Maybe I’m Unconscious

Carl Jung theorized a Universal Unconscious, a sort of master computer where human beings are local terminals off that one main unit. Humans do not have separate personal minds but rather share a single Unconscious, and so behaviors are shaped according to universal patterns, with individual histories containing data unique to our own experience. Looking to the source of that Universal Unconscious, Jung found patterns of behavior across every culture and every time period of human history where people behaved according to the same universal principles. So looking beyond our own personal computer terminal we discover ever more universal and impersonal patterns of behavior.

The Universal Unconscious sort of conjures up images of the Borg in Star Trek. What does Jung’s theory suggest, if anything, about free will? Are we pre-programmed to behave in defined ways to any given situation or set of circumstances that we encounter? Or is the Universal Unconscious more of a two-way flow of information that we are all adding to and drawing from over the course of time? Perhaps all of the individual computer terminals make up the main computer and data flow is exchanged between the individual units and the main one, and back again. So unlike the Borg, there is room for individual expression as each unit has value to add back to the main terminal, which appreciates that value and distributes it back to the individual terminals.

The question then becomes what are we each adding back to the main terminal? Maybe we ought to ask ourselves if what we are sending is spyware and spam in the form of selfishness and negativity. And if we are doing this, what is the main terminal going to return back to both ourselves and to others? Are we infecting the system with our viral thinking or are we adding value to it? Perhaps it would be a good idea to install a spam blocker, spyware remover, and antivirus program to each of our terminals to block the negative thinking, the self doubts, the judgments, the intolerance, the violence and hatred toward others from infecting the main terminal and returning the appreciation of negativity back to all of humanity.

Too blind to see

My angel was right in front of me, and I was too blind to see her.

Somewhere around November 1994 I came down with a case of severe food poisoning that was not getting better on its own, and finally sent me seeking the care of a physician. After more extensive testing than was really necessary it was discovered I had contracted a strain of salmonella. I was prescribed two different antibiotics to clear up the infection and recovered quickly and uneventfully. I thought it was just a dim memory like all the other times you get sick in your life. Two weeks later, however, I was out having lunch and that familiar feeling in my stomach came over me again. I tried to convince myself this was just a “normal” attack of my GI system because I have had digestive problems my entire adult life. But it quickly became obvious this was not to be the case. Another trip back to the doctor and another round of tests showed I was now suffering from an infection caused by the antibiotics given to me for the salmonella. I was suffering the effects of Clostridium difficile, and it was causing a form of severe colitis which would take more than a year for me to recover from. “Recover” strikes me as an odd word to use there. I would “recover” back to the dysfunction I already have all the time.

The pain caused by this form of colitis is indescribable. It isn’t as if I had been a stranger to pain because by this time I was well rehearsed by a whole list of other problems, but after the first few months of severe bloody diarrhea, rectal tears, extreme fatigue and weight loss down to about 89 pounds, I had reached my limit. It sounds sort of cliche in a way, but I started to pray for death, and wondered why I was being denied my prayer day after day. I had already bailed out of medical school, had huge student loans to start paying back, and was now in the ravages of an infection that not only was excruciatingly painful, but in so many ways stripped me of any shred of dignity I had left (which wasn’t all that much given all the medical procedures I had already been through by this point). I had to become completely dependent on my parents, literally an infant again, for everything. And I mean everything. In my eyes, my life had no value so why wouldn’t God just let me die.

One night, in a very dramatic display, I crawled out of my bed and on to the floor, buried my face in the carpet, stretched my arms out like Jesus on the cross, and prayed. I didn’t pray for death. I didn’t even pray for healing. I prayed only that God would show me some sign, any sign, that He was with me. Please just show me I am not alone and abandoned. I expected God to appear to me in my room that night. My concept of God was so incredibly immature, still being immersed in Christian dogma I was completely blind.

What I felt on that floor that night was absolutely nothing. I felt no presence, didn’t see God, had no visions. I was alone, abandoned, left to wallow and suffer in my own self pity. God didn’t love me. Why should He? I was worthless and hopeless and disgusting. I crawled back into bed and sunk further into my depression.

There were people praying for me, holding me up to Jesus, wishing me well from a very safe distance. I appreciated all of that, and am still grateful for their prayers. There were those praying for me in their churches, even one or two who came to my house to read me scriptures, a particular favorite being the Book of Job. The thought that God might be making deals with Satan to allow him to torture me didn’t do much to bolster my mood quite honestly.

Meanwhile, through all of this, I was completely blind to what was right in front of my face every single day. My angel was with me every single day and I didn’t even see it, couldn’t see it, because I had MY expectations of God and how He answers prayers. It had to be my way.

