good husband. She keeps to herself, but starts thinking of `Ali, even though her family would never approve of him.

As Ali begins to win her heart, her family learns of his wealthy heritage. They suddenly become very excited forAli to marry their daughter and setup a meeting with Ali's parents.Ali knows nothing of these plans. When he comes to the girl’s house and sees his parents, he knows instantly what they are about. They are only being nice to him because they want to marry into a wealthy family. They would never have accepted him otherwise. `Ali believes that the girl is the same, and that everything has been a trick to lure him. He leaves and returns to the school where he learned sculpture.

Perhaps this is why God hides behind the nature of this world. He is like Ali, covering up his wealth because of the false interest it would generate. He wishes to know who His lovers are and who wants to marry Him because of what they hope to gain. It is not that He wishes this hell of obscurity for us -- after death we are sure to enter another world free of that burden -- but those who learn the secrets of love here can discover a special connection, like the girl whose affection forAli was untainted by knowledge of His wealth.

In this respect, His hiding is a gift to us, for once the veil is lifted, our hearts will no longer be ours: they will be lost in admiration to One Whose essence is the substance of every wish. But how can something so automatic be love? Maybe love only lies in being willing to see what others cannot.

We tend to think of the universe as a stable system progressing from one state to another, methodically. This has been the dominant view for centuries. However, modern experiments have shown that the universe is basically unstable – yet is always observed to be stable. That is, looking forward in time there are innumerable possibilities, but looking backward in time we always see a coherent universe.

For whatever reason, we see only a coherent universe and not the quantum flux that is its underlying reality. This has interesting implications for faith, prayer and free will, but essentially the universe has two faces: an utterly chaotic quantum flux we cannot observe directly, and the highly ordered system we’ve become accustomed to.

For example, we see many properties of the universe as “laws”, such as the law that objects at rest will stay at rest. However, there is no such law: we have simply observed such perfect consistency in that regard that we infer the operation of a law. As far as the universe is concerned objects can move spontaneously, but as far as history is concerned, they do not (unless you consider miracles).

If consistency is only observed and is not a feature of the universe per se, it means that stability is something the observer imposes on the manifold possibilities of reality. We see a consistent progression of history because something about the function of observation demands it. Thus, if you go back in time and change something significant, you cannot alter the fact that observers after that moment must observe a coherent world. This is what makes time paradoxes impossible. People used to think that the universe itself was stable and therefore a temporal paradox would destroy its stability, but quantum mechanics says that only our observation of the universe must be stable and thus no matter what actions we perform in the past, it is impossible to destroy the stability of future observations.

As for the future we “came from”, it now exists as a separate potential along a branch in a parallel universe that is no longer real from the point of view of those who observed the change we made. A new and different universe new proceeds after the point of the change, to conform to the stability requirements of those who observed it. There is always a single history and uncountable futures. Perhaps you could even say that what we call historical time is the same as the reality of those who experienced it – that the fabric of our souls is made from the outcomes we observe, rather than a separate substance altered by such moments.

I feel your peace on quiet nights  
when the cool winds presage rain.

Later your joy rises, with its gentle warmth  
to dry the dewdrops weighing the leaves.

Your beauty sings like songbirds on branches  
or crickets pleading with the star-filled night.

Your bright qualities are indeed my Charon:  
for their sublime touch ferries me to other worlds.

Imagine one friend gives another an amazing piece of Arabic calligraphy, framed under glass and bordered in ornate, gold leaf filigree. It is so beautiful that the friend decides to mount it in the center of his living room wall as the main piece in the room. The bold, black lines curve left and right, forming the image of a woman’s hair as it flows down to the bottom of the page.

I visit this friend and ask him, “What does it say?” He replies, “What does it matter? It’s so gorgeous, just looking at it is enough for me.”

Life is a lot like this. There is so much beauty – in the pretty faces, the grand ideas, the intricate systems of complex harmony – I often myself simply looking on in rapture. In those moments the sight itself is enough; the experience of perception seems like the essence of all life has to offer.

Then someone comes along who has spent the time and effort to learn Arabic. He stands in the friend’s house and says, “Do you know what’s written on that tablet?” The friend has no idea; he knows it only as a thing of beauty, worthy of admiration. The Arabist turns to him in surprise, “How long has it been here?” “A few years or so.” “You never thought to seek a translation?”, he asks. The friend answers, “Does it really matter? It sits on the wall so nicely, I thought it made a better use for it than reading it!”

