The Blurry Dream House

 

 

 

For the spirit fills the darkness of the heavens,

It fills the endless yearning of the soul.

It lives within a star too far to dream of,

It lives within each part and is the whole.

 

It’s the fire and the wings that fly us home.

 

                                                                       Joe Henry

 

A few weeks ago my wife and I purchased property adjacent to our own in northern Vermont.  It consists of 21 acres of tiered meadows alongside wooded hillsides and ravines.  A small, two-story house sits along the road that leads from nearby Lowell Village up Hazen's Notch, a mountain passage to Montgomery Center.  The dwelling shares this plot with a large, dilapidated barn and an old sugar house, as well as an apple orchard of about 40, closely packed trees.  It is, for me, a dream come true.  I don’t mean “a dream” in the sense of surpassing joy.  No, this whole project looms as a kind of onus involving tasks, chores, and nuisances added to a life that contains as many of each as I feel like I need.  Rather, it is the crystallization, in a sense, of an actual, recurring, nocturnal dream that has haunted my sleep for decades. 

 The dream takes two forms around a consistent theme.  In one version, I suddenly remember in my slumbering state that my wife and I own another home about which I had completely forgotten, and in my dream I am visiting it.  The house itself is always rural, sometimes in the countryside, or sometimes it’s an old, picturesque home on a village commons.  In either case I’m thrilled to pay a visit and I look upon the house in utter astonishment, bewildered that I forgot that it existed and it was ours.  The image is always blurred and the dream never lasts long.  I inevitably wake up and ponder with disappointment that the experience was “just a dream.”  

A similar recurring dream that hasn’t come around in years, involves the home of my childhood.  In this familiar dwelling I stumble upon a room of which I was previously unaware.  I wander through the newly discovered space in excited incredulity that I had never previously realized its existence.  The frustration that emerges from both dreams and follows me to my awakened state is the brevity of my visit to the new or forgotten realm.  I don’t have time to overcome my astonishment and examine the details.  I fervently want to go back to sleep, return to the dream, and continue my explorations.  I have read that such dreams are not uncommon and represent a desire to re-integrate a lost aspect of the self, perhaps rooted in something like nostalgia.  Another popular interpretation is that the newly discovered room represents suppressed emotions or stifled spiritual awareness coming to the fore.  These explanations possess an aura of truth but they also strike me as incomplete and ultimately inadequate.   

The emotions/sensations that surround my nocturnal experiences and their aftermath are ineffable and fleeting, but real.  Occasionally, during my waking hours, an indescribable “flavor of being” penetrates me, completely out of the blue.  It’s not an image, it’s not a linguistic message, but rather an ambiance familiar to me as having accompanied a recent dream.  It lingers a moment, then wanes.  I try to grasp it, detain it for closer inspection, but usually in vain.  A piece of the connected dream might come to the fore, a snippet of the forgotten home for instance, but often not.  I liken the experience to the quickly dissipating perfume that tarries for just a moment after a lovely woman passes by and disappears into the crowd.  But a fleeting fragrance is superficial and blatant.  The “dream flavor” is subtle and deep.  It is, by my reckoning, a glimpse into the profound depth of inner space, no less voluminous and extensive than outer.  This realm  is accessible to each and every one of us; our dream world is one portal.  The forgotten house, the newly discovered room - they exist and await our arrival.  The familiar framework in which we carry out our daily lives is but one aspect of a much greater reality.   

 

Science Dogma

           Modern science denies all of the above.  “Experience,” according to mainstream science, is the product of a conglomeration of dumb, colliding particles that happened upon a configuration that resulted in cleverly creative brains.  Brains, by some mysterious process, then manufacture the surround-sound, touchy-feely, IMAX theater “show” of experience.  It’s all a happy accident.  The same scientists that promulgate this idea also lament that when they scrutinize the fine details of matter of which, by their account, the universe is composed … it disappears.  They just can’t pin the damn stuff down!  The so-called particles, they find, are actually intangible fields of energy whose actions are governed by probabilities, nothing like colliding billiard balls.  No actual “thing” manifests until the process is witnessed by a conscious entity.  So, here’s the conundrum:  matter, which they tell us comes to fruition only in the presence of consciousness, nonetheless, according to them, is the origin of that same consciousness.  The model is self-contradictory.  They admit that they don’t know the mechanism by which matter produces conscious experience, but they promise that it does and “someday soon” they’ll figure it all out.  They haven’t yet and they never will because they have the cart before the horse.  

