When I visit my parents each summer, my sister and I take a daily morning bike ride. We have a twenty mile loop that includes beach side, meadows, and woods, with some edges of towns at the corners. When it has rained the night before, there are puddles on the road and the trail - sometimes covering the whole road surface. My sister generally plows right through them, lifting her feet high off the peddles. I tend to go around them if I can, and if I can’t, I go through gingerly, hoping to avoid the wet, sandy track of splashed water up my back.
My sister rides all year round. Once, she told me, she had ridden right after a heavy rain, and pretty much the whole trail was a big puddle. The sky had cleared, and the puddles were vividly reflective. She said she had almost a feeling of vertigo, seeing the reflection of the trees and sky deep below her. She said, maybe we’ll get a ride like that while you’re here.
A few days later, we had a ride that had some puddles. I approached them in my usual way. Another feature of our rides is conversation - we call ourselves the biking philosophers, solving the world’s problems each morning at six, except on Fridays, when we take out the trash first. So the conversation was going along on that day - I was trying to explain some metaphysical point to her, and getting the feeling that I shouldn’t have tried. My words were just creating a sense of separation, and I didn’t feel I had any way of expressing it that could pull it together. Then we came to a puddle.
It was a bright puddle, full of sunshine and yellow-green from sun-drenched trees, with blue and white from the sky. It was on Jennifer’s side of the trail, and she rode right through it with great delight. She exclaimed at how the vivid picture was splashed into an abstraction of colors as her tires plowed through.
I was ready to just let that be the end of my efforts to explain my point. But Jennifer urged me to continue, so I said,
When you just rode through that puddle, it was this marvelous connection with another world - with the depth of the sky beneath you and the play of the colors. And when you went through it you felt a thrill, because of the sensation and your connection to it. That was an experience of being alive. Now I went through a puddle a little while back, and I didn’t see the reflection at all, because I was thinking of the sand that would go up my back, and trying not to get my feet too wet. Whereas, for you, the puddle was a great experience. But you couldn’t really prescribe your experience in terms of riding through mud puddles - “for your well-being, ride through at least five mud puddles a day.” It somehow wouldn’t get a handle on what you were trying to recommend. But you did have an alive experience riding through the mud puddle. It just can’t be prescribed in material terms. That’s what I mean by saying life is entirely spiritual. You can’t get a handle on what’s important, substantial, valuable, by pursuing material experience. Because it can’t capture the quality that makes you love it.
That made sense to Jennifer. The actual presence of the alive moment worked in a way that none of my philosophical words could do. The splash of Spirit came and united us in understanding - bright yellows and greens and blues exploded into clarity - the abstract colors forming a concrete connection.
Friday, November 28, 2008
My neighbor as myself
I had a dream early Monday morning in which I felt deep emotions - strong love for the characters in the dream, a sense of the importance of the things in their lives going in the right way for them.
On the bus Monday, a woman didn’t want to move her backpack off the chair next to her to give me a seat. She asked me to ask another person, who was also taking up two seats, to move. While I was hesitating, the young woman across the aisle offered me her seat. I hesitated there, too, unwilling to have her stand in my stead, but she indicated a vacant seat farther back which I hadn’t seen, and moved to it.
Sitting in the seat she left, I felt a little discomfited by the exchange - happy enough to have a seat but uncomfortable that someone else had moved for me; wondering if the young man in the seat next to me was her partner and I was causing them to be separated, wondering about the woman with the backpack. I had noticed the helmet on her pack when I still thought she was going to move it, as I expected, for me to sit down, so I surmised she had her bike on the bus. I then noticed that there was also a fold-up bike inside the bus, taking the space of three seats that fold up for a wheel chair to be accommodated. I wondered if it was hers (it turned out to be). I had been more comfortable asking her to move her backpack than asking the other person - a rather flamboyant person of dubious sex who was deeply involved with something with a large antenna - to stop lounging diagonally over two seats.
Then I had a thought: what if all the people I see on the bus are characters in my own dream? Because the emotions from my morning dream were still lingering, this was not a dismissive thought. It had two accompanying parts - one, an opening of my ability to feel love for them; and two, a sense that they were all part of me, all with messages to teach me, all opportunities, tests, as it were, of my ability to love. I considered that perhaps the woman with the backpack was feeling strong in a newfound ability to stand up for herself, to take enough space for herself. I didn’t really think specifically about anyone else on the bus, but as I got off the bus, I found myself thinking of her as someone who had just taught me a great lesson.