The Arabist turns back to the hanging script. “Well, though you don’t seem too interested, what you have on your wall reads: ‘There are ten bars of gold in the hollow oak, to reward the curious.” The two go out and sure enough, there is the gold. “This doesn’t take away from the beauty of the tablet,” says the Arabist, “but learning how to read it would have been a double benefit. Now you can enjoy both the form and intent.”

I’ve talked with people in my life who say similar things about life. When I speak of mystical realities they say, “Why bother with all these laws and exercises? The joys of my life are enough for me.” Yet Plato wrote, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Not because an ignorant life has no beauty, but because, when placed next to the life that could be ours, it fades away in comparison. Why not reap the double benefit of significance and signifier?

When talking about God, heaven and this life, one often hears the word “perfection”. However, none of us has experienced what this word refers to. Our present state is called imperfect relative to a state we have never known. So what do we mean by perfection?

A common sense meaning of perfection is: more of what I want and less of what I don’t. For example, a perfect job is more interesting, pays more money, is closer to home, has better management, all while eliminating long hours, too much traveling, drudge work, etc. The more positive aspects it has, and the fewer negative, the more perfect it is. The ideal job, then, has only what we want and nothing that we don’t.

But is this perfection? Ask a child what his perfect meal is and he might respond like Will Ferrell in the movie “Elf”: “The four food groups are candy, candy canes, candy corn, and syrup.” No adult considers this be perfect, though it fits the child’s definition of having more of what he wants and less of what he doesn’t want.

This implies that the wanting has to be perfect for the outcome to be perfect; yet I have no way to define a perfect desire. Typically we relate perfection to our wishes, which is why it’s defined as “more and less”. Heaven is more of what we want: peace, joy, satisfaction, and less of what we don’t: fear, injustice, sorrow. But what if this desire is imperfect, like the child who wants ice cream for dinner? In that case, it entirely undermines our picture of what heaven should be. The heaven and God we talk about is born from our own wishes – our concept of perfection according to our likes and dislikes – but if our wishes are infantile, the heaven we image, though it sounds great, might actually be bad for us!

Since we only know perfection in terms of what we want, there is no way to know what a perfect desire is. It’s not just a desire that leads to a better long-term result, because we can’t define “better” without referring to our desire. Thus, we cannot know what perfection is. We have to be told by someone who knows better, just as a child must be instructed by an adult. A proper understanding cannot be found in how we think things should be.

Further, consider the world around us. If it was made by a perfect Hand, it demonstrates to us what perfection looks like. Not in the sense of a single freeze-frame we can call perfect, but in the dynamic movement of the whole, inclusive of all space and time. What we’re looking at is perfection in motion – though since our view is limited, what we see is always imperfect in regards to that whole. In this sense calling the world imperfect is correct because it is never presents a complete picture; but calling reality itself imperfect is to judge it according to our wishes and not in terms of the perfect creation that it is.

So life, not our desire, defines perfection, with imperfection being an artefact of the limits of our vision – “imperfect” here implying incomplete rather than poorly done. If life defines perfection, and if our vision is always imperfect, then we cannot know perfection – we can only live it. But if we let our desires define perfection for us, we will neither know it nor live it, since we will reject the perfection that life is in favor of our own perspective. Thus people turn away from the life around them, and in their hearts turn toward a heaven of their own making. But this heaven is not perfection; it is a rebellion of the mind against its limits, which rather than coming to terms with them prefers the uncreate reality it wishes life to be. We want ice cream instead of broccoli, but since we rebel against the wishes of our parents, we force down the broccoli as we dream of the ice cream to come. For us, perfection is a land of ice cream only, though health and the reality of our body says otherwise.

This perfection is something that ultimately we cannot know, but we participate in it always. That is, we have to eat the broccoli, we have no choice. We may not understand how it fits into the cycle of health, or why eating it first is necessary to enjoying the ice cream; but even though this understanding of perfection escapes us, we still eat it and play our part in life’s cycle of perfection. The question is: do we learn to appreciate it despite our preferences and undeveloped tastes, or do we always rebel and imagine our own “perfection” to be more true?

