Thursday, January 18, 2007

I saw I

Maybe a good place to start with this blog is to describe the first experience that gave me an eternal perspective on my life and how it changed me forever.

I was about 10 or 11 years old. While trying to sleep my thoughts bounced around to whatever topics are in the mind of a 10 or 11 year old. But suddenly, my thoughts seemed to echo just long enough for me to catch a glimpse of something I had never seen before. I, for the first time, observed the fact that I thought and could think, and that awareness burst into a chain of affirmations that rocked my young mind. I found out, in a profound, earth-shattering way, that I exist.

Needless to say, I continued to have trouble falling asleep. I didn't know how to proceed with this new found knowledge. This awareness became systemic and uncontainable. It spread like wildfire through my psyche. My self-aware mind became a kiln cooking the sand castles of my young consciousness and, in their place, left fortresses of reflective glass; every thought showed me my own mind and reaffirmed my existence.

Two main affirmations sprung forth from my self-realization. First, I am an individual being with free will who can choose to act and think independent of conditioning and, second, that emergent quality will exist forever. I cannot say that these affirmations came about by logic or rational inference, or that they were even completely comprehensible to me at the time, but I can say that they were self-evident in light of my self-awareness. Once I saw my mind the freedom and the eternal quality of it were intuitive and unavoidable.

And so, I was met with an existential dilemma. The prospect of existing forever came flooding in. The concept of eternity daunted me. It was similar to my self-realization but instead of renewing my mind it shed a somber light. Suddenly life was terribly real and almost onerous. I didn't want to live forever. Eternity looked like a purposeless abyss that nothing could fill, an existential black hole. I tried to hold my ideas of God and heaven up to eternity but even that could not assuage. So my spirit that had just been discovered already seemed dismantled. I broke under the weight of my existence, eternity and the bitter reality of it all. I didn't want to exist forever be it in heaven or hell, and so I cried.

For the first time, I cried with my body, my mind and my spirit. As a being standing defenseless on the doorstep of existence peering over the precipice of eternity, I had been broken. I admitted that I had no answers and fear welled up inside drowning me. In the deep unexplored corridors of my being I admitted my total vulnerability and defeat surrendering to whatever lay outside myself.

But that is when God actively stepped in and comforted me. I was not the active agent. I did not conjure up my idea of God and hold it to the harsh reality of existence for protection like before, God was the active agent this time not me. A personal, loving and caring God willingly rescued me. Before, I held onto my idea of God and expected that idol to do my bidding. With my prideful heart and arrogant spirit I thought I could wield God like a weapon and strike down my fear. But, only by a broken spirit and utter humility could I truly cry for God to step into my life, and He did.

I cannot prove it. I cannot completely understand it. But I feel God in the depths of my being in the same way that I know, intuitively, that my mind is free and that it will exist forever.

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Welcome

This blog remains a half-baked idea and it might be hard to pull it off without looking too pretentious or sentimental. But, I could never shake the feeling that our existence and mortality are things that demand our attention and that certain questions should not be ignored, so I wanted to dedicate a blog to this type of dialogue if only to better comprehend my own views, and hopefully get other people thinking and talking about these things. So, my purpose with this blog isn't to protelytize but to provide a forum for friendly, fair and open discussion about what we should all consider. There are countless forums like these on the internet but I thought it might be better to have this type of discussion with people I know. If anyone is interested in this please send me some topic suggetions, thanks.