Portrait of a Seeker: Born to Wonder (upcoming book excerpt)

Screen and stage actors get awards for loosing themselves in a role, by becoming another person by walking and thinking with that person’s thoughts.  We’re all doing that now, for God’s viewing pleasure.  To be “me,” this method actor or specialist would have to put in the real time that I’ve lived to date.  They’d have to experience each single event that happened in my life and react to all the happenings exactly as I have reacted.

So, there’s no hope?  For communicating to you, fair reader?  I don’t know.  I read things by an author and some have moved me profoundly.  My proximity to their outlook, in reading their considered mind-products (words) somehow affects me, changes me, creates a mood in me—and through this mood, I feel things I’ve never felt before, consider things previously unconsidered, and so on.  So there is hope.  For something.  And that’s remarkable.

Can God, or you, do both sides of this coin?  Walk the creature’s part and be the impartial witness of animal tracks left in the snow?  Maybe he can.  Maybe he does.  Maybe you can.  Maybe we are bits of God, doing just that.  In a hundred years I won’t be here.  I’ll be gone like I never was.  There’ll be a faded echo.  My speculations will be… old tracks left somewhere.  Maybe not quite brushed out yet.  Maybe obliterated immediately by a necessary construction project.  Where will that leave me?  Where does my understanding of the coming and going life process leave me now?  What am I left with?  What is my place now, in this place I find myself in? 

That kind of thinking is what drove me to look for some solid answer to life while I was here.  I wanted to know what was the real overview.  I knew the various over-moods I could look at my life from.  They were shifting like a kaleidoscope with the currents of my perceptions and ponderings, but they weren’t a final perspective.  I sensed strongly that there was a final perspective, one which would answer everything.  From the shot of my dad’s death, to the rumblings of the avalanche that calved away from the cliffs of myself, I found myself asking, “What?  What?..  I wanted to know the meaning of life.  I seriously doubt that many people who hear me say this know what I mean.  Unless they, too, are driven by the condition that these words point to, they couldn’t possibly know.  But they’ll say they know, they’ll think they know—and they’ll assume a lot, write me off and misunderstand everything.  I am positive of this because this is what I do to others.  I’m so sure.  I hear what they say and I judge it (condemn it) from my position of view.

What is the meaning of life?  Who ever finds the answer to that question?  Who ever dedicates themselves to the search for the answer?  Well, for these questions, I would answer, “Me…and me.”  In the beginning of my active answer-seeking period, I totally disregarded people who were sure beyond any doubt, who knew that there was no answer (they knew that the world was flat) to my question because I felt the pull, the sureness that there was something big that felt like it resided in the place where that question was leaning.  I didn’t have it, but I knew I could feel it.

A picture can be put together, of this animal speaking in its head to you.  But…  What?  No… it won’t represent me.  It never could—could it?  Could even an omnipotent, all-knowing God know me?  No, (I say, defiantly).  Not without living in my own, personal shoes.  Even God would be just a God-finger pointing down at a little inconsequential moon named David.  The pointing finger is not the moon, remember?  Words describing the moon are not the moon, the actual me, the ultimate tangible moon-ness.  

From the other side, can I, the moon know my own moon-ness?  Can I see myself, the forest, for the tree—my total identification with myself—in my eye?  “I” cannot see myself.  Let alone see myself as others do.  So I need a specialist, a teacher, a preacher, a guru to help me with my problems, some tell us.  That specialist has something that I haven’t got—distance, perspective, detachment--a better viewpoint.  

I "need" a therapist that isn’t identified with the things that I think are important; one who is an impartial witness.  And yet… that specialist can’t ever, ever truly know me or be a valid authority on me and myself until he thinks from inside my thoughts.  Who would want to do that?  God?  Maybe that’s what we’re all here for.  That’s method acting: walking and talking the part.

There’s no need to ‘act,’ there’s just being what you “are.”  Who said that?

Well, I’m going to be late for work.