I’m very concerned that our society is much more interested with information than wonder. Fred Rogers
We have unwittingly exchanged the active experience of being alive in the present for living in a dank library filled with atomized facts that we read not with just our eyes, but with our whole physical bodies. We willingly plug ourselves into a matrix of technology and information that, given the right combination, can summon fleeting fulfillment of our selfish desires: popularity, prosperity, pleasure, and power.
These four pillars serve as the supports that bear the table of lifeless and soul-less reductionism where we spend our lives attempting to put together the one-million piece puzzle from the box of pieces that, even if accomplished, would result only in a flattened and ghoulishly carved representation of the real world that awaits us in plain sight – if only we would just turn around, leave the puzzle behind, and embark on a journey of adventure, purpose, and meaning.
We live in blueprints rather than homes. We exchange the territory for the map and the symphony for the sheet music, both of which can be neatly tucked into our day planners. We have abandoned the rapture of a starry night for a lifeless book where the front cover has faded under the white-washed sky of light pollution, the back cover boasts of the data contained within, and the pages between them offer not stories, but columns and charts, distances and densities, enormity and expansion.
We have stripped sacred symbols of their resonance and reduced them to tokens and trinkets to buy, sell, or appropriate for monetary gain. Two-handed scrolls enchant no longer, now lost to mindless single-handed scrolling. Pythagoras marveled at meaning in mathematics, envisioning the number one as the symbol for unity and ten for perfection. He found astonishing connections between music and ratio. But now hear the name Pythagoras and all we can muster is a-squared plus b-squared = c-squared as a formula to conquer algebra tests and solve occasional problems. Mathematics are now mere means to ends.
We have wandered from wonder, only to wonder why we wander.
Today, we delve deeply into the hope that this wretched wasteland in which we wander is not our home – the hope that we may yet wake up and rise up and return to reverence, recapturing rapture and seizing the sublime.
Welcome back to wonder.
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Woe to him who cannot tell the difference between the fear of objective truth—a truth which exposes us to our lies in order to show us the fundamental love at the heart of reality—and the fear of the false universe which our world injects into us. Jacob Needleman
Gravity is an objective reality – it exists whether we are conscious of it or not. And gravity not only exists. It exerts. Its force acts upon us at all times. And as such, we construct our world in order to accommodate it – even when we aren’t conscious of it. At crucial times, to not have a keen awareness of the presence and power of gravity is to risk harm or death.
It is one thing to read in a book that the gravitational force exerted on a free-falling body results in an acceleration of that body of 9.8 m/s/s. It is quite another to thing to lose your footing on the precipice of a steep cliff and realize that if you don’t regain your balance immediately, you will be that free-falling body.
Our modern way of thinking has created a false dichotomy between truth and experience. We have become obsessed with the reduction of truth into facts: atomic sentences and numbers and equations that we can use as a periodic table of elements.
But this obsession holds no real power. No matter how well you know that two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen combine to form water, this fact will not help you when you are on your knees in the desert and dying of thirst.
Water is life, and your experience of consuming it is vital.
Spiritual truths exemplify this need for active participation even more deeply. A sacred text is not sacred because it reveals truth in written form. It is sacred when and only when the truth in the text connects the spirits of both reader and writer and the experience of sacred communion takes place.
Facts stripped of truth and immersive experience are lifeless at best and oppressive at worst. But when spirit meets truth – yours and the divine – you lose your mind and find your soul.
So if you’re stuck in your head and dying of thirst in a land of facts, it’s time to strike out on a new adventure.
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For Meditation
“The whole earth is filled with awe at your wonders; where morning dawns, where evening fades, you call forth songs of joy.” Psalms 65:8 NIV
The state of wonder….is itself a higher form of knowing than the explanations one subsequently seeks in the absence of that state…. If one steps out on a starry night and observes one’s inner state, one asks if one could hate or be overwhelmed by envy or resentment. … Is it not true that no man or woman has ever committed a crime while in a state of wonder? – Jacob Needleman
The reason we cannot seem to find ourselves in a state of wonder anymore is that we must lose ourselves to be in a state of wonder. The gateway into wonder has no room for the self, which is precisely what makes walking through it so wondrous.
Think back to a time to a moment when you were awestruck. Captivated. Swept away by wonder. In that moment – time ceases to exist. There is no past. No future. No desire. No ego. Anxiety does not exist here, because there is no you to feel it. The only thing that exists is the captivating subject of your attention that pulls you completely out of yourself. You are incapable of judging it. Evaluating it. Reducing it. All those forms of analysis require you to perform them. And in wonder, there is no you.
How can there be no you? No self? If there’s no you, then who is the observer? Who is the entity caught up in wonder if not you?
The answer is a paradox. The entity caught up in wonder is you. The real you. It is your naked soul, free of the ego and all of its entrapments. It is the being you long to be. That you were intended to be. That you are if you will just shed everything that attaches itself to you. To find yourself, you must lose yourself.
To be and not to be. That is the answer.
The question is how? How do we shed ourselves to enter through the gates of wonder and live in this state of being?
How can we marvel if we do not know how?
We follow the one who does.
Source Scripture
You Look Marvelous: John 5:19-30
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Extras
He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed. – Albert Einstein
Wonder is a quality of attention that rises above and outside normal rational thought. And once we have wonder flowing through us, we find ourselves with access to its tributaries: love, joy, peace, gratitude, and many others.
Today, in wide-eyed wonder, the goal is to get us through the wilderness of ego-driven attachments to that river. There, we can not only experience wonder in the present and future, but we can also reframe our past in a way that lets us reinterpret even the most painful moments through new lenses.
Source Scripture
Newborn Wonder: Luke 1:57-79
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Extras
Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy. – Joseph Campbell
Joy. We all want it. We chase it. We devise formulas to reproduce it. We do our best to seize hold of it.
But where is it?
Ask the wrong question and you will never find the right answer.
Joy is not something we chase, or concoct, or grasp. It is something to which we yield. In order to experience it, we must let go of what thwarts it.
You don’t find joy. You yield to it and it flows through you.
Source Scripture
Joy Flows When Souls Connect: Luke 1:39-56
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