I’ve been trying this out, when I think of it, in the days since. My husband will say something to me, and I’ll think, here is a character in my dream. He is mine to love. He is here as an opportunity for me to test my love. And then I’ll respond. My responses then tend to be kinder, because I’m not thinking he should be a certain way. And there’s no place, in thinking of other people, for things like envy, because everything I see is part of my world, and no one else’s.
I’m not saying that I’m the only one that exists. I’m just saying that I’m the only one that exists in my dream. Every other individual is also a perfect reflection of God. But I don’t have the ability to see them that way from within my dream. How I see them in my dream is up to me. And the more I consider my interactions with them as opportunities to love, the more closely, in my dream, I’ll see them as they really are.
Jesus said, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” I’ve been considering, in the last few years, that this can imply that my neighbor is myself. This odd fiction of thinking of everyone I see as a character in my dream, a part of me, can be a working exercise of loving my neighbor as myself. I didn’t think this up and then work on having it happen. It started to happen, and so I started to think about it.
On the bus Monday, a woman didn’t want to move her backpack off the chair next to her to give me a seat. She asked me to ask another person, who was also taking up two seats, to move. While I was hesitating, the young woman across the aisle offered me her seat. I hesitated there, too, unwilling to have her stand in my stead, but she indicated a vacant seat farther back which I hadn’t seen, and moved to it.
Sitting in the seat she left, I felt a little discomfited by the exchange - happy enough to have a seat but uncomfortable that someone else had moved for me; wondering if the young man in the seat next to me was her partner and I was causing them to be separated, wondering about the woman with the backpack. I had noticed the helmet on her pack when I still thought she was going to move it, as I expected, for me to sit down, so I surmised she had her bike on the bus. I then noticed that there was also a fold-up bike inside the bus, taking the space of three seats that fold up for a wheel chair to be accommodated. I wondered if it was hers (it turned out to be). I had been more comfortable asking her to move her backpack than asking the other person - a rather flamboyant person of dubious sex who was deeply involved with something with a large antenna - to stop lounging diagonally over two seats.
Then I had a thought: what if all the people I see on the bus are characters in my own dream? Because the emotions from my morning dream were still lingering, this was not a dismissive thought. It had two accompanying parts - one, an opening of my ability to feel love for them; and two, a sense that they were all part of me, all with messages to teach me, all opportunities, tests, as it were, of my ability to love. I considered that perhaps the woman with the backpack was feeling strong in a newfound ability to stand up for herself, to take enough space for herself. I didn’t really think specifically about anyone else on the bus, but as I got off the bus, I found myself thinking of her as someone who had just taught me a great lesson.
I’ve been trying this out, when I think of it, in the days since. My husband will say something to me, and I’ll think, here is a character in my dream. He is mine to love. He is here as an opportunity for me to test my love. And then I’ll respond. My responses then tend to be kinder, because I’m not thinking he should be a certain way. And there’s no place, in thinking of other people, for things like envy, because everything I see is part of my world, and no one else’s.
I’m not saying that I’m the only one that exists. I’m just saying that I’m the only one that exists in my dream. Every other individual is also a perfect reflection of God. But I don’t have the ability to see them that way from within my dream. How I see them in my dream is up to me. And the more I consider my interactions with them as opportunities to love, the more closely, in my dream, I’ll see them as they really are.
Jesus said, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” I’ve been considering, in the last few years, that this can imply that my neighbor is myself. This odd fiction of thinking of everyone I see as a character in my dream, a part of me, can be a working exercise of loving my neighbor as myself. I didn’t think this up and then work on having it happen. It started to happen, and so I started to think about it.
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Correcting Thought
Some years back when my kids were small, I took great comfort in a group of friends whose kids were around the same ages. We would hang out in each other’s kitchens and family rooms, talking while our children played, picking up conversation threads dropped in the frequent interruptions. At one point one of them commented on a gesture I had - a kind of a short movement of my head from center a little to the right, mouth closed. She said it signified I wasn’t buying into something that had been said. I hadn’t been aware of the gesture, but my other friends recognized it, and also agreed about what they felt it meant.
As I thought about it, I wasn’t surprised to find I had such a gesture. After all, what was I going to say when discussion turned to things medical, or theories about behavior that I didn’t think were true? I had my own sense of what was true, and I had to hold to it. After all, a Christian Scientist is supposed to correct thought, right?
