This Depends Completely

The trick is to keep this always before us. Always present to our minds. This depends completely upon our paying attention. Depends upon the recreation of the view we had on our mountain. On the reliving, if you will, of that sudden insight. That sudden apprehension. That sudden freight train of the cosmos annihilating us there.

Everything depends upon this. Upon our paying attention. Upon our reminding ourselves. Almost as if we need to give ourselves this new mind. This new way of seeing things. Of experiencing things.

We keep trying to see the cosmos in the old way. I don’t know why. Don’t ask me why, because I have no idea. Habit maybe. The comfort of habit. Hey it’s not always all that comfortable to feel unimportant. To feel overwhelmed by a tsunami sea. It’s not all that much fun for one’s little self-involved life to be drowned and submerged in the general flood of his presence. In the overwhelming sense of his dominion. His power. His actuality.

But I don’t know. There’s this everydayness that keeps creeping in. Keeps creeping like a dog after its vomit. This sameness. This every day is like every other day. This sense that we are all just moving through this like a bunch of zombies underwater. Everything is slow and vague. Everything is very quiet. Or if it’s loud, still it’s far away. It may hurt the ears, but it does so from a long way off. Even if it’s someone shouting and his mouth a few inches from your face and his spittle wetting your face. Or if you are in a car accident, it seems like it’s happening to someone else. Someone you knew a long time ago but now. Well. Now. You are only distantly acquainted. Your knowledge of this other person is only very sketchy now. As if you haven’t kept up. Haven’t really had a conversation that entailed more than thirty words in decades.

What is this, I’m wondering. What is this tendency to forget. To forget one of the most extraordinary moments of your life. To forget the meaning that was in that moment. The understanding. The direct experience of God. The excitement of this. The exhilaration of this. As if he had reached out of the cosmos. Reached his hand straight out of the nth dimension and pulled you into the nth dimension through the invisible doorway. Through a doorway he keeps up there. Up on the tops of mountains but also elsewhere. Also in any number of places. In one’s bedroom, for example. In one’s bed.

But I undress. I mean. I digress. What I mean is that these moments kind of dry up, in a way. Kind of dry up like a river in a dry season in a dry land. Dry up and leave only a vague impression that a river was once here. That a river once flowed through here. That leave some evidence that a river once passed this way, but no residue. No moisture whatsoever.

And so recollecting the experience is like trying to invoke a river by remembering it. By longing for it. By opening one’s heart far enough that it aches for the river that is no longer here. That has disappeared into the dust. Into the dust of our everyday lives.

And so these experiences. These ecstatic experiences. Depend on something in us, is what I’m getting. Depend upon some door opening in us and staying open. Opening at least long enough for God to wheel the nth dimension doorway from wherever it is right now over to our vicinity. Over to our neck of the woods.

And what may happen is that we step out of the doorway that habitually separates us off from the possibility of the world, the possibility of the cosmos. We open the door that we have closed in ourselves that keeps us from the danger of our actual lives. From the lives we were meant to live. And we step through that doorway that is in us and enter into naked space. Into the place of naked possibility. Into the place where anything may happen. Who knows what may happen here, where we are no longer protected. We have no idea and are therefore not very anxious to do this. Quite reluctant to do this. We do this so infrequently, we can forget how. We do forget how. But occasionally we do it. We find ourselves opening the door because there is this ache for something out there, but we aren’t exactly clear what it is. We’ve forgotten what it is. It’s risky to step out into pure blue space. We don’t have any idea what will happen. Will we fall. Will we rise. Will a rocket powered freight train run us down. We have no idea, but we do it anyway, from time to time. Looking. Searching. Adventuring out of our sleepy lives. Our predictable lives. Our lives full of cotton wadding and slow motion. And sometimes when we do this we find another doorway. God’s doorway into his nth dimension. The place where he lives.

And then he steps out of his house. He finds us here dangling in space. Dangling in air, outside the deep upholstery of our lives. The deep pile carpeting of our lives. The dark paneled nothing of our lives. And he grabs us. Just absconds with us. And that is maybe what we mean. What we may think we mean when we say that we. That God. That something extraordinary has happened involving God.