Part Forty One

Talk given at the second Worship convocation, St. Michael’s, Maryland.

When Ramakrishna touched the Divine, he sat in a speechless trance for six months. When he had a vision of Jesus, he wept for three days.

Ramakrishna had spent his life working in the temples of Kali and being trained by priests and pilgrims alike; he’d been on a spiritual trail for decades before Tota Puri shoved him that last little bit into the arms of the Divine.

And still, a six-month trance. Three days of weeping.

I am telling you this because it is possible that you might someday have your own experience of the Divine.

I doubt it. In all candor, the fact that you are here tells me that you are striving hard to know the Divine and that means you probably will not be able to master the final lesson, which is humility – that to know the Divine you must first give up seeking to know the Divine. It is downright un-American to do anything with the idea that you’re not worthy, and if you subtract humility from the equation then the idea that to find you must stop seeking just becomes New Age babble.

But let’s assume that I’m wrong and you’re right and you stop seeking and become as a child. And you have that transcendent experience we’re all here talking about.

What then?

In modern English the term “ecstasy” implies unadulterated pleasure, but the ecstatic experience of touching the Divine is not pleasurable. It is terrible. It is wrenching. It is… well, transcendent. I’m not sure how else to put it. It will strain your mind to the breaking point. By definition the Truth that you encounter will be beyond your ability to comprehend it. Even though you are that Truth, our intellects are far too limited to grasp 99% of what we are exposed to in that timeless moment that we see the fundamental reality of the Divine.

It will, to be blunt, screw you up almost beyond repair. As much work as you put into seeing and following the path to the Divine you can never be fully prepared for it. There are hermitages and monastery cells all around the planet filled with gibbering anchorites who found the Divine and went mad as a result. You will be speechless for a time afterwards because what you have encountered cannot, for obvious reasons, be put into words. There was a time when people were more accustomed to divine madness, and were better able to deal with it, culturally. We're not those people. In modern America, there's really just one kind of insane; that your particular mental illness was caused by the Divine and not by too little lithium in your blood is really not relevant. Nuts is nuts.

Think about it – once the direct experience of something has passed, then the way we know that something is by the use of symbols. Right? These symbols may not be words – they may be physical sensations, or notes, or colors, or images, or smells, or tastes – but they exist in our minds, as symbols of what has passed. And the only symbols our minds understand are those rooted in the physical world. All symbolic thought – which is to say, all of our conscious thought, all that makes us sentient beings, self-aware and aware that we are aware – is rooted in the five senses. This is something that philosophers like Locke figured out centuries ago. People like Noam Chomsky rephrase it in terms of semiotics, but it’s not a new concept. Conscious thought is expressed in symbols that depend upon the notion of a physical reality to have meaning. This is something the Buddhists, in particular, understood well.

But the Divine transcends the physical. Therefore you have no symbols with which to describe it. No words, no images, no notes. No touch, taste, smell. Your mind is left struggling with this experience which has overwhelmed it and for which it has no… no process, no tools for processing.

You will be able to suppress the memory somewhat. But just barely. It’s too powerful. Psychiatrists tell us that repressed childhood traumas express themselves in strange ways during our adulthood. Well, whatever childhood trauma you’ve experienced, the conscious awareness of the Divine is more traumatic. And more powerful. And when you try to deny it and squelch it and pretend it didn’t happen, it festers. It gnaws. It corrodes your mind like an acid volcano; you can let it explode, or you can keep a lid on it, but either way it’s going to rip you apart.

Let me tell you what doesn’t work to fix this problem.

Drugs, including alcohol, don’t work. You might be able to manage brief moments of weightlessness, where you don’t CARE that there’s an acid volcano stripping away your sanity, but the drugs will be increasingly ineffective until you’re back to making a joke of the whole thing by killing yourself.

Flight doesn’t work. It sounds odd, but everyone has the impulse to run. You associate what happened with where it happened, or who was with you when it happened, and you have this irrational urge to just get away from the scene of the crime in the hopes that a little distance will fix things. It doesn’t, for obvious reasons: the thing you’re running from is you, after all.

There are only two things that seem to work, and they both have their pros and cons.

One is to immediately resume walking upon the path that led you to the Divine to begin with. This can be very hard to do, and it seems counterintuitive – you want some distance between you and that awful crushing Truth that you stumbled upon. But if there are rites and rituals that have become habit to you, returning to them will be soothing. And the circling of the Divine that the path necessarily entails will help sort of step you down from the ledge; you wean yourself instead of dropping it cold turkey.

Like I said, this is hard for most people to accept. They want it out of them, they don’t want to start the non-search again.

Which brings me to the second option, one which I discovered sort of by accident but which explains the abundance of inaccurate roadmaps to the Divine that we have.

You can talk the damn thing to death.

When it happens to you, you will reflect upon what I just said and laugh derisively. Because… well, because of what I said earlier. The symbols we use are so utterly inadequate to describe something which transcends the physical that every attempt seems like a caricature, at best. You are taking the square pegs of that Divine experience and trying to fit them into the round holes of your conscious, symbolic thought.

Do it anyhow. Hammer on those square pegs until you force them into those holes. It will stretch the holes out some and at the same time shear the sharp edges off of those pegs.

It doesn’t have to be words. Whatever form of expression you’re most comfortable with. Dance. Sing. Paint. Whatever. Do it, and start doing it right away.

What happens is this: the inadequate, inaccurate, misleading caricature of the experience that you create symbolically will start to supplant the real thing in your mind. Even as you recognize that this symbolic version is little more than a parody of the real thing. But this symbolized version of Truth is something your mind can handle. And you will slowly neutralize that acid.

At the same time your reformed, easier-to-swallow version of events will serve as both a guidebook and a barrier to having the experience all over again. A guidebook, because now you’ve done it once and so you have a better idea of what the journey entails. But a barrier, because now your mind has this misleading, dumbed-down idea of the Divine that it clings to like a life preserver.

You might re-encounter the Divine later. That’s so strange to say. As if you would run into God walking down the street, hey, God, haven’t seen you in awhile. You never stop encountering the Divine. Let's say, then, you might again have a full realization of the Divine. That’s better. And after your brain can’t take it anymore and you are spit back into ordinary limited consciousness you will have to go through the same exercise. And you’ll come up with a different inaccurate rendition of the experience. But now you can use the two different flawed symbolic versions of Reality to help you triangulate on the Truth.

This is, really, all that Worship is. We take the flawed symbolic renditions of Truth that other survivors of the Divine have left behind, and we use them to try to figure out where we’re supposed to be looking. Lots of people find the Divine just by using the Bible, or the Koran, or, hell, the Sermon of the Flower. No one source did it for me -- I needed a little bit of everything to find my way.