Lately I’ve come to think about this differently. A fundamental question is, how is thought corrected? If thought is theory, all that would be needed would be the construction of a system of explanation and support that is believable - that is, internally consistent. Correcting a theory would just be pointing out false premises or conclusions - examining evidence, considering possible interpretations, looking at things in new ways. This is the kind of thing I have long loved to do - I still find it interesting, exciting. But thought is more than theory. If thought comprises the total of our substance, then it includes everything that we are - what we call body, what we call spirit, what we call heart and soul. We’re told in Christian Science that correcting thought brings healing. But I’ve never found holding to a theory, however beautiful, to do anything to heal my body, or my heart.
So correcting thought must be something much deeper than developing a theoretical construct, a way to think about something that has a consistent story, putting my chosen protagonists in the right place. Any story, any way to choose to think about a set of people or circumstances, is just a story. It can do no more for me, in terms of healing, than (as Mrs. Eddy says) moonbeams can melt a river of ice. To correct thought in a way that would bring healing requires going beneath the story. Mrs. Eddy says, “Divine Love corrects and governs man.”
So the only way I can correct my own thought is by opening myself to divine Love - allowing my self to be lifted by the flood tides (as Mrs. Eddy says, “The way to extract error from mortal mind is to pour in Truth through flood tides of Love"). In a rising flood tide of Love, there is too much power for me to cling to the little rocks of my theories of right and wrong - too much moving force of goodness for me to account for how everyone’s behavior should be arranged. My egocentric sense of order is washed out, turned and tumbled, and made impossible to reference. I am compelled to allow myself to be floated up and held in the new order of Love.
As for correcting other people’s thoughts, there’s no correctness in telling people how I think they’re wrong and what I think they should do to think or do better. Thinking such thoughts at them without saying anything is even more ludicrous. The only way that I might correct thought is if there is some way I can reach to the underlying knot of fear and doubt about their worth, and somehow loosen it.
If I can correct a thought in myself or someone else, it won’t be to change a theoretical construct or a story. It won’t be to say that a certain thing is wrong and some other thing would be right. I will be successful if I have enough love to dissolve the thought that says we’re in this state of separation from the divine Mind, that makes us feel cut off, lonely, in need of improving ourselves. The only thing that can correct that thought is something deeper than the internal judge that tells me what’s wrong with myself or others. That deeper thing is the truth about our perfect being, the truth about how much we are loved.
As I thought about it, I wasn’t surprised to find I had such a gesture. After all, what was I going to say when discussion turned to things medical, or theories about behavior that I didn’t think were true? I had my own sense of what was true, and I had to hold to it. After all, a Christian Scientist is supposed to correct thought, right?
Lately I’ve come to think about this differently. A fundamental question is, how is thought corrected? If thought is theory, all that would be needed would be the construction of a system of explanation and support that is believable - that is, internally consistent. Correcting a theory would just be pointing out false premises or conclusions - examining evidence, considering possible interpretations, looking at things in new ways. This is the kind of thing I have long loved to do - I still find it interesting, exciting. But thought is more than theory. If thought comprises the total of our substance, then it includes everything that we are - what we call body, what we call spirit, what we call heart and soul. We’re told in Christian Science that correcting thought brings healing. But I’ve never found holding to a theory, however beautiful, to do anything to heal my body, or my heart.
So correcting thought must be something much deeper than developing a theoretical construct, a way to think about something that has a consistent story, putting my chosen protagonists in the right place. Any story, any way to choose to think about a set of people or circumstances, is just a story. It can do no more for me, in terms of healing, than (as Mrs. Eddy says) moonbeams can melt a river of ice. To correct thought in a way that would bring healing requires going beneath the story. Mrs. Eddy says, “Divine Love corrects and governs man.”
So the only way I can correct my own thought is by opening myself to divine Love - allowing my self to be lifted by the flood tides (as Mrs. Eddy says, “The way to extract error from mortal mind is to pour in Truth through flood tides of Love"). In a rising flood tide of Love, there is too much power for me to cling to the little rocks of my theories of right and wrong - too much moving force of goodness for me to account for how everyone’s behavior should be arranged. My egocentric sense of order is washed out, turned and tumbled, and made impossible to reference. I am compelled to allow myself to be floated up and held in the new order of Love.
As for correcting other people’s thoughts, there’s no correctness in telling people how I think they’re wrong and what I think they should do to think or do better. Thinking such thoughts at them without saying anything is even more ludicrous. The only way that I might correct thought is if there is some way I can reach to the underlying knot of fear and doubt about their worth, and somehow loosen it.
