Striking Ordinariness: Redux

There is a line in the central text of my Fellowship which reads: "Deep down in every man, woman and child is the fundamental idea of God... in the last analysis, it is only there that He may be found."

I've found that, as a part of my spiritual path, that has been perhaps the single most difficult notion to remember - 'God' is within, an inner experience, not without, an outer, objective experience.

My tendency in spite of abundant experiential and indirect knowledge to the contrary, is always to assume He's 'out there', that if you found the right apparatus or the right methodology you could see Him in a physical sense. And this of course leads to all sorts of problems, all the problems (in fact) that come from anthropomorphism: what does God look like? Is He really a he or a she or an it (which sounds too impersonal) or does God appear to each individual as he or she wish to see God? What does Heaven, or Paradise, actually look like, or Hell for that matter? What is the metaphysic of the soul, and how does it relate to the body, etc etc.

Such questions can be interesting in that how-many-angels-can-dance-on-the-end-of-a-pin way, but the reification of spiritual concepts and realities becomes problematic when one starts to take such things too seriously. One runs the danger of 'eating the menu', as it were, treating Heaven and Hell as actual physical localities rather than concepts, notions, or states of mind.

Thankfully I tend not to make that mistake with these things; but sitting in Meeting this morning, I realized that I've been making a rather continuous mistake in the way I think about spirituality and the spiritual life, period.

I sat in Meeting for Worship, trying to find that 'light within', holding this mental construct of a layer of thoughts and thinking on top, a layer of subtler, quieter thoughts underneath, a layer of moods and emotions below that, and my 'self', trying to sink lower and lower and see this light...

... and while I was thinking about all this, for some reason the following phrase from a Qur'anic ayat floated into consciousness and got stuck on a loop:

Qaf (50):16

وَلَقَدْ خَلَقْنَا الْإِنسَانَ وَنَعْلَمُ مَا تُوَسْوِسُ بِهِ نَفْسُهُ وَ نَحْنُ أَقْرَبُ إِلَيْهِ مِنْ حَبْلِ الْوَرِيدِ

Wa laqad khalaqna al insana wa na-'alamu ma tuwaswisu bihi nafsuhu wa nahnu 'aqrabu ilayhi min habli alwareedi

And verily We created humanity, and We know what whispers in [humanity]'s essence, [for] We are closer to [him] that [his] jugular vein. (My own translation/interpretation)

... and that's when it dawned on me that I once again was turning spirituality and the spiritual experience into something other, something other-worldly, rather than something very simple and direct and here-and-now. I was separating out the experience of God from the experience of day-to-day life, treating it as something special and different, reifying that experience, setting it on a pedestal in a fiberglass case and setting an alarm to go off if anyone tampered with the case, and then standing back and looking at it and thinking "Man, I wish I could get inside that case and touch that thing again."

Which is when I began to smile, and realize that the alarm, the case, the pedestal and the thing didn't exist: I had just thought them all up. What I was looking for was right underneath my nose.

Out of that grew a deep appreciation for my immediate experience, what was happening to me in that moment. I opened my eyes and stared at the whorls in the wood of the bench in front of me, and felt real gratitude for it. Then I began to think about my life, this life, all the experiences that I've had and everything that I've learned and done and felt and seen, and I felt love for that. I saw it as a gift, or more precisely, an offering to Allah, something for which - because He is me and I am Him - He also felt love and gratitude. Life, my life, was not a gift from Him to me, as I had previously thought; instead life, my life, was my gift to Him, the eternal Watcher.

So I was able to feel God's love for me, and my life; which is something I have been missing, something I seem to omit from my day-to-day experience usually. Intellectually I enjoy and love my life, but for quite a while now it's been a hollow statement, just something you say because you're supposed to say it.

And this brought back memories of one of my more primary and wonderful 'root' spiritual experiences, which happened during and after I had suffered a major illness. I was in the hospital for it, and in the recovery process, and I felt so alive, so full of real joy, as if I were truly blessed. During that time, which lasted about six weeks, I woke up in the morning with thankfulness and fell asleep with gratitude. Being kind and compassionate, forgiving the few faults I saw and utterly overlooking the rest, connecting to other people in a very simple and basic way... telling the truth, letting wants and desires and needs and cravings slip by, intuitively handling conflicts within myself and without... it was a grand ol' time. It was only after discharge, when I returned to 'normal life', that I for the first time began to notice what I did not have, latched onto that thought, and sank into one of the deepest pits of depression I have ever faced (and, being a severely depressed person normally, I want to stress how much of a doozy this one was).

I think, now, that was the character of that experience, a certain sense of knowing that living my life, and the way in which I lived my life, was a gift, a present, an offering to Allah. This precious, tenuous thing called an 'existence' was both something given to me and something which I could give without ever giving-away. Or, to paraphrase Terry Pratchett in one of my favorite books, Small Gods: to die for a cause is easy. To live every day of your life for one, that's the real challenge.

Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. What is enlightenment? Chopping wood and carrying water.