I didn’t see the angel who would come in every morning and open the blinds in my room to let the sun in. I didn’t see the angel who brought me little cups of oatmeal, applesauce, Ensure, and tea, coaxing me to try to eat just a little bit today. I didn’t see the angel who so gently and softly brushed my hair every day, being careful not to pull too hard at the tangles. I didn’t see the angel who sat in a chair next to my bed and read to me. I didn’t see the angel who would buy flowers for my bedroom or light a candle on my nightstand. I didn’t see the angel who was carrying me to the bathroom when I was too weak to make it there myself, and sat on the edge of the bathtub to hold my hand while my guts were bleeding out into the toilet every day. I didn’t see the angel who was taking samples of what was coming out of my body to the laboratory to see if we were making any progress on beating the infection. I didn’t see the angel who changed my clothes every day and made sure I had clean underwear on at all times. I didn’t see the angel who would come with a warm washcloth and washed down my sick body with tenderness and care. I didn’t see the angel who was changing my bed linens and fluffing my pillows to make me more comfortable. I didn’t see the angel who would sit with me for endless hours of boring television or silence or even sleep. I didn’t see the angel who would listen with patience and unceasing compassion to my self pity and tears. I didn’t see the angel who in her own way was praying for me, and who was loving me through without conditions. I didn’t see the angel who was taking me to my doctor’s appointments, medical tests, and obtaining my prescriptions for me, making sure I was taking everything I was supposed to when I was supposed to. I didn’t see the angel who was tough on me when I was sinking too far into the abyss of self pity and pulled me out in loving correction.

I didn’t see her because I was selfish and took her for granted. I didn’t see her because while I was wallowing in my own self pity she just kept giving, kept caring, kept doing everything for me. I was so blind not to see the angel right in front of me. God had already answered my prayers. I was just too stupid to recognize that my angel was right in front of me. My angel came to me. My angel. My mom.

It’s the experience stupid

Without the experience, they are just words on a page. So whatever book is in my hands, I read the words but it is still the same. It doesn’t matter what book it is,. It is the experience that is key. Maybe there really is nothing to seek or chase because I’ve never lost anything to begin with. Anything I didn’t have in the first place cannot be lost. My distortion has been in my expectation of the experience, just like the little girl I was who had an expectation of that communion wafer because it was supposed to literally be the body of Christ. In one day you can experience more than a lifetime of reading words on a page.

All you need is love. Not words on a page or a sentimental song, but the experience. Love is not a word on a page. It is an experience of the heart. My own seeking for some universal truth out there is what has gotten in my way, because all I really needed to do was pay attention to what was already there in my heart all along. My mental chatter gets loud and drowns out my heart entirely too easily. Self doubt and judgment are never far behind. In these fleeting moments of realization, I not only know that I know nothing, I don’t care that I know nothing, because it is the experience of love that tells me I don’t need empty words on a page, no matter how poetic or eloquent they may be.

Let’s see how long it lasts…

The Eucharist

With my squeaky clean absolved soul it was time to move on to the rituals surrounding the receipt of the Body of Christ for the very first time through the sacrament of the Eucharist. Up until this time I felt left out of the ritual of communion during Mass. Feeling left out of what was considered the miracle of the Mass, the transformation of bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, felt like missing out on the birthday cake at a birthday party. I would watch in awe as the priest broke the huge communion wafer up into pieces and drank from the special chalice as he performed the mysterious rituals at the altar. As a little girl I believed the communion wafers given to each of the individuals in the church came from that one huge wafer he used at the front of the altar during the elegant rituals.

I was so excited that I was finally going to become part of the adult crowd and get to partake in the communion ceremony. We were very well practiced in CCD as to what was expected of us. We were told we had a choice to make about how we would receive the Body of Christ. We could either fold our hands together in reverence and allow the priest to place the wafer on our tongue, or we could place one hand below the other and offer our hands up to the priest for him to place the wafer in our hands.. With the hand resting underneath, we would then reach up to the cradled wafer resting safely in the other hand and place it in our mouth. Either way, we were to make the sign of the cross when we were finished and close our eyes in silent prayer.

As the priest approached, he would lift the Eucharist in his hand and say, ?The body and blood of Christ?. The proper reply on our part was, ?Amen?. It was pretty simple this time compared to preparations for confession.

As I pondered my choices about receiving Christ’s body, I began to worry about dropping the communion wafer. If I chose to hold the Body of Christ in my own hands, I was scared that I might drop him. Was that a sin? And would it require another trip back to the confessional booth? I certainly didn?t want to be remembered as the kid who dropped the body of Christ on the floor during first Holy Communion. I therefore decided I would choose to have the priest place the wafer in my mouth. After all, if he dropped it on the floor it would be his fault for being so careless with the Body of Christ. What I didn?t know at the time was that the church had a contingency plan. There would be an altar boy standing by with what looked like a giant golden spoon (called a communion paten or plate) that would be placed beneath your chin as the priest put the wafer in your mouth just in case the Body of Christ should slip out of his hand or your mouth, or a crumb should fall. Christ would certainly be safe if he fell into that golden spoon. I wondered how many times his body had hit that cold marble floor, and what they did with the wafers that fell on the floor. Did they have a funeral for them?

