Hopeful Thinking - Saturday, January 27, 2018 - A Pinstreak of Light

    Humanity’s relationship with and understanding of God is based on a limitless supply of limited information. All we know of God is what we can see through the keyhole. It seems impossibly dark in here. A bright light is definitely on in the other room. All we can see of it, however, is the narrow band of photons which miraculously hits the impossibly small target of our eye.
     It’s not much information to begin with. But worse, we’re all trying to see through the same keyhole at once. Crowding around it. The sides of our faces pressing hard against one another. So many trying to see. To verify. Each of us gets so little. Just a thin pinstreak of light. But our slender beam is entirely our own. No other eye can see through the opening at the exact angle we can. Just like no two views of a rainbow are exactly the same. What each looks like depends upon where you’re standing. In fact, each rainbow is in reality a series of individual rainbows in an amount exactly matching the number of eyes looking at it.
    Will you criticize your neighbor for not standing where you are, or seeing exactly what you see? Would you criticize them for nothing more than simply not being you? Your pinstreak of light is yours alone. So is theirs. Humility is remembering the fact that none of us holds all the truth. Confidence, a.k.a. peace, is being okay with that fact.
    Sometimes we have to learn the same lesson over and over before we really get it. We are ignorant. But we strive. How do you feel about your own ignorance? The limitations of your own pinstreak. Can you be at peace with it? Spiritual logic suggests as we become nonresistant to our ignorance we become receptive to wisdom. Let go.
    Don’t resist your ignorance. Better to make good use of it with the attitude of a beginner’s mind. It’s easier than trying so hard to have all the answers. Philosophy tells us peaceful minds have a tendency to attract peaceful environments. But what’s really happening is that a peaceful mind sees the peace which was always there. A peaceful mind sees through the darkness, sees beyond it, rather than looks at it.
    It might be useful to imagine that on some level you already know everything’ but just can’t remember it all. If we have deduced that we are eternal spiritual beings having a finite human experience, is it so much more of a stretch to imagine that our eternal selves have been around the block a few times? Might know a thing or two? How much wisdom do we really possess?
    Maybe life is like a corn maze. On the ground all we see is corn in all directions. We feel lost, but it’s an illusion. For when we look from above, we understand. Is the full knowledge of our souls truly lost to us, or merely veiled while human for a purpose we don’t understand? A corn maze we think is not of our own making, but we would be wrong.
    The best way to perhaps connect with that eternal knowledge — at least a bit more of it — is to simply acknowledge it’s there, and that it’s yours. Perhaps that collective unified body of knowledge, inside of which we somehow maintain both individuality and unity at the same time, is what we have chosen to call God. Heretical or not, the thought is fair. If true, even partly, we have only to tap into our unknowingness to access It.
    We know more of the solar system than we do of the sea. And yet we swim. We are driven to the water because we are made in its image. We do better when we respect and honor the sea than fear it. We feel encouraged when we acknowledge that it sustains us, ignorant though we may be fully as to how. We give thanks for its continuing abundance and the light which reflects from its surface.
    There is so much more that we do not know. Since it’s impossible for one person to know all things, we are compelled to work together. We are designed to both teach and learn. Our pinstreak of light may be our own and it’s all we get. But perhaps there is more than meets the eye.