Think small

You know those meditative exercises that have you expanding out? Puffing yourself out with each breath, pushing the boundaries of yourself to the room, the house, the surroundings, out and out until you are infinite, one with the Infinite?

Try the opposite instead. Try feeling small. Sense the boundaries of your body, or whatever is the minimal you, maybe the core of your breathing self, and let everything outside of that be the great Other. Get small, sense your smallness and the greatness of everything outside you. Know that you are an infinitesimal piece in an infinite puzzle.

I am finding something right about this.

I am writing under the influence of a book, James Kugel’s wonderful memoir, In the Valley of the Shadow, which I mentioned a few days ago. Kugel came upon his own sense of smallness under dire circumstance: receiving the cancer death sentence of 2-3 years (which he outlived). He describes how the sense came on: “The background music suddenly stopped. It had always been there, the music of daily life, the music of infinite time and possibilities and now suddenly it was gone, replaced by nothing, just silence.”

The sense was not threatening, however; it inspired awe, and a quest: was this feeling somehow related to the origins of religion, the human capacity to believe in God? Kugel is a biblical scholar.

In steps too complicated to relate here--a scholarly and scientific exploration but always tied to his own experience--Kugel walks back into early human consciousness and then forward into the modern sense of self. He imagines how God or gods at one time must have seemed to lurk just on the other side of the curtain that separates the tiny human from everything else in the world. He shows how the evolution of human control over our environment contributed to distancing ourselves from the sense of divine presence—which must often have been more frightening than comforting.

“Back then we fit snugly into our place in a world that was overwhelmed by divinity, and even if the forms in which the divine presented itself to us—the successful hunt or harvest, the encounter with a mysterious stranger—were necessarily drawn from the world of our own experience (a bit like the sights and sounds of a dream), such was simply the way in which the great, underlying divine presence made itself known to us.”

It is the “big, clumsy modern self” that is unusual, an aberration, with our sense of control and our own significance and for whom “that meeting next Thursday afternoon is so important.” It is our modern way of seeing ourselves, Kugel speculates, that robs us of the possibility of experiencing divine presence.

Kugel paints a nuanced picture of the very un-nuanced world of religious experience, which he calls “starkness”—awe, ecstasy, conversion experiences, knowledge of good and evil, sheer awareness of the Other.  “Of course, dreams,” he writes, “are the prime real estate of starkness.”

Of course.

In dreams we shed our big, clumsy, modern selves and become cartoon characters in wild dramas not of our own making. Anything can happen. Sometimes the curtain lifts and the bush burns, the divine presence blinds us.