The debate between material vs. mind as fundamental to reality has been waged on an uneven playing field for at least a century.  The accredited media of science are peer-reviewed journals related to a myriad of disciplines.  Authors submit their experimental findings and conclusions to a board of overseers for each periodical.  These overseers decide what will or will not be published.  From the mid-1900s until recent decades, any submission that suggested that the universe arose from anything but a materialist foundation was rejected outright.  The word, “consciousness,”  appearing in a paper used in any way to suggest it might be fundamental to reality was an immediate disqualifier for publication.  The irony here is that the originators of quantum theory, which encapsulates the enigmatic mechanics that describe the actions of elemental matter, were themselves non-materialists.  Neils Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrödinger, to cite a few examples, believed that consciousness lay at the root of existence.  But, as mid-twentieth century technological marvels emerged from scientific breakthroughs, bestowing unprecedented wealth upon certain individuals and countries, scientists were told not to ponder deep questions concerning matter and consciousness, just keep bringing us the innovative goodies.  “Shut up and calculate,” was the mantra of the day.   

 

Religious Dogma 

Popular religious thought in the Western world became heavily influenced by those who interpret their affiliated scripture that features an extrinsic deity as literal doctrine.  These documents consist of an amalgam of handed-down oral accounts that were reduced to writing by many authors who lived thousands of years ago.  They have been rewritten, edited, amended, altered, and redacted in thousands of iterations since.  The Catholic Church, guided by disparate motives, not all pure, determined which of these writings comprise the official canon.   Proponents twist themselves in knots to rationalize away obvious inconsistencies within the texts.  They also vehemently dispute, with no evidentiary support, any scientific assertion that contradicts biblical accounts.  Emergent dogma is inculcated into youth of the tribe from birth and adherence is sometimes rigorously enforced.  Christians not only deny human divinity, they characterize themselves as congenitally evil, pathetic sinners who require salvation by the graces of a “God” of their own creation.  As Rice University humanities professor, Jeffrey Kripal, puts it, “We [project] our own divinity and our own immortality outside of ourselves and then [bow] down as if we’re some kind of servants or slaves to this monarch in the sky.”  In other words, we worship an idol that we manufactured and in so doing lose sight of our true essence.  

This misapprehension is fraught with pitfalls and dangers, for a picture of the sun pasted over the windowpane obscures the rays of the actual sun.  The manufactured, extrinsic deity readily absorbs and then conveniently reflects cultural prejudices.  He is always a male.  He favors “our” country.  He holds “our” opinions and moral inclinations.  “We” can prove this by citing passages in religious scripture that support our contention (while ignoring contradictory passages).  There is no question, according to proponents, that this supreme authority (who we created thousands of years ago) dictated his moral agenda to chosen human representatives.  This is BAD … from the tacit, seemingly innocuous, message conveyed by the football player who points to the sky after scoring a touchdown, to the outrageous claims of Christian clergy and politicians that Hurricane Katrina was an expression of “God’s wrath" on New Orleans because of the city’s tolerance of gays.  These examples lie at each end of the spectrum of misleading and dangerous religious assumptions surrounding a human-created, extrinsic “God.”  The gamut also encompasses lives of wasted sacrifice, deferred responsibility, purchased indulgences, pious self-righteousness, and crusades.  

The institutions who claim to have the ear of and enjoy favors bestowed by this manufactured “God” wield their power in self-serving ways.  The “Ten Commandments” are prominently displayed, a not so tacit declaration of our country’s “official” religion.  A lapel-pin flag declares the wearer a citizen of the nation that is “under God,”  the only truly righteous nation on Earth, the one nation that deserves to dominate the planet.   This extrinsic “God” will brook no challenge to “His” authority.  There is no subtlety in the passage from Exodus, “I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me.”  Whoa!  In other words,   “I’m kickin’ ass and takin’ names, and you damn well better capitalize the first letter of all references to Me, cuz it really pisses Me off when you don’t!  Keep it up and I won’t hesitate to have your toddler granddaughter run over by a bus.”  

