Perhaps understanding is the wrong word.

That I can approach the physical world with logic... this only yields conclusions about how things appear to be, but how they are is a set of probabilities until I observe something... then the waves collapse into a singularity. Or diverge into alternate universes, of which I only experience one.

There is far more than the physical world... there is experience. There is (to name an idea that correlates to my experience) Oneness playing hide and seek. The Great Game. And to truly engage and to play that game, I cannot engage on the logical level, indeed, I have to leave all logic behind, have to be. The world is ours, if we would only let it be.

And the physical world is just one portion within the Great Game, it is the most readily accessible manifestation of the game. Then synchronicities. I learn to perceive more and more, until I see the universe in a grain of sand - no, the power of the universe, everything that's needed for a universe, in a grain of sand. In everything, in everyone, the same power, the same potential, the same isness, the same that.

But all that was written days ago. It's not real, none of it. But I did use logic to leave space for that which is not logic. (Neat little trick, eh?) Leave it to me to need to give myself permission to be.

I'm still pretty touch and go, over here. Time was easily measured in weeks, now days seem better, yet morning, afternoon, evening, might each have its own tenor, inexhaustible in length, slipping one into the next: when did I arrive here? When wasn't I here? Despair, joy, exhaustion, fear, peace, terror, silence. Yesterday seems like another lifetime.

Only now, this, I am.

Frustration and detachment

Monday night I tried to write a post expressing my frustration with everything - with the world, with myself, about my frustration with being frustrated... it just wasn't coming out right, and I felt like I was just complaining about stuff I shouldn't complain about... then again, I oughtn't be frustrated, either, and sometimes I am. A lot.

So I get frustrated, usually at myself (idealism and perfectionism go hand-in-hand some days) and then proceed to be upset because I'm frustrated! It's ridiculous, I don't need to do it, but I do it to myself anyway, and I know it.

Detachment. It's just a game. Wash, rinse, repeat as necessary. Don't forget to breathe.


Three related posts by others that happened (ha) to go up in the last day:
John on Being the watcher instead of the thinker ...detachment. I am me, not the stuff swimming through my mind.
Trev writes Missing the mark is right on target. Contrast: the whites are whiter, the brights are brighter, and the darks are darker...
Andrew's impassioned words/manifesto ("i am a christian") I'm sharing a lot of the frustrations that I read here... and it happens that my sister (the Catholic apologist) bashed Merton for me on Sunday.

Showers spawn thoughts.

Or apparently just the thought of a shower. If I have more to say later, I'll amend this.

I realized as I was headed toward the shower that my longstanding belief that absolutes exist is one I ought to be willing to let go, too.

There's more to say, I've added the material below from my thoughts at work today.

Without faith, God can't exist. (Or be said to exist because He seems to.) But similarly, nothing can exist. Furthermore, nothing does exist that can be verified; all science verifies is our experience, or rather, what our measuring instruments experience. And yet, here we are. I want to hide, but wherever I go, there I am.

Nothing exists, but a lot of things seem to; we can choose how we interpret the things that we seem to feel and think.

And, what if we're wrong? So what? There's no right answer because there's nothing!

Faith, both-and either/or, E-prime

This is the end of the road for logic, and now comes the choice that I don't want to make. Don't want to be wrong.

It seems that I've now argued myself into being an atheist.

Is nonduality just our best explanation for what we experience? What makes an experience real, and is there really any way of knowing if it is?

I could talk myself in circles all day, but the end result is this: either I choose to believe or I do not.

Stuck on Saturday.

I got a lot of laughs out of the latest podcast over at stupid church people, but the podcast also provided a catalyst to distill some questions that have been floating around my mind lately.

Namely, what if we're wrong? What if I'm all wrong?

I don't think I care, much, and there's nothing for it anyhow, if there's no certainty. If we do the Punnet square it's better to believe in a vengeful God; right or wrong the odds are stacked in our favor; if we believe in a loving God there's only half a chance. But I'm pretty sure that God doesn't exist.

Let me clarify. God does not exist how I thought.

How God does exist, I don't know anymore. Can't know, if the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is still in effect. Prayer as I've known it seems like a worthless exercise; yet, if we seem to connect with something, then what is real?

I spent an hour in my hammock last night, with many minutes spent in adoration of the tree. Its gnarled bark, fresh leaves arranged to drink in the sun, dead branches, is the tree dying? Does it know? Will my love, tender caress, close embrace, let it live? Or let it die?

And nondual reality. Yes, I suspect that's how things are, but my senses generally tell me otherwise. Yet the lazy flap of nylon, cool heavy smell of lake, call from a different world, beckon me to remember.

What use is anything if it can't be seen, felt, touched?

There's only one kind of living that I know - dancing lightly, holding loosely, drinking deeply, loving extravagantly. It's intensely present, grounded in reality (of the absolute sort) but experienced through the senses. Anything else is empty, hollow by comparison.

And what if we not only create our perceived reality but actual reality? Another question for quantum physics, but no less pertinent in real life. Quantum physics deals not with what is, but with what we experience, what we can observe.

If that's all we can really get at, if the rest is just a cloud of unknowing and probabilities, then why bother? All we can understand is the middle scale; it degrades into randomness at one end and chaos at the other. How is it tied together? Where is God in all this?

"Up there, somewhere, shouting down at us that he loves us, wondering if we hear him."

What is God, in all this? At the subatomic level it's altogether possible that nothing exists until we try to observe it, and that the very act of observation brings it into existence.

silence

take, take 'til there's nothing, nothing to turn to, nothing when you get through.
won't you break, scatter pieces of all I've been, bowing to all i've been running to
i, i've got a question, i've got a question - where are you?
did you leave me unbreakable? did you leave me frozen?
i've never felt so cold.
i thought you were silent, i thought you left me for the wreckage and the waste on an empty beach of faith.
was it true?
i, i've got a question, i've got a question - where are you?
scream, deeper i wanna scream, i want you to hear me, i want you to find me.
i want to believe, but all i pray is wrong, and all i claim is gone
i, i've got a question - where are you?
-jars of clay

I'm stuck on Saturday. Christ is dead and the Resurrection is yet to come. Torn between the nightmare and the thing that seems to be reality. Alternating views, alternating visions. Wanting the truth, but just as badly wanting a sense of security, knowing that I already have both. Longing to know that I'm not alone, and knowing that I never was. And still yearning for the God that I can see and touch... even while that God reaches out and loves me through the arms of others and loves through my hands to others. God out there, and in here. Everywhere, nowhere. Lost, and found. Hidden and sheltered, but out in the open, if anybody looks. Blindingly lonely, but deeply not-alone. An abiding sense of peace, a frightening sense of uncontrol.

How can we hide in God when the world's not right and He's nowhere to be found? And yet Christ lives in us and shines through us. This is the Resurrection, friend, you and I, God made present, God that we can see and touch.

But I'm not seeing it.

How can I write something that is fair to the reality that I think I know and the one that I am seeing and feeling? This is so difficult. And so easy. I am the knower, and the observer.

We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.
-O'Shaughnessy

And yet, some days it seems like we are all writing the symphony together.

Invitation to a shift of perception.

Become the-one-who-breathes-you.

Or, realize that you already are.

That peace is with you.

And Heaven is now.

There is nothing to become, everything to be.