This is the Sixth in a series of articles that examine nine “scientific facts” that require a new theological response.

Read First Article: What we can Know about the Universe
Read Second Article: Homo Sapiens, God, and the Evolving Universe
Read Third Article: From the Very Big to the Very Small
Read Fourth Article: Undeserved Suffering
Read Fifth Article: The World We Create
 
Reflection Number 6: A Zone by any other name…
 
We all have experiences in our life that go beyond the ordinary, and they go by many names that you have no doubt heard: flow, peak experience, in the zone, Now, non-duality, direct experience, non-reflexive experience, the holy, cosmic Thou. They are spoken of by everyone from sports announcers to Buddhist monks. The different words have specific connotations to their individual proponents, but they all come close to meaning the same thing.

The easiest way to understand them is to look at some possible situations. For example:

You laugh uncontrollably.
You become totally absorbed in the fury of a thunderstorm.
You are shocked by a beggar in the subway.
You discover that a friend has just died, and cannot restrain the tears.
A baby smiles at you, and you reflexively smile back.
You suddenly realize the solution to your problem.
You are captivated by the starry sky above.
You don’t remember scoring those three baskets to win the game.
You feel at one with your surroundings.

The list goes on and on. Every event in our life has the potential to become a “moment”. These are times when we are not analyzing a situation or thinking about an experience, but rather simply living the experience. It is something that happens to us, rather than it being the result of our intention. We are basically passive and not active, whole and not divided, being at one with ourselves and what is happening to us. In the moment we overcome distinctions between ourselves and our experience, not by flying through space and occupying the same place, but by experiencing directly rather than thinking about experiencing. For example, you hear some good music and start tapping your feet. Subconsciously, your body begins to internalize the rhythm. The event was not deliberate; it just happened. In all such events, we are enveloped in a total experience that shatters our private little world. In them we overcome divisions and find a unity not only within ourselves, but also with our experience. There is no hidden agenda, be it conscious or subconscious. We are really all there. And it can happen any time, any place, in conjunction with anything.

I don’t think that we can make moments happen. You cannot get out of bed in the morning and decide you will have a moment or two that day. It’s something that happens to us. On the other hand, we can be receptive. We can be open to moments, even though we can’t make them happen. The most self-centered person you can imagine can be invaded by a moment at any time, but it would seem that a person who is open and receptive will experience many more such events than a person who is not.

I find it dismaying that I can’t hold onto moments, but I think I know what happens. Quite simply, it is because our world that we talked about in the previous essay re-establishes its hold over us. In its gentlest form, this means that we just start thinking about other things. The fury of the storm abates, and we go back to whatever we were doing prior to its arrival. The baby smiles, you smile back… and then she cries! I hit a great “unconscious” stroke with my #4 iron, and then I start to analyze my swing. Electro-encephalograms on pro golfers show little activity during the swing; those on duffers are all over the place. I imagine that the same would be true of any athlete- or artist, writer, composer, dancer, orator, etc- who is in the zone. We lose the moment by thinking.

But I also believe that in other situations our world regains its control by doing what it does so well: it fits the experience into categories it has already created. We don’t like intrusions, so we tuck them away on the “correct” mental shelf, maintaining our sense of order- even at the cost of accuracy. So, for example, you are encountered by a beggar in the subway, and your world is momentarily shattered, but pretty soon the experience is fit into your interpretive framework. “Oh, yes, starting tomorrow I really must do something about poverty…” One minute you are lost in the intensity of a thunderstorm, experiencing a moment, the next minute you are comparing the storm to others you have seen, analyzing, comparing…We do not like to be out of control: our world regains its footing and the moment is lost.

Lest we fail to appreciate the significance of moments invading worlds, think of Siddharta Gautama, the Buddha-to-be. According to legend, he was a young prince, isolated from the world by a father who wanted to protect his son from experiencing the misery of life. But one day, as he was looking out the window, he saw a sick person, and suddenly realized that people could become ill. Another day, while looking out the window, he saw an old person, and realized that his young, handsome, and princely body would not always be the way it was. And again he looked out and saw a person who had died, becoming aware of death for the first time. In the fourth experience of looking out the window, he saw a monk who had dedicated himself to searching for the truth. These experiences, be they historical or mythological, point to moments in life when the Buddha-to-be realized he was living in a dark mental cave, and vowed to seek enlightenment.

Great moments in history have been formative not only in the history of Buddhism, but for Christianity as well. We read in the New Testament book of Acts about a person named Stephen, who became a follower of Jesus shortly after the crucifixion, and was soon stoned to death because of his faith in Jesus. As Stephen was being stoned, Paul, soon to become the greatest Christian missionary of all time, was standing at a short distance witnessing the event. Paul was educated and trained in Jewish law, and because of his absolute devotion to the Jewish religion, he was a relentless persecutor of Christians. After the stoning, Paul was en route to Damascus, purportedly to arrest more disciples of Jesus, when he had an experience of light in the sky and became blind and disoriented. Paul wrote later that this was, for him, an encounter with the risen Christ. There is no doubt in my mind that as Paul was watching Stephen being executed, and as Paul was experiencing his own persecution of these Christians, some extremely powerful forces were at work within him that later manifested themselves in a literal, physical blindness as well as a disorientation about who he was. Paul’s world had been invaded in a moment, and the real world would never be the same.

This may sound like a theologian talking, but I believe that moments are those times when we bump into the Thou-ness of the universe. We become one with ourselves and with our circumstances, and accept it as a gift. Call it god, or not. We don’t have to name it, just experience it. We don’t have to have faith in it. We don’t have to believe in it. We can just smile about it, knowing that something special has occurred.

Not all moments are earth-shattering, but they are all important because they have the power to change our lives, to open our minds, to see life in a new way. Perhaps the greatest help in both overcoming worlds as well as enhancing receptivity to moments is community, to which we will turn in our next reflection.
Read Seventh Article: How Other Persons Affect Us
Read Eighth Article: Who am I?