If I can correct a thought in myself or someone else, it won’t be to change a theoretical construct or a story. It won’t be to say that a certain thing is wrong and some other thing would be right. I will be successful if I have enough love to dissolve the thought that says we’re in this state of separation from the divine Mind, that makes us feel cut off, lonely, in need of improving ourselves. The only thing that can correct that thought is something deeper than the internal judge that tells me what’s wrong with myself or others. That deeper thing is the truth about our perfect being, the truth about how much we are loved.
Saturday, November 15, 2008
The hand of Love
In the middle of the night
the mother comes and strokes the child’s hair
running her fingers through
gently smoothing the strands
In the middle of the night
the currents of dreams softly realign thought
disentangling the questions
deftly smoothing the strands
Soft as water
strong as currents
lifting the mermaid hair up from the rocks
smoothing it and holding it in disentangled ripples
The hand of Love lifts all tangled things
smoothes them
sets them right and holds them in shimmering order.
I’ve had this image for a while of the hand of Love - how it solves all conflicts without having to engage in them, how it sidesteps the question of who or what is wrong, and lets each of us know that what we always wanted to believe, is true. We are loved, we are held in our perfect purpose, none of the things we feared can hurt us. We were not wrong, but we were not right either - not in the way that puts us on one side or another of a conflict. There is nothing we need to prove. Love is unfolding our being, and holds us with the same certainty that the current holds the mermaid hair.
I’ve felt this hand of Love lifting and settling my thoughts, taking away my sense of conflict with others - any feeling of needing to confront a problem, to be wrong or right or to view others that way. I feel it lifting our country, our world, rendering irrelevant the perennial considerations of blame, giving us a new sense about how all needs can be met together, instead of some being chosen over others. When Love guides me, I know what to say in my family, so I don’t create tangles, but allow Love to smooth us all and hold us up together.
the mother comes and strokes the child’s hair
running her fingers through
gently smoothing the strands
In the middle of the night
the currents of dreams softly realign thought
disentangling the questions
deftly smoothing the strands
Soft as water
strong as currents
lifting the mermaid hair up from the rocks
smoothing it and holding it in disentangled ripples
The hand of Love lifts all tangled things
smoothes them
sets them right and holds them in shimmering order.
I’ve had this image for a while of the hand of Love - how it solves all conflicts without having to engage in them, how it sidesteps the question of who or what is wrong, and lets each of us know that what we always wanted to believe, is true. We are loved, we are held in our perfect purpose, none of the things we feared can hurt us. We were not wrong, but we were not right either - not in the way that puts us on one side or another of a conflict. There is nothing we need to prove. Love is unfolding our being, and holds us with the same certainty that the current holds the mermaid hair.
I’ve felt this hand of Love lifting and settling my thoughts, taking away my sense of conflict with others - any feeling of needing to confront a problem, to be wrong or right or to view others that way. I feel it lifting our country, our world, rendering irrelevant the perennial considerations of blame, giving us a new sense about how all needs can be met together, instead of some being chosen over others. When Love guides me, I know what to say in my family, so I don’t create tangles, but allow Love to smooth us all and hold us up together.
Saturday, November 8, 2008
Sea Change
I meant to look up what the phrase meant, before I packed up my computer. But I was out of time, so I came anyway, with this feeling of sea change washing over me, surprising me continually, like waves lapping at the shore of my thought.
So surprising to feel so different. So strange to consider that perhaps I can’t describe the difference in words that are any different from ones I’ve used before. Sea change to me means that the whole sand scape of my world has been wiped casually clean, as by a wave. It means the closing of the water over the surface quickly becomes smooth, as if there were never an exposed sandbar. The waves calmly say, I didn’t see anything - yet everything has changed.
Sea change - a new weather that comes in over the sea and brings a new atmosphere, a new set of smells, a new texture in the air.
I was reading articles in the Penn Alumni magazine - featuring people who went to my school, who are now doing impressive things -a man who has used his savvy to start up multi-million dollar enterprises, a woman who has carved out a career as a novelist and promoter of her books. I found myself delighting in the logic of their approaches, and when I was done, I noticed that something had shifted in my thought. When I was in college, I shunned business - the word, the people studying it. Though it was slightly under the surface of consciousness, I think the two components of my thought were belief that business is associated with selling out, with selling one’s soul and one’s friends; and fear that I could never understand it or be successful at it. Mostly the notion of business made me want to sleep.
Now I realized that my thought, over all these years, had closed out as undesirable a vast field in which people might interact with each other with intelligence and effectiveness, might bring ideas to fruition, might stretch their capabilities, express their identities, give to the world. It seemed unsurprising to me then, that I hadn’t gone forward with any of my ideas for accomplishing good in the world. Not that I hadn’t tried a few times, not that I hadn’t wondered why I didn’t seem to have what I needed to actually pull it off. I had had, buried beneath the surface, something that worked against myself with every effort I made.
