practice, experience, action

My deepest fear is that there is no God. My deepest fear is that life is all illusion and I will awake someday and find myself alone. A hallucination I experienced when I was a teenager: I awoke and found that I was a satellite spinning in space. I awoke to a reality that was infinite solitude and infinite emptiness. In the hallucination I awoke from the dream of my life and found that all relationship, all creativity, all beauty, had been but a dream. This is my deepest fear: that there is no meaning and that life is but a dream from which I will awake some day to emptiness.

My deepest desire is for connection with God and other. I have glimmers of it, slight moments when I experience the deep flow of energy and life between us all. I call those experiences mystic experiences, experiences of God and the divine as manifest on earth. I experience them as stepping into the warm places in the ocean: those momentary, ephemeral, waves of warmth and surrender. I find them in the forest, on the dance floor, on the beach, or even in Nordstrom’s line if I am looking. The problem is most of the time I am not looking. Most of the time I am too attached to my life and my problems, and to the petty desires of the moment, that I don’t notice the warm spots.

This is the purpose of my religious and spiritual practice: to become awake enough that I experience the warm spots and then act on them. From our awareness of divine connection we are able to pull each other up when we drift into fear and despair. From these experiences of divine connection we move to social action for the greater good. It is a circle for me: practice, experience, action, practice, experience, action. When a cog falls out of the circle I become depleted. Energy flows out and I lose touch. I can fall back into fear and deep despair. I begin to imagine that my hallucination was real. Grace brings me back to the circle and balance. Grace, friends, and memory bring me back to practice, experience, and action.