You were like the wind in my life:  
sometimes bitter cold,  
sometimes you embraced me.

When you blew hard  
it ruined all the fragile things;  
and when you blew gently  
it was enough to move me.

On warm days you were a south wind  
bringing hope and renewal;  
but in the winter season  
I could sense the end was near.

You were never anything I could grasp  
even though I felt you:  
When I reached out, there you were;  
as I closed my arms, there was nothing.

You dried my tears and burned my lips.  
You made the heat bearable  
and the cold even worse.

You were like a dance --  
a sweeping cloud of leaves --  
but the steps were just beyond me.

Friend of hawks! stirrer of deep waves,  
beginner of storms  
and end to my peace and calm...

My wind-vane points the way  
but I can't catch up.  
You were always on the move:  
heading towards me, running away.

I hear news of you.  They tell stories.  
But however far you go  
to my thoughts you keep returning.

“Manifest being” is a thought which works for me as a kind of union between mysticism – the quest for ecstatic union with the hidden essence of the Divine – and phenomenology, a philosophy that reduces human experience to our awareness of the phenomena of being.

I believe God has two aspects: a part that is perfectly hidden and a part that is universally manifest. Neither is God alone. His essence depends upon His manifestation to be known as “God”, while His manifestation depends upon His essence to exist at all. Both of these taken together constitute a basis for referral and relationship, but either taken apart would have no meaning for us.

Consider a phone call from a dear friend. The moment she calls it lifts my heart and I feel flooded with happiness. I may have been waiting all day for that call. When it comes, it transforms me from a being bereft to one who is full. However, what is happening? My phone is just a composition of plastic and metal, and the voice I hear is a modulation of air pressure using magnets and a vibrating cone. That electronic voice relates to hers in a way, but she herself is nowhere to be found in the physical ingredients of the conversation.

And yet if someone asks me, “Is that so-and-so you’re talking to?”, I would answer, “Yes, it’s she”, and the answer would be perfectly reasonable. She’s not there, and yet she is there. The phone has become a medium to express contact with someone who is actually far removed from me.

Likewise my own voice, face, and behavior express to my friends a soul that even I cannot point to. Though I’ve been many people since birth – infant, child, teenager, adult – my family and I both feel them to be instances of one person. A “Johnness” hides behind all of these many forms, yet the forms are the only way to know Johnness. The visible is a means of communion with the invisible.

Further, the invisible cannot be reached directly. Without a phone, I can’t converse with a friend who is hundreds of miles away; without my outward form, I would be no more accessible to others than those spirits who have passed beyond the pale. The medium and the message are so inextricably linked that although the mind can separate them, the heart does not. My friends who look at my body genuinely think they are seeing me. In fact, my body is as much of me as they’ve ever known, so its shape stands for “me” in their thoughts and memories. When they pray for me they might mention my name, or recall my face, but neither of these is related to me except as a form of expression. And in the end if I stand in the form of my body and ask, “Am I not me?”, they would all affirm it. The medium is, in the sense of its relationship rather than its being, coequal with the message.

The same holds true with the phone. We believe we are talking with a person on the other end when in fact we’re talking to a phone. The identification of caller and phone happens subconsciously, to the point that we transcend the physicality of the medium and imagine ourselves communing as if directly with the person on the other end. The phone in this case is a manifest being, a collection of phenomena, yet this does not inhibit transcendence toward what the phenomena represent. It is so natural an action that we needn’t think of it for it to happen.

These examples imply a deeper question: What about phenomenal reality itself? Is it the medium for an ultimate Message? Is it, with all of its changes and plurality, the manifest being of a hidden essence so great, it requires such plenitude just to give us a taste of its manifold possibilities? If this is so, then life itself, and living it, is like being in a constant conference call with the Divine – except that our own being is both receiver and speaker. And it is because the connection is so intimate and universal that we often miss entirely that any message is being conveyed at all.

Many of the people whom I speak with about “God” refer exclusively to His hidden being, or the aspect of Divinity forever removed from human experience. Though as I speak with the them my own soul is removed from direct experience! They sit and talk with me, having a relationship with this hidden being of my soul, at the same time as they imagine God utterly beyond contact. Perhaps they are conversing with Him even then, as they are with me, but the subtlety of the connection clouds the matter. They hold the “phone” while telling me that the Caller is infinitely far away, yet fail to put the receiver to their face and realize that His voice is as close as their own ear.