A few weeks prior to my first communion, I received from my parents a pretty white book of prayers with a pocket in the back for rosary beads and/or a scapular. I can always remember looking with reverence at the one my mom received for her first Holy Communion. It is such a beautiful little book and I always thought it seemed so magical. It was stored in a little box that kept it safe, and when she would take it out and show it to me I always felt I was holding something sacred in my hands. Now I had one of these books of my own.

A friend of mine and I also received a Holy Bible of our own as a gift from our parents. It was a children?s bible and it had those really special thin pages that seemed important. I now had a bible of my own with those thin pages; it somehow made it seem more holy and magical, almost like the delicate paper made the words precious and mystical. Ironically, in the Catholic church we were never encouraged to actually read the Holy Bible ourselves but rather were taught to rely on the priests and bishops and Pope to tell us what it said instead. The holy people surely had a direct line to God that the rest of us out there sinning and breaking commandments and doing penance just didn’t understand.

On the day of the big event, all of the children receiving the sacrament were lined up at the altar to kneel down at the front. It seemed odd and special and a little intimidating to be at the front of the church with the whole congregation behind us. I had never been up that close to the altar before, and the giant crucifix with the body of Jesus hanging there seemed larger than life. I couldn’t help but stare with fascination at the places on his body with the wounds of the crucifixion. I tried to imagine how much it must be hurting him.

The priest and the altar boy holding the giant golden spoon made their way down the line of children at the altar and we each received the sacrament of the Eucharist. It was pretty uneventful. No one dropped the Body of Christ on the floor, and we all answered “Amen” when we were supposed to. No one got into trouble for talking or chewing gum so it all worked out pretty well. When it was my turn, the priest placed the communion wafer on my tongue. It was perfectly round and had an imprint of a cross. At first, it seemed like it was stuck there, kind of dried to my tongue. As my mouth filled with saliva and surrounded the wafer, it began to disintegrate. It wasn’t at all like the little disks I created at home with Wonder Bread to practice with. It was smooth in texture and had a very pleasant taste. As it slid down my throat I tried to imagine Jesus inside of me.

I didn’t have any kind of mystical experience accompanying the physical ingestion of the Body of Christ. It was just a wafer that tasted good. It seemed to me like we were all sharing in something special together, but I didn’t have any kind of holy lightning bolt feeling the way I was supposed to. I remember that day as something special because I felt included, grown up, part of something that felt important. But that wasn’t supposed to be the point of receiving the Eucharist. You were supposed to “feel” something.

But like the sacrament of penance I don?t recall it being a particularly spirit-filled experience. Instead of nurturing our spirits as we grew in body, we were bombarded with memorization, rules, rituals, traditions, expectations, and above all…fear. Fear accompanied by judgment would become my predominant experience of religion and God for many years. The Catholic church wasn’t done yet, and the Protestants were still to come.

Knowing Ourselves

“A human being has so many skins inside, covering the depths of the heart. We know so many things, but we don’t know ourselves! Why, thirty or forty skins or hides, as thick and hard as an ox’s or bear’s, cover the soul. Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there. “
-Meister Eckhart

Do you know yourself?

Lost…again

Once again I find myself going back to a post and wondering what I was thinking when I wrote it. I find so much hypocrisy throughout the post Lost and Found it is painful now to read. Here I am bemoaning the methods of those who have found the truth as they know it to be, and I write a post that pretty much uses the same methods I claim to find so objectionable. I am not trying to convince anyone of anything, or prove anything to anyone, but it sure sounds like it when I read back over what I wrote. Back to the drawing board … again…shame on me for my intolerance and lapse in compassion.

Soaking in the joy of approaching springtime

Deciding that I needed to take a break from the elaborateness of my elaborations and let a few things “soak in”, I have given a little more time to creating. In keeping with the spirit of letting things “soak in”, I had this idea to try painting with food coloring on rice paper.

Happy springtime!

Lost and Found

My history in spirit (at least to this point) is pretty varied, obviously displaying a fairly strong tendency toward seeking something. I wonder what I’m hoping to find exactly. I’ve survived the rigors of two vastly different Christian denominations (so different in fact they have been known to kill one another), albeit not without a few scars of my own.

I have nothing against either denomination, nor Christianity in general, (and can even find myself curiously defending them at times) but for me personally there has been more hurt than there has been movement of spirit or experience of God’s Love. That can’t be what the heart of religion is about.