 

Chosen Sides 

Physicalist scientists erect hard boundaries around reality that exclude the plethora of data that shouts that there is so much more.  Millions of people have witnessed phenomena considered impossible by conventional parameters.  When I confronted an atheist friend with this fact recently, he blithely declared that all of these reports, if examined, are readily solved with prosaic explanations.  He considers himself “open-minded” and would be insulted if I suggested otherwise, but he is, in fact, incurious, lacking the slightest ambition to examine the evidence himself.  He is quite comfortable, thank you, in his physicalist easy chair, often wrong but never uncertain.  

Another friend recently told me that “... the Bible is the only book you ever need.”  He is committed to the extrinsic “God” that looms above, watches, and keeps a naughty and nice list.  "God" listens to my friend’s prayers, and He might look favorably upon a request but only if His Ass is kissed properly and even then it’s still a “maybe.”  My friend’s universe was created a few thousand years ago, just as the “Good Book” implies.  He dismisses scientific folderol such as cosmology and evolution theory, without an iota of curiosity to explore alternatives to his rock-solid world view.  He is oh-so comfortable in his church pew, clutching a teddy-bear god who might, at the slightest provocation, turn into a dragon.    

  

The Divine Human Alternative 

What if immortality and divinity reside in each and every one of us?  There is a big difference between praying to an extrinsic idol to save your sorry soul, on one hand, and looking within yourself for a divine center of wisdom and inspiration, on the other.  Inner alignment is the brass ring as opposed to a negotiated solution, for there is no bargaining with intrinsic divinity.  When confrontation is called for, intestinal fortitude provides strength and courage more reliably than the hoped-for assistance of a big brother.  A trustworthy inner compass, unlike a fancy GPS on the dashboard, will never lose its signal.  The advice that Polonius, in Shakespeare's, Hamlet, bestows upon his son, Laertes, holds surpassing wisdom, “This above all, to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.”  

The remembered house and the newly discovered room of my dreams are the inner universe that beckons.  It is mysterious, hazy, and hard to get at; and so is the reality in which we dwell.  Comedian, Mitch Hedburg, jokes that the reason no one can get a good photo of Bigfoot is because he actually IS blurry.   From Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle” to Einstein’s disdained “spooky action at a distance,” the universe is likewise blurry.  Reality fails to conform to the simple notion of objects in a box. The more stark and clear the concept, the less accurately it portrays reality, and a box of toys supplied by a Santa-in-the-Sky is about as simplistic as it gets. 

To enter the blurry dream house, one must be willing to give up the comfort of certitude.  The sacrifice won’t be for naught, for adventure awaits.  Ponder a world in which nothing is sacred except for the divinity that dwells within each of us: not Jesus, not Muhammud, not Yahweh, or the Buddha, Mother Mary, or any of the sanctified saints.  There simply is no external idol to worship and pay homage to.  Transcendence resides within you.  And when you say, “I came into this world,” know that you did not.  You came out of it, a sequel to the world's creation, and trillions of worlds like it, that emerged out of the dust of exploding stars.  You issued from the same factory, not as a separate, isolated, static self, but rather like a wave that arises from the sea.  The elements of your being, refractions of fundamental consciousness, move in and out as your process evolves.  Just as you can never enter the same river twice, the dynamic called “You” ever transforms as the wave furls and unfolds, sharing the vast ocean with every other wave.  

Contemplate the above but don’t try to grasp it, for you can no more do so than you can clutch a handful of the sea.  Just watch it.  Go with the flow.  Ponder it within the realm of a quiet mind, the same way you behold the sunset.  The clouds of your thoughts move across the panorama as you take in the brilliance of the sky beyond.  You can’t stop the clouds or your thoughts from arising, so why bother trying?  Observe them with dispassionate equanimity.  This is the Self from which to sally forth to embrace the world around you, for the embraced world grants entrance its inner parlor only to the smitten suitor, not the confronting lout.  It beguiles, charms, and seduces its lover, revealing secrets that it conceals from the brute beating upon the door.  This is the love affair with life that awaits those who dispense with the fabricated, extrinsic replica that they have clutched forever.  No retribution will follow, for that ersatz God was never alive.