The Divine Spark
I have heard God described as, quite simply, the passion that embraces a man when confronted by the mysterious connections he perceives. This state is euphoric, contemplative and wistful in that it never lasts. Put on a piece of music you like and let it carry you into that state and as you hang, suspended on another's imagination you will glimpse the passion of the author and meet his god. I have always been astounded that while we can barely perceive each other, let alone understand what others want from us, we can sometimes bridge this gap in a non-verbal way.
Even as filtered as our senses are, we receive an incredible volume of information every second we are alive. It divides our minds into rooms, categories and sub-sets and we sift through all of this and make judgments based on experience and genetics. Now, recall a moment when every sense you have was focused on a single thing. Something that pricked your mind to attention and held you, while you explored the feeling, the sensation and the experience. Somewhere in there is the passion, and you rarely come away from it without an awareness of something mysterious.
As advanced technologically as we are, no one has ever been able to quantify this experience and we hover somewhere between Heaven and earth because we can't explain it away. It may come to you while you're listening to music, or reading a book, or working on your car, or while you're jogging, or staring into the face of your child, or cooking the perfect omelet or while you're having sex (maybe that should have been first), but describing it runs a very distant second to experiencing it. Spiritual? Definitely. Divine? Maybe. Singular? Always. Fun? You bet!
Our efforts to simulate the experience have been ceaseless, simply because it can't be simulated. We will endure a lifetime of hangovers, both alcohol and drug induced, looking for a substitute so that we can command a spiritual bliss to descend on us on demand. Good Christians everywhere frown on the effort because if someone finds it, they, and God, will be out of a job. I wouldn't worry, though. Collectively, we couldn't find our asses with both hands.
2 comments:
Seeking Fat Pigeons.
here here !! (cheers from the old bastard in the balcony)
while defining it as 'god' is rather suspect, I'm damn sure that this spiritual experience is something most of us strive for... and while you never quite re-capture the magic of your first omelette or sexual encounter, certain things do trigger it better than others
to gain the experience without the aid of drugs we need to force the breaking down of those 'rooms, categories, and sub-sets'... we learn that organizing habit by rote, it's survival after all... but the ecstatic experience arises when the categories are insufficent to house the perception, and it bursts the floodgates ... maybe a great work of art, an un-classifiable piece of music.. a pigeon that won't fit the hole.
but there's another way as well, we can try to move the holes... hide the bookkeeper's log... force ourselves to examine perception before it gets shelved, and to savour it afresh .... in that way, perhaps even the simplest experience can become profoundly ecstatic, all on it's own
small children don't need art
I suppose it can be forgiven(?) if the standard response to a sublime moment is to lay it at the feet of whatever local deity happens by as it hands over the reigns and simultaneously relieves us of the responsibility for our own happiness. I quite like the 'Fat Pigeon' analogy but I suspect that method two is the answer, as it would remove the accidental aspect and we could take the credit, and the resposibility for our own responses.
Post a Comment