Yesterday, as I stretched on awakening from my afternoon nap – I take one because I can – the first thing I saw was the book binding with the title “Iberia” (by James Michener, if it matters). Funny thing was, in my semi-sleep, a part of me did not realize what that meant. Another part did, and it wondered at the part that didn’t. Iberia? What’s in a name? The part that didn’t know wondered at its foreign sound, and languidly guessed at what it meant: Tales of Arabian Nights? Mohammed and the zealous hordes? Which is to say, this mind had an idea, perhaps taken from the mind that understood, but not an exact idea. It was different. How could that be? How can we have two thinking minds?
This morning I was looking for a decent CD to run on the old portable that sits on the dishwasher while I cooked a breakfast that had to include peppers and tomatoes, since we have 15 tons of them in the garden and they are threatening to mount an attack. I shuffled through them (the CD’s, not the tomatoes and peppers – one does not shuffle through a mountain), seeing some that are definitely for winter only, or for spring, until I found one on the bottom that took me by surprise. It was conductor David Wilcox’s Cambridge Choir rendition of Thomas Tallis’s masterpiece, “Spem in Alium” (which I believe I have mentioned here before. If you need a big nudge to believe in God, this is it.), which I have been looking for over a year. And there it was. Of course I played it, and it brought the well-needed whelming of faith that is usually so hard to achieve. I thought that this is why I found it (primitive that I am) and it was, but only in part. It also suggested to me an idea that went so well with Iberia. Here it is:
Think: when you lose your glasses, you really do know where they are. Your mind is playing tricks on you, like a leprechaun that is stationed in your brain. And when you are standing on stage and forget your lines due to stage fright, horror of horrors, you certainly do know your lines, but that leprechaun is acting up again. One part of your mind is working either apart from another or actively against the other part. I will not try to understand why here, and I’m sure it can fill a psychologist’s doctoral thesis, but it is so.
Now think of that rush of spiritual feeling that many get from Thomas Tallis’s work, or from other songs or from cathedrals or the rock formations of Zion National Park. Yes, these outside elements tip feelings off, but they are not in any way the feelings themselves. We might have a great one-liner from “Dust in the Wind,” but there are none in the rock formations at Zion, nor really in “Spem,” because the words are in Latin and they can’t be understood anyway in the blending of the chorus. Rather, the feelings come from within. They were hiding there all along and needed prompting. This is not like sex, that often needs another body or imaginary body to get the juices flowing, but rather something else that is entirely free from the material world, although it can be invoked by things of the material world. It is, and has to be, within us at all times (wherever ‘within’ is).
We live, then, with our normal side paired with the immortal and the sacred, both always being with us even as the sacred is normally sensed as being apart. Like the glasses we lost, a part of us knows where the sacred is, but just like the glasses, we continually forget where we put it. Something, a leprechaun of sorts, hides it from us even as it knows how to retrieve it. Even if it is bequeathed to us by the Holy Spirit - which it must be, just as life is – it is still there with life, necessarily side by side. The question is, what stops us from living with it at all times? Unlike sex, an experience of the holy does not wear down our bodily chemical needs, nor does it age or become undesirable. Like sex, if we experience it once, we want it again, and unlike sex, with spirit we can and want to have it all the time, forever.
But that is not for this world. That is the problem we as a spiritual species are set with in this dimension of living. We are beset here by two minds, one on and one usually off from the one on, the latter relentlessly distracted by the hard-wired world of brick and mortar. It is the job of the great spiritual leaders to give us techniques of “memory” that are used for tasks far more important than finding glasses or memorizing lines, and it is the gift of great artists to help us break through the maze of memory loss to get back to base one, back to our origin and to our future, our alpha and omega. This is something we want to do, just as we want to find our glasses, but to want is not enough. Finding the memory, the mind that always knows but hides, is what we need to do.
The ways to do this always converge on denial of this world for the other. It makes sense – we cannot remember where our glasses are if we are simultaneously thinking about other things, which is probably how we forgot them in the first place – but who wants to be mindful all the time? This is the greatest challenge for the Masters – to find the technique that can save us from forgetfulness. To follow such technique(s) is the greatest challenge for ourselves. But if we at least know that the other is there, or are told by those we trust that it is, we just might drift towards it as our life naturally fades. It might be that, as our material brain deteriorates, we can finally come to hold in our other mind that which lasts forever. It could just be, then, that grandpa or grandma in their dementia might have turned the tables, with the daily mind lost to the spiritual mind. It might just be.