“Manifest being” means that everything I see is God, without its being God per se. A photograph of a friend is that friend, without its being them per se. The concept of “is”, while perfectly true in the dynamic sense of providing relationship, is false in the static sense of identicality of being.

If everything is God, then everything is a message, a token; but even more than that: just as my heart collapses medium and message into one experience with regard to a phone or a person’s character, so this same collapse, or unification, should be possible in how I experience the world. The tendency to separate Messenger from Message with respect to God – and then to focus only on His hidden aspect, believing Him forever distant from the experiences of everyday life – seems an artefact of social upbringing.

The idea that nearness and communion are immediately accessible at all times is so confounded in the mystical literature, no wonder we doubt such a basic fact of our perfective reality. It is this doubt which has created the feeling of perpetual distance, because we have been looking at the answer all along, right before our eyes, but we keep hearing the refrain, “No, that’s not it, keep looking.” And if we keep looking for what we already have, not believing we have it, there will never be an end to that search.

In the original Hebrew the meaning of sin was “to miss the mark”: to not fulfill what was meant to be, to lose an opportunity. Yet I hear sin used more often in relation to the attractive things of the world, such as calling chocolate “sinful”. The same is said for places where beautiful people wear little clothing, or if the environment is too pleasant, etc.

I can understand why moralists would frown on things if their morals are against it. There are food moralists, for example, who are against chocolate and the refined sugar it contains. But why call it sinful? Even if it tempts people away from a rigid obedience, how does this cause a person to “miss the mark”?

Maybe in these cases the mark is the standard itself, making “sinful” whatever causes a person to fall short of that standard. However, this makes sense only if the standard is the goal. If the standard is only a means to an end, “missing the mark” is missing the end which that morality is helping us to reach. For a food moralist whose objective is health, a sin is not what violates their regimen, but what detracts from health: if they have an opportunity to achieve enduring health, but do things that go against the goal, they will have “missed the mark”. Thus if one chooses a morality appropriate to a certain goal, “sin” is whatever harms that goal – most likely from violating the morality intended to achieve it.

Consider the goal of happiness – assuming there exists a morality to take us there. A sin would then be whatever makes us unhappy. How different from the idea that the things we enjoy should make us feel ashamed because they are “sinful”! Either it is sinful because it makes us unhappy (and not the other way around) or it makes us happy and we call it sinful because we have another goal in mind – such as contrasting present good with future good.

The moment of discernment should be the instant of sadness, or when the goal is lost. As despair begins, I think, “I’ve sinned somehow”, because I’ve missed the mark I was aiming for. When I feel elated, the opposite thought comes to mind. Or if something makes me feel good that later provokes more pain than its joy, intellectually I remove time and recognize that what’d appeared helpful to my goal was actually harming it.

To move this to the religious degree, I assume from Scripture that everything I see around me, including my own soul, has been created to a purpose. To sin in this context is to fail to reach that purpose. Since man is the only element I’m aware of that has free agency, only man can make a choice which could be called sinful – since all other parts of reality have been determined to play their part.

If a man can sin by failing to reach his appointed level in this scheme, it begs the question: why should we care? Teleology is well and good, but does it indicate anything we can actually benefit from? Here I would say that fulfillment and happiness are both of a kind, being justified in their condition by the condition itself. To miss the mark is to miss out on something that could have been achieved, the loss of which is felt only once we become conscious of what was lost.

The misuse of our being’s capacity, then, is the religious meaning of sin. We were created to a certain end, but we can “miss” that end through negligence. A man sins who does not make the best use of himself and the time he’s been given – not simply the one who avoids the conditions leading to sin. Sinfulness is a failure to engage ourselves fully in the process of creation.

What that process is, and how we fit into it, is so individual I don’t think anyone can knowingly say if another is sinning or not. The knowledge of our purpose is so far beyond words that this, I believe, is where morality establishes itself: as a guideline to use in place of knowledge. To the degree that we can trust the guideline to assist our reality, we can say that failing the guideline is a sin. Here we have the contemporary usage of the term: to describe things that might cause us to fail in faithfulness to our goal. But the nomenclature of sin these days has become very indirect, and has taken on the sense of an adjective when properly it should be only a verb.