Grown

I think I am being grown.  I feel stretched.  It's not terrible, but not great either.  Many things are changing.  I had dreams about dragons again, which seem to precede big changes for me that require growth.  I also had deja vu today, which is another sign that something is happening.

I don't mean this in the way the words might sound to many people.  It's not some spooky or flighty thing where I think of these things as special powers or whatever.  I don't even know if it's real.  But I know my experience.  And dragons are sometimes a symbol of wisdom and reptiles can indicate change in dreams.

The deja vu is just a distinct impression that I've done something before.  I don't know if I dreamed it in advance, or maybe it's just a feeling that occurs when I'm in a state of confusion and growth.

But it doesn't really matter, does it?  The point is the significance to me.  They are markers of something I should pay attention to.

Changes are immanent in work and life, and I've noticed a tendency toward less control and more dependence on God, which comes in the form of independence from other things.  Hence it feels good and bad at the same time.

This may be an answer to prayer...in reality everything is an answer to prayer, isn't it though.  In this case, I did pray for God to move me and for him to teach me to trust him more.  So here goes.

The cool thing to me is that I am not so nervous as I once would have been about things like this.  I'm hoping to find out if Uncle George's ideas that we have to move to see the results are true.  That only in obedience to the requirements can we see the results, the lack of which we claim as disproof.

He also said that when we ask of God and it seems like no answer, it may be that God has answered immediately, but it is taking time, maybe years, for us to grow to the point that we can understand the answer.  This seems consistent with my understanding of God.  He would rather have us right and thoroughly good and so would not give us a half answer or no answer, as we sometimes think, but rather immediately begins the process of growing us, finishing us, to the point that we can hear.  And hearing, can understand what he says.  But we are not going unanswered.

To me, this is powerful.  I always thought that we might be ignored for our own good sometimes, like a good parent will ignore their petulant child until they relent. But what if it isn't that at all?!  What if God is a better parent than us?  ...as if there is any question.  Of course he'd be better.  Necessarily better.  To understand that way is to confirm my infantile perspective.

Or perhaps, I would think, we just couldn't understand so he doesn't explain, like a parent who resorts to, "because I said so." to the whining kid that won't accept the answer.

Or perhaps that's it: that we are just whining so he won't answer.


But just imagine instead, what it would mean to have a God who answers so immediately and powerfully that he would grow and shape a whole world of space and matter and experience around us in order that our hearing would begin developing to the point that we could first hear the answer and then our minds would be capable of understanding it.

It's supra-language, dark cloud, behind the veil stuff.

The thoughts are coming too fast now for my fingers to keep up.  So I have to stop.

Time warp

Have you noticed that time passes differently based on your particular perception of it?  If we are busy it tends to pass quickly.  If we're bored, it drags.  But what time is cannot really be defined.  We can tell that a duration has passed, but we can't measure it except by tracking some cycle within space.  This is still a function of our perception.  So if the rotation of that atom or star were to change speed, we would only be able to know it by the relation of it to another object also bound in space and time.

Think of it like an airplane.  If there were no windows to see things moving past you, you'd have no idea whether you were actually moving or not because everything in the plane would be moving at the same rate, whether that rate was faster or slower, everything would continue to move in unison and you'd never know how fast it was going.  Same goes for time. For all we know, time may actually not be static and might actually pass at different rates which we can't perceive because we can't step outside of it to find a fixed point of reference.

One thing that certainly seems to slow time is expectation.  I've been looking forward to many things lately.  Not in the sense of enjoyment, but simply, a lot of things to keep track of in the near future.  This made the previous month drag like none other.  I'm glad it's over so some of those things can actually occur and time can go back to the pace I usually perceive.

But this led me to remember something Augustine, the philosopher and theologian said.  He talked a lot about time and said that what we call future is really just expectation of something coming into being.  The past is the memory of that moment which no longer exists.  So that makes the present the point between expecting something and remembering it...which really has no space at all.  If you squeeze your conscious perception of time passing down to the smallest moment you can grasp, you'll experience an infinitesimally small point at which the future is sliding into the past, the expectation becoming memory.  It seems to rocket by and can actually be quite dizzying.  Try it right now and see.  Faster than sand through a funnel, moments of potential are becoming memories and we can't hold on to any one of those points.

This tiny point that occupies no area, no space, no time, is the present.  The eternal now.  And that is all that really exists.  If I focus on it too much, I seem to see everything around me like Neo seeing the matrix code; in constant flux through an infinitely minute Now.

At this point I also usually experience a sublimity.  Something enormous and palpably greater than myself.  It's there.  And if I chase it, try to focus on it, I find that it's focusing right back at me.  And that's where I usually lose it.  My mind starts to unravel and the window closes, thankfully, so I can exist without being dissolved into that present. 

I believe that this is a glimpse of the nature and reality of God.  Not some man in the sky.  If that's what you think then your conception of God is far too small.  I'm talking about the Source of all sources.  The prime.  The thing from which all that is derives its being.  And by many other philosophical proofs, I could demonstrate why it must be personal.  In short, it can't be a nameless force or a reflection of my own infinity because it must needs be something higher than my faculty to perceive it or contemplate it.  So if I can regard it, how much more would the source have to be capable of regarding?  If I can think of it, how much more must it, first and to a greater degree, think of me.  But there are treatises (literally) on this, and I invite you to do your own homework on it.

My point is that where else could such a being (even "being" is too small a word) exist but in the only spaceless, timeless space that does exist?  That ever-present, unchanging Now. In that point, I can access the big bang.  I can understand the origin of the universe.  I can know the meaning of knowing.  I can experience what IS on a deeper level than can be cognitively processed.  It's right there all the time.  Seriously try it, see what you experience.