The engine of the plane caused the pilot to shout as he nodded his head towards the other side: “I dropped her over there, by the big tree. Cost 800 dollars,” a hint as to how much I would have to pay if I wanted to keep up. And it was keeping up that was the problem. “She,” the woman I had once done fieldwork with, was now on another adventure with indigenous people in the Amazon and I had been left behind. I couldn’t allow that. I couldn’t allow her all the glory that might come from that. The ‘big tree’ was a huge ceiba, or tropical cottonwood, that stood out in the vast tropical forest, far from any modern comfort or rescue. I would have to be dropped by that tree, and would, but the feat was dark and filled with fear, and for good reason. Not only the forest but the people were wild, unpredictable, but I would have to go. My professional career depended upon it, and that was important enough to risk death.
I woke to that engine noise as if it had been real in the dark winter hour of 5:00 AM. My feeling then was of desolation, of abandonment and of failure. There was the fear of the dream-mission mixed with the reality of past abandonments by whomever and the ever-living presence of my failure at my profession. Dark, all dark. Again, it was a dream without goodness or hope, spiritual or otherwise. It was all oppression, for the fear of death, for the personal fear of loneliness, for the social fear of professional failure. Try as I might, no shimmering figure walked on those waters of despair. I was food already eaten, a possession of insecurities apparently beyond my control, helpless in the belly of the beast.
The day before we had gone to our Bible class to study the Acts of the Apostles, and then for a walk with one of our friends. At a few points, it seemed appropriate to mention Jesus, not to proselytize but because he was on my mind and, as said, it seemed appropriate. For instance, for some reason we were talking about life after death, and our friend said, “We don’t know anything about the afterlife because no one has ever come back from the dead.” Within a second, I thought about Near Death survivors, then reflected that no, they didn’t really die, and then thought about Jesus, who actually did die, and who remained in the land of the dead for a biblical three days. I said so, adding only that even Jesus had given few specifics, to which she replied, “Let’s not go there,” in an ominous voice. Don’t mention Jesus – as if the original Prince of Peace had been a mass murderer of such ugly proportions that we must not even mention his name.
Odd, but not unusual. I do understand it, at least on two levels. For one, many of us older people were raised by parents who made us go to church, where the meanness and hypocrisy of many members - maybe even of the clergy and the parents - and the monotony of the service made any thought of being a future member revolting. I had long been a member of that group. Then there was the other group, also ever growing, that saw any reference to dead people and invisible gods as simply stupid and superstitious. As one who still believes in the possibility of leprechauns or water spirits, that was never me, but I was squeezed through the academic process and I understand the training. In our friend’s case, the problem was obviously the former, coupled with the usual sense of self-determination that most Americans have. Religions are filled with hypocrites who have the gall to tell us how to live our lives. Yeah, I get it.
But that is not the case in the dark jungles of our dreams. There we can experience and believe anything. There, spirits of the land and air as well as spirits of the dead come alive with indisputable life force. There, the essence of our fears and failures and desires also take on form or action as if they, too, were living beings. But more often than not, God in any form is not there. Among all the pixies of our unconscious, God remains aloof. We are left, then, to our internal darkness unaided, abandoned, alone, scared in the dark. Among all the nonsense that plagues us, why are we not given the invisible “nonsense” of a protective and benevolent god?
Here the two, the bad dream and the wariness of the friend, come together. We are abandoned by God in our dark dreams because we have made those dreams within ourselves. That is, it is our own preoccupation with such things as abandonment or failure that have given them such power over our lives. Unlike God, who is at least implicit in an incomprehensible reality, these dreams are only dreams with no real substance whatsoever. Unlike the universe, they do not really exist. They exist only because we are focused on the negative, and in the negative, we find no God. As the Psalms say, God is only light. We should not expect him where we conjure darkness.
Nor should we expect him where we conjure distrust and disgust. There is the old tale of the pessimist and the optimist: to counter their emotional excesses, one Christmas the parents put in the stocking of the pessimist child the keys to a motor scooter they bought for him, and to the optimist, they give nothing but a pile of horse manure. The pessimist sees the keys and says, “Oh great, now I have to worry about the scooter breaking down,” while the optimist says, “Great! Now I have to find the pony!” Although both live in the same reality, both experience it entirely differently based on their expectations. For our friend, anything about Jesus is hackneyed, lame and oppressive. If I were to mention Buddha or Lao Tzu, she would be open and perhaps even welcome, but never so Jesus. He is her parents, her past, all the people she came to fear or to rebel against. She has probably never read the Bible and certainly not studied it in any objective way, but she knows even before she knows. Don’t-go-there. And although I may stray across the line now and then – and feel like an idiot when I do so – God doesn’t. He respects our free will. He is right in front of us and deep within us, but if we conjure what he is not, he will not intrude. Fear not, then, friend.