Yesterday, as I stretched on awakening from my afternoon nap – I take one because I can – the first thing I saw was the book binding with the title “Iberia” (by James Michener, if it matters). Funny thing was, in my semi-sleep, a part of me did not realize what that meant. Another part did, and it wondered at the part that didn’t. Iberia? What’s in a name? The part that didn’t know wondered at its foreign sound, and languidly guessed at what it meant: Tales of Arabian Nights? Mohammed and the zealous hordes? Which is to say, this mind had an idea, perhaps taken from the mind that understood, but not an exact idea. It was different. How could that be? How can we have two thinking minds?
This morning I was looking for a decent CD to run on the old portable that sits on the dishwasher while I cooked a breakfast that had to include peppers and tomatoes, since we have 15 tons of them in the garden and they are threatening to mount an attack. I shuffled through them (the CD’s, not the tomatoes and peppers – one does not shuffle through a mountain), seeing some that are definitely for winter only, or for spring, until I found one on the bottom that took me by surprise. It was conductor David Wilcox’s Cambridge Choir rendition of Thomas Tallis’s masterpiece, “Spem in Alium” (which I believe I have mentioned here before. If you need a big nudge to believe in God, this is it.), which I have been looking for over a year. And there it was. Of course I played it, and it brought the well-needed whelming of faith that is usually so hard to achieve. I thought that this is why I found it (primitive that I am) and it was, but only in part. It also suggested to me an idea that went so well with Iberia. Here it is:
Think: when you lose your glasses, you really do know where they are. Your mind is playing tricks on you, like a leprechaun that is stationed in your brain. And when you are standing on stage and forget your lines due to stage fright, horror of horrors, you certainly do know your lines, but that leprechaun is acting up again. One part of your mind is working either apart from another or actively against the other part. I will not try to understand why here, and I’m sure it can fill a psychologist’s doctoral thesis, but it is so.
Now think of that rush of spiritual feeling that many get from Thomas Tallis’s work, or from other songs or from cathedrals or the rock formations of Zion National Park. Yes, these outside elements tip feelings off, but they are not in any way the feelings themselves. We might have a great one-liner from “Dust in the Wind,” but there are none in the rock formations at Zion, nor really in “Spem,” because the words are in Latin and they can’t be understood anyway in the blending of the chorus. Rather, the feelings come from within. They were hiding there all along and needed prompting. This is not like sex, that often needs another body or imaginary body to get the juices flowing, but rather something else that is entirely free from the material world, although it can be invoked by things of the material world. It is, and has to be, within us at all times (wherever ‘within’ is).
We live, then, with our normal side paired with the immortal and the sacred, both always being with us even as the sacred is normally sensed as being apart. Like the glasses we lost, a part of us knows where the sacred is, but just like the glasses, we continually forget where we put it. Something, a leprechaun of sorts, hides it from us even as it knows how to retrieve it. Even if it is bequeathed to us by the Holy Spirit - which it must be, just as life is – it is still there with life, necessarily side by side. The question is, what stops us from living with it at all times? Unlike sex, an experience of the holy does not wear down our bodily chemical needs, nor does it age or become undesirable. Like sex, if we experience it once, we want it again, and unlike sex, with spirit we can and want to have it all the time, forever.
But that is not for this world. That is the problem we as a spiritual species are set with in this dimension of living. We are beset here by two minds, one on and one usually off from the one on, the latter relentlessly distracted by the hard-wired world of brick and mortar. It is the job of the great spiritual leaders to give us techniques of “memory” that are used for tasks far more important than finding glasses or memorizing lines, and it is the gift of great artists to help us break through the maze of memory loss to get back to base one, back to our origin and to our future, our alpha and omega. This is something we want to do, just as we want to find our glasses, but to want is not enough. Finding the memory, the mind that always knows but hides, is what we need to do.
The ways to do this always converge on denial of this world for the other. It makes sense – we cannot remember where our glasses are if we are simultaneously thinking about other things, which is probably how we forgot them in the first place – but who wants to be mindful all the time? This is the greatest challenge for the Masters – to find the technique that can save us from forgetfulness. To follow such technique(s) is the greatest challenge for ourselves. But if we at least know that the other is there, or are told by those we trust that it is, we just might drift towards it as our life naturally fades. It might be that, as our material brain deteriorates, we can finally come to hold in our other mind that which lasts forever. It could just be, then, that grandpa or grandma in their dementia might have turned the tables, with the daily mind lost to the spiritual mind. It might just be.
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