Belief in a mind greater than our own, an external mind that
can relate to us in a helpful way, is a recurrent belief in human history. To honor this archetypal psychic entity,
let’s just call it Big Mind.
Now, depending on time, place, and culture, people imagine Big
Mind in different ways: as spirits and deities of magic, of shamanism, of polytheistic
religions; as constructions of monotheism like God, Brahman, Wakan Tanka; as
all kinds of angels or demons; as carefully defined philosophical agents or
beings like the Hegelian Geist or Bergsonian elan vital; as entheogenic formations of consciousness; as
hallucinations of various kinds that qualify as psychotic; and so on. In light of this historical
proliferation of forms, I think we’re justified in forming the hypothesis of
Big Mind: vague and general, I mean no more than something I could also call extended,
subliminal, or transcendent Mind.
Now, the interesting question is not: Do you believe in God?
Are you an atheist?
Frankly, I don’t give a damn. The question that interests me is
different. I want to know what
kinds of experience people have that prompt them to believe in a Big Mind – whatever
they happen to call it.
When we put it that way the discussion shifts from the
shallow, politically oriented interests of “new” atheists and militant
believers. Instead, I recommend we
turn to the rich phenomenology of Big Mind. Here we have something to work with and build on, the marvelous
varieties of human experience.
Some brushes with what I call Big Mind may be found in my book, Soulmaking.
For example, I had a visitation from Big Mind some years ago
on a very cold Christmas Eve. I was living in a place called Edgewater, in New
Jersey. My apartment faced the Hudson River and Manhattan. That December 24th was the coldest
night of the year, around zero degrees – a point relevant to my story. In a
nutshell, I had a falling out with my fiery-tempered, red-haired girlfriend. The heating system was barely working and
gusts of icy wind kept slapping the front window.
We were freezing (nestled in our coats and sweaters) but
kept stubbornly apart, depriving ourselves of the warmth of each other’s bodies
– not to mention the warmth of our feelings. Cold in every
sense of the word, we angry lovers retreated into ourselves and slept in
separate rooms.
In the morning, as soon as we woke up we noticed something
strange. An overwhelming presence
of a sweet perfume filled the apartment.
My tropical dracaena plant had burst into white flowers during the
frigid night. The cheerless apartment suddenly smelled like spring. We walked around looking for something,
an explanation – how could that plant have flowered in such bitter cold?
The incongruous tropical fragrance allowed us to let go of our
anger. Without transition we melted
back into our warm affection for each other, and we couldn’t resist feeling
buoyant with Christmas cheer! We piled on more coats and sweaters and headed out
for the nearest diner that was open.
Breakfast and some steam heat seemed like a wonderful idea.
After the holiday, I went on a tour to experts at the Bronx
Botanical Gardens and all the flower shops in my neighborhood and got the same
response -- impossible, unheard of!
“A miracle,” said the woman at the Botanical Gardens. Tropical plants don’t blossom and fill a
room with fragrance in temperatures of zero degrees Fahrenheit.
So who am I to dispute my own experience or the remarks of
the experts? I therefore count it as
a visitation from Big Mind. A Mind
that can make a tropical plant blossom on the coldest night of the year is not
only big-minded but big-hearted. It looked to Frances and me as if we had been
given a gift from the Spirit of Christmas. The gift warmed our hearts. The message was breathtaking and it spoke to us in a
language beyond words. So did God
cause my tropical plant to flower?
That again would be the wrong question, and to fix on explanation would ruin
the magic of the experience.
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