It is this that points to the greater fear. Back when I was at the then-rural University of Connecticut, several friends and I were walking back through the woods and cornfields from “3 Dollar Pitcher Nite” when one of us started to yell and run around like a madman. We were in a dried but unharvested cornfield and none of us could even understand what he was saying for a moment in his excitement. Then we heard it: “Pot! We’re in a field of pot!” Sure enough, when we were urged to notice, we realized that we were pushing our way through a tall patch of marijuana, which was all the rage back at the dorm. We then ran around like madmen ourselves, stripping the leaves from the enormous plants that had been invisible to us just seconds before (they turned out to be hemp, useless for the purpose of getting a buzz, but we could not know that than). It certainly was not Manna, but how could we be so blind? For college idiots like ourselves, that field was like gold to a 49’er, but we could not see because we did not expect to see.
What else might we be missing simply because we do not expect it? What if the best and brightest minds of the Mideast, and then Europe, actually “saw” something in the God they proclaimed for several thousand years? And what if our arguments with our parents or society or our adolescent desires have kept us from seeing what might, at the very least, be the portal to enlightenment even in these progressive times? That is the greater tragedy. The historical Enlightenment rejected standard religion (but not necessarily God) because religion denied what science was beginning to see. But can we not see – to make an unholy comparison – both the corn and the pot? Must we become a slave to one vision and miss the greater, more subtle panorama?
Until the end of time as we know it, this struggle between one vision and the other will continue, but simple experience tells us that if we block our desire to see beyond the common veil, we will probably be all too successful. What we desire most could be right before us if we were to clear our prejudices and learn to expect something. The great sages of the past tell us that this something exists and that it is wonderful and closer to us than our own breath – and that it is there, just like the air, for anyone to breath. They tell us that if we just had the faith the size of a mustard seed, just the smallest crack in the defensive armor of the material culture d jour, it would reveal itself to us. And so I tell myself ‘Why Not?’ In the darkness of my dreams, what have I got to lose?
The engine of the plane caused the pilot to shout as he nodded his head towards the other side: “I dropped her over there, by the big tree. Cost 800 dollars,” a hint as to how much I would have to pay if I wanted to keep up. And it was keeping up that was the problem. “She,” the woman I had once done fieldwork with, was now on another adventure with indigenous people in the Amazon and I had been left behind. I couldn’t allow that. I couldn’t allow her all the glory that might come from that. The ‘big tree’ was a huge ceiba, or tropical cottonwood, that stood out in the vast tropical forest, far from any modern comfort or rescue. I would have to be dropped by that tree, and would, but the feat was dark and filled with fear, and for good reason. Not only the forest but the people were wild, unpredictable, but I would have to go. My professional career depended upon it, and that was important enough to risk death.
I woke to that engine noise as if it had been real in the dark winter hour of 5:00 AM. My feeling then was of desolation, of abandonment and of failure. There was the fear of the dream-mission mixed with the reality of past abandonments by whomever and the ever-living presence of my failure at my profession. Dark, all dark. Again, it was a dream without goodness or hope, spiritual or otherwise. It was all oppression, for the fear of death, for the personal fear of loneliness, for the social fear of professional failure. Try as I might, no shimmering figure walked on those waters of despair. I was food already eaten, a possession of insecurities apparently beyond my control, helpless in the belly of the beast.
The day before we had gone to our Bible class to study the Acts of the Apostles, and then for a walk with one of our friends. At a few points, it seemed appropriate to mention Jesus, not to proselytize but because he was on my mind and, as said, it seemed appropriate. For instance, for some reason we were talking about life after death, and our friend said, “We don’t know anything about the afterlife because no one has ever come back from the dead.” Within a second, I thought about Near Death survivors, then reflected that no, they didn’t really die, and then thought about Jesus, who actually did die, and who remained in the land of the dead for a biblical three days. I said so, adding only that even Jesus had given few specifics, to which she replied, “Let’s not go there,” in an ominous voice. Don’t mention Jesus – as if the original Prince of Peace had been a mass murderer of such ugly proportions that we must not even mention his name.