I’ve wondered if my seeking is related to living in chronic pain, though I don’t really think this is the entire explanation because even before my journey through that jungle I had always been drawn to spiritual subject matter in one way or another, always wide-eyed with curiosity over the supernatural and unexplained, always wondering about what there is beyond this life, this world, this ‘reality’.

Maybe I am waiting for a “that’s it” moment. Is that spiritual shopping? Like I’m not willing to put up with the things I don’t like about one tradition, so I end up being a shopper, taking a little bit from here and a little bit from there, but not able to commit? Am I speed dating different traditions? After spending so much of my life committed to a religion that is just so insufficient for me personally in the way it is practiced, maybe I am fickle, riding the wind and hoping one day to finally land somewhere.

Christians say I am blaming Jesus for the folly of mankind. Am I blaming Jesus? I see Jesus and his teachings and his life in a different way now than I did then, a way that seems to be intolerable to the Christians I know, and yet I feel a closeness to his teachings and his life that I never experienced while I was a “practicing Christian” (whatever that means exactly).

I’ve been asked if I’ve gone over to the ‘new age’ (can someone please tell me exactly what that means because I still don’t understand that term), or even worse, I’m beginning to learn about and (uh oh) even discover value in Buddhism and Sufism and a few other “isms” that seem to be unacceptable, and in some cases downright wrong or forbidden. Christians know there is only one truth, and since they are living in that one truth, they can appear to be exclusionary, but they say they aren’t actually exclusionary because all are welcome to come into the truth with them. It is a very welcoming truth.

Just as a brief aside (and to be fair) I don’t think this is all that different in any other religious tradition; where there are people so too will there be the same problems that people bring with them.

So then there is the bible. Some Christians read it, others rely on others to read it and interpret it for them. That’s okay, I suppose. After recent discussions about masters and students, I suppose maybe there are some people who are better able to understand and teach the bible than others. But I guess it seems to me if you are going to dedicate your life both here and in the hereafter to the teaching contained in a book, and to worship a man as God whose teachings are contained therein, it isn’t a bad idea to spend some time reading it yourself.

So then I got to thinking again about faith and belief and worship. I’m thinking too much by this point, aren’t I?

Christians will often come back to any difficult question with a response that is simply: it’s about faith. Okay, I can accept that. But now I wonder again. Faith in what? Faith that the bible was dictated by God to the writers of each of the books and that the writers transcribed it all accurately without any additions or interpretations of their own, faith that those involved in choosing the books of the bible that would make it into the final manuscript were only following the voice of God in their choices and had no other motivations in these decisions (and indeed even the Apocrypha is still not included in Protestant bibles as it is in Catholic bibles so there isn’t even consistency there), faith in living the words of the bible literally, faith that those who translated the biblical words from their original languages (with words that can have vastly different meanings when translated) were translating with God as their translator and not choosing meanings for words and phrases that were anything but Divinely inspired, faith in the preachers who interpret the bible and its stories for those who find it a bit dificult to understand, faith in rituals performed at every church service and rules to live by made by different denominations who seem to find very little to agree on even though they purport to worship the same book, the same God, the same Son of God?

Faith in what?

It seems like a lot of layers of faith in people or rituals or objects or words or rules to wade through before you ever reach God.

So to my friends in Christ, I guess I must concede. From your perspective, yes, I guess I am lost. Love is all I have to offer from the vastness of “lostness” I have chosen. I know you are praying for me, and I genuinely offer my gratitude to you for doing so. I pray for you as well…I offer you prayers of peace, tolerance, forgiveness, compassion, and highest above all … I offer you prayers of Love.

Reverence

reverence

1. a feeling or attitude of deep respect tinged with awe; veneration.
2. the outward manifestation of this feeling: to pay reverence.
3. a gesture indicative of deep respect; an obeisance, bow, or curtsy.

Words without actions remain on a page as merely definitions and descriptions. So I ask myself how I am applying reverence in a more everyday sense, taking it “out of the box” (or perhaps out of the pulpit) so to speak.

On a trip to the beach some trash has been left behind and I pick it up and put it in a trash can. I show reverence for the shore.

I research and find out where my local facility is for safely discarding hazardous chemicals.
I show reverence for the environment.

I offer my seat in a crowded fast-food restaurant to an older couple.
I show reverence for my neighbor.

I give money and time to those who are struggling, and practice compassion and kindness toward others.
I show reverence for human life.

I stop on the side of the road to comfort a young lady who is holding her dead cat that was just hit by a car.
I show reverence for kindness and compassion.

I offer gratitude for wildlife and nature and support protection and rescue organizations.
I show reverence for all of creation.

I stop during a busy day and smell a beautiful rose in appreciation.
I show reverence for nature’s artistry.

I commit to taking better care of myself, and strive for self improvement and fulfillment of purpose.
I show reverence for God.

What do you think about reverence and how it applies to everyday life?