Now it feels like that’s gone. It doesn’t mean, as my husband may wish it did, that I will forthwith go out and start a money-making business venture. But it seems it’s important for my business of being in the practice.
I started thinking about this in September - studied business plans and wrote one for myself - translating all of the concepts, as I understood them, to spiritual terms. I wrote a plan for increasing the market share Truth had in my thought and in my view of the world. I guess what has happened here is a palpable gain in market share for Truth. Suddenly I can see God’s hand in all the field of business, and have a basis for affirming that God can guide business to be universally beneficial, principled, sound. It feels like a better basis of prayer to see God guiding business than to imagine business as an evil thing that should go away. Also I felt my thought opening up towards all the people who have embraced the pursuit of business - and because that is such a lot of people, it feels like an opening towards people in general.
There is another part to this as well. It is that I don’t succeed in life by defining it - people, pursuits, ways of thinking, etc - as being comprised of some good and some bad, with my task being to choose out what’s good, at least for me. Instead, I succeed in life by knowing that all is good, that God is in control of everything, and that by standing up for this truth, I bring it into my experience.
I got home and looked up sea change. It turns out, I had the feeling of it right, though the reference, from Shakespeare, is to bones changing to corals over time, under the sea. But it still has that transformational feeling - everything is here but everything is different. I asked for this, and I am happy to see it come, time and again, as many times as needed, till I come home to myself.
So surprising to feel so different. So strange to consider that perhaps I can’t describe the difference in words that are any different from ones I’ve used before. Sea change to me means that the whole sand scape of my world has been wiped casually clean, as by a wave. It means the closing of the water over the surface quickly becomes smooth, as if there were never an exposed sandbar. The waves calmly say, I didn’t see anything - yet everything has changed.
Sea change - a new weather that comes in over the sea and brings a new atmosphere, a new set of smells, a new texture in the air.
I was reading articles in the Penn Alumni magazine - featuring people who went to my school, who are now doing impressive things -a man who has used his savvy to start up multi-million dollar enterprises, a woman who has carved out a career as a novelist and promoter of her books. I found myself delighting in the logic of their approaches, and when I was done, I noticed that something had shifted in my thought. When I was in college, I shunned business - the word, the people studying it. Though it was slightly under the surface of consciousness, I think the two components of my thought were belief that business is associated with selling out, with selling one’s soul and one’s friends; and fear that I could never understand it or be successful at it. Mostly the notion of business made me want to sleep.
Now I realized that my thought, over all these years, had closed out as undesirable a vast field in which people might interact with each other with intelligence and effectiveness, might bring ideas to fruition, might stretch their capabilities, express their identities, give to the world. It seemed unsurprising to me then, that I hadn’t gone forward with any of my ideas for accomplishing good in the world. Not that I hadn’t tried a few times, not that I hadn’t wondered why I didn’t seem to have what I needed to actually pull it off. I had had, buried beneath the surface, something that worked against myself with every effort I made.
Now it feels like that’s gone. It doesn’t mean, as my husband may wish it did, that I will forthwith go out and start a money-making business venture. But it seems it’s important for my business of being in the practice.
I started thinking about this in September - studied business plans and wrote one for myself - translating all of the concepts, as I understood them, to spiritual terms. I wrote a plan for increasing the market share Truth had in my thought and in my view of the world. I guess what has happened here is a palpable gain in market share for Truth. Suddenly I can see God’s hand in all the field of business, and have a basis for affirming that God can guide business to be universally beneficial, principled, sound. It feels like a better basis of prayer to see God guiding business than to imagine business as an evil thing that should go away. Also I felt my thought opening up towards all the people who have embraced the pursuit of business - and because that is such a lot of people, it feels like an opening towards people in general.
There is another part to this as well. It is that I don’t succeed in life by defining it - people, pursuits, ways of thinking, etc - as being comprised of some good and some bad, with my task being to choose out what’s good, at least for me. Instead, I succeed in life by knowing that all is good, that God is in control of everything, and that by standing up for this truth, I bring it into my experience.
I got home and looked up sea change. It turns out, I had the feeling of it right, though the reference, from Shakespeare, is to bones changing to corals over time, under the sea. But it still has that transformational feeling - everything is here but everything is different. I asked for this, and I am happy to see it come, time and again, as many times as needed, till I come home to myself.
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