Odd, but not unusual. I do understand it, at least on two levels. For one, many of us older people were raised by parents who made us go to church, where the meanness and hypocrisy of many members - maybe even of the clergy and the parents - and the monotony of the service made any thought of being a future member revolting. I had long been a member of that group. Then there was the other group, also ever growing, that saw any reference to dead people and invisible gods as simply stupid and superstitious. As one who still believes in the possibility of leprechauns or water spirits, that was never me, but I was squeezed through the academic process and I understand the training. In our friend’s case, the problem was obviously the former, coupled with the usual sense of self-determination that most Americans have. Religions are filled with hypocrites who have the gall to tell us how to live our lives. Yeah, I get it.
But that is not the case in the dark jungles of our dreams. There we can experience and believe anything. There, spirits of the land and air as well as spirits of the dead come alive with indisputable life force. There, the essence of our fears and failures and desires also take on form or action as if they, too, were living beings. But more often than not, God in any form is not there. Among all the pixies of our unconscious, God remains aloof. We are left, then, to our internal darkness unaided, abandoned, alone, scared in the dark. Among all the nonsense that plagues us, why are we not given the invisible “nonsense” of a protective and benevolent god?
Here the two, the bad dream and the wariness of the friend, come together. We are abandoned by God in our dark dreams because we have made those dreams within ourselves. That is, it is our own preoccupation with such things as abandonment or failure that have given them such power over our lives. Unlike God, who is at least implicit in an incomprehensible reality, these dreams are only dreams with no real substance whatsoever. Unlike the universe, they do not really exist. They exist only because we are focused on the negative, and in the negative, we find no God. As the Psalms say, God is only light. We should not expect him where we conjure darkness.
Nor should we expect him where we conjure distrust and disgust. There is the old tale of the pessimist and the optimist: to counter their emotional excesses, one Christmas the parents put in the stocking of the pessimist child the keys to a motor scooter they bought for him, and to the optimist, they give nothing but a pile of horse manure. The pessimist sees the keys and says, “Oh great, now I have to worry about the scooter breaking down,” while the optimist says, “Great! Now I have to find the pony!” Although both live in the same reality, both experience it entirely differently based on their expectations. For our friend, anything about Jesus is hackneyed, lame and oppressive. If I were to mention Buddha or Lao Tzu, she would be open and perhaps even welcome, but never so Jesus. He is her parents, her past, all the people she came to fear or to rebel against. She has probably never read the Bible and certainly not studied it in any objective way, but she knows even before she knows. Don’t-go-there. And although I may stray across the line now and then – and feel like an idiot when I do so – God doesn’t. He respects our free will. He is right in front of us and deep within us, but if we conjure what he is not, he will not intrude. Fear not, then, friend.
It is this that points to the greater fear. Back when I was at the then-rural University of Connecticut, several friends and I were walking back through the woods and cornfields from “3 Dollar Pitcher Nite” when one of us started to yell and run around like a madman. We were in a dried but unharvested cornfield and none of us could even understand what he was saying for a moment in his excitement. Then we heard it: “Pot! We’re in a field of pot!” Sure enough, when we were urged to notice, we realized that we were pushing our way through a tall patch of marijuana, which was all the rage back at the dorm. We then ran around like madmen ourselves, stripping the leaves from the enormous plants that had been invisible to us just seconds before (they turned out to be hemp, useless for the purpose of getting a buzz, but we could not know that than). It certainly was not Manna, but how could we be so blind? For college idiots like ourselves, that field was like gold to a 49’er, but we could not see because we did not expect to see.
What else might we be missing simply because we do not expect it? What if the best and brightest minds of the Mideast, and then Europe, actually “saw” something in the God they proclaimed for several thousand years? And what if our arguments with our parents or society or our adolescent desires have kept us from seeing what might, at the very least, be the portal to enlightenment even in these progressive times? That is the greater tragedy. The historical Enlightenment rejected standard religion (but not necessarily God) because religion denied what science was beginning to see. But can we not see – to make an unholy comparison – both the corn and the pot? Must we become a slave to one vision and miss the greater, more subtle panorama?
Until the end of time as we know it, this struggle between one vision and the other will continue, but simple experience tells us that if we block our desire to see beyond the common veil, we will probably be all too successful. What we desire most could be right before us if we were to clear our prejudices and learn to expect something. The great sages of the past tell us that this something exists and that it is wonderful and closer to us than our own breath – and that it is there, just like the air, for anyone to breath. They tell us that if we just had the faith the size of a mustard seed, just the smallest crack in the defensive armor of the material culture d jour, it would reveal itself to us. And so I tell myself ‘Why Not?’ In the darkness of my dreams, what have I got to lose?
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