I, MONASTERY: A SHORT STORY

Olney Pack, the chairman of the enlightenment studies department at Ohio Island University had been on an enlightenment retreat up in the Adirondack Mountains in New York but here, after the six-hour return trip, was crossing the causeway back onto the island. It was as he passed the high lighthouse on the northern tip of the island, though, the lighthouse in the shape of a standing Buddha, that he had, all of a sudden, the breakthrough that he had spent the whole of the past week looking for, meditating on. In a nutshell, while there was a unitive experience to be had, where one could feel one's inner energy field as having no boundary, there was inexplicably something else.

Turning left onto River Boulevard which would take him down to the college, a maneuver that, luckily, steadied his mind just when he needed it, he went on to reflect on this "something else." He hated the word "God," since it was the loaded term of all loaded terms, a word with all kinds of baggage, but he didn't know what else to call it. Eckhart Tolle, the contemporary spiritual teacher, said he often used the word "Being" instead. Yet this wasn't quite right either. Still the name was not as important as the experience itself. Alas, though, this too was hard to nail down. Descriptions such as joy, love, peace were too trite, too worn out to do it justice.

The real eye opener for him, meanwhile, was that this something else, while it was interwoven with it, was not the external world of material phenomena. This was not pantheism. The universe was all one energy, true enough, but this something else was a different energy altogether. And, from his sense of it, it did not create the universe. The universe was never created. It always was and always would be, moving in and out of manifestation in a never-ending cycle.

He rolled down the window and took a long deep breath of the river air. Up ahead the arching gates leading onto the campus could just be seen, but would only be visible for another ten minutes, fifteen at best, as the evening river fog was rolling in. No matter. His intention was to drive on by. Working at the university again was out of the question now. Had he known that the retreat in the Adirondacks would lead to this shift in him, that it would produce this revelation, the last of it coming as he made that turn onto the island, he would never have attended it. Enlightenment retreats were not supposed to yield enlightenment. "All I want to do is join a monastery after this," he chuckled. "Except that I am the monastery now."

THE VIEW OF MYSTICS

What is the nature of Reality, that which ultimately IS? How much is our picture of it, what we know, or think we know, dependent on what we are able to see of it with our very limited range of perception? May it not be at least a possibility that, if our range of perception were enlarged, we should see it quite differently?

Mystics have been found in all ages, in all parts of the world and in all religious systems. Out of their experience and their reflection on it have come the following assertions:

1. This phenomenal world of matter and individual consciousness is only a partial reality and is the manifestation of a Divine Ground in which all partial realities have their being.

2. It is the nature of us humans that not only can we have knowledge of this Divine Ground by inference, but also we can realize it by direct intuition, superior to discursive reason, in which the knower is in some way united with the known.

3. Our nature is not a single but a dual one. We have not one but two selves, the phenomenal ego, of which we are chiefly conscious and which we tend to regard as our true self, and a non-phenomenal, eternal self, an inner person, the spirit, the spark of divinity within us, which is our true self. It is possible for us, if we so desire and are prepared to make the necessary effort, to identify ourselves with our true self and so with the Divine Ground, which is of the same or like nature.

4. It is the chief end of our earthly existence to discover and identify ourselves with our true self. By doing so, we will come to an intuitive knowledge of the Divine Ground and so apprehend Truth as it really is, and not as to our limited human perceptions it appears to be. Not only that, we will enter into a state of being which has been given different names, eternal life, salvation, enlightenment, etc.

All this rests on two fundamental convictions:

1. Though it may be to a great extent atrophied and exist only potentially in most, we possess an organ or faculty which is capable of discerning spiritual truth, and, in its own spheres, this faculty is as much to be relied on as are other organs of sensation in theirs.

2. In order to be able to discern spiritual truth, we are, in our essential nature, spiritual; in order to know That which is called God, we are, in some way, partakers of the divine nature; potentially at least there is some kinship between God and our soul. This is to say, we are not creatures set over against God. We participate in the divine life; we are, in a real sense, "united" with God in our essential nature, for, as the Flemish contemplative, the Blessed John Ruysbroeck, put it:

"This union is within us of our naked nature and were this nature to be separated from God it would fall into nothingness."

This is the faith of mystics. It springs out of their personal experience and reflection on that experience. It implies a particular view of the nature of the universe and of humans, even though this view may conflict with other conceptions they have.

To this latter point, there is a poem by the late Latin poet and philosopher, Boethius, which, translated, opens as follows:

This discord in the pact of things,
This endless war 'twixt truth and truth,
That singly held, yet give the lie
To him who seeks to hold them both...

This is to say, in the world, constituted as it is, we humans are faced not with one single truth but with several truths, not with one but with several pictures of Reality. We are thus conscious of a "discord in the pact of things," whereby to hold to one truth seems to be to deny another. One part of our experience draws to one, another to another. It has been the eternal quest of humankind to find the one ultimate Truth, that final synthesis in which all partial truths are resolved. It may be that mystics have glimpsed this synthesis.

THE MINISTER: A SHORT STORY

An old man now, he was thin, remembering that he was not always so, was not always old, and was not always thin. It had to do, he said, with the drop in his testosterone level when he turned 50, or maybe 55, and with it a loss of his muscle mass, not that he had that much to lose, but he had a fair bit. Compared to most, he had a lot actually. What intrigued him was that he was not distressed by it, in contrast to when he was younger, when the absence of even one pound had him feverishly lifting more weights and eating a whole lot more food. It was, he said, as if he feared dying. As it happened, he WAS dying, had been dying from the day he was born, except that he only just now saw it.

I watched him pull up a picture of himself on his laptop, the same picture I had of him in my mind, a photo of him as a young man, with much shorter hair than the long gray locks he had these days. When he was a young man he wanted to be a minister. That was when his life got in the way. Now that his life was no longer in the way, he was becoming a minister.