...Then I stumbled on a passage written by Bede Griffiths, a contemporary Benedictine monk.  Griffiths describes his boyhood experience of walking one night when he was suddenly dazzled by the beautiful song of a flock of birds.  Their singing awakened senses he'd never used before.  Instantly the world seemed transformed, he says, as if he'd stepped into "the presence of an almost unfathomable mystery which seemed to be drawing me to itself."

    That was it: no burning bushes, no flaming chariots.  Just a gentle, subtle awakening, a soft epiphany that many might simply shrug off.  But it changed Griffith's life forever.

    Soon I found accounts of similar revelations: people surprised by a thrill of wonder as they read poetry, pondered the cosmos or prayed.  Mystical experience, I was beginning to understand, was not a magical ascension into some distant literal paradise.  It was a quiet, personal epiphany that the miraculous and the mundane are one and the same, and that both are right before our eyes.  

    For the first time since I was a kid, I felt the presence of something mysterious and fine.  What that something was, I couldn't fathom, and somehow, I didn't need to know.

    Soon I learned that, for the mystics, it is only when the self is pushed aside during meditation that we can see reality as it truly is.  Indeed, Andrew Newberg's scans suggest the brain may be able to experience two realities.  In one reality, awareness reaches the mind through the filter of the self.  In the other, the self is swept aside, and the mind's awareness grows broader and more unified.

    "And there's no way to say one is more real than the other?" I ask.

    Newberg smiles.  Reality, he theorizes, is a matter of degree-what feels most real is most real.  "The mystics tend to experience this [transcendent] state as more real than ordinary reality," he says.

    I am silenced.  I can't swallow the notion that our mystical insights should help shape our practical view of experience.  Then I found this passage by Albert Einstein: "The fairest thing we can experience is mysterious.  It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true science.  He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead."

    Soon I discovered Einstien's view was shared by other great scientists-  Niels Bohr, Max Planck and Werner Heisenberg-who concluded there is room in a rational universe of incomprehensible wonders.  

    After completing the book, I can't say that I've found religion.  But I have come to realize that the biggest, most fascinating mysteries are to be savored, not resolved.  And mystery is all around us: We just need to humble our hearts and pay attention.  

    "My salvation is to hear and respond,' wrote Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk.  "For this, my life must be silent.  Hence, my silence is my salvation."

    And that, I've decided, is my new master plan:  To forget about being informed or interesting or rational.

To just shut up and listen for awhile.

 

Excerpt from Searching for the Divine by Vince Rause

 

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