Richard Dreyfus in Close Encounters: This means something
Steve, Suzi, and Paul are on their way to Sedona for Linda’s Bridge to Now. Back Nov. 16. Posts have been scheduled.
All my life I’ve been attracted to the frontiers of knowledge so I’ve drawn a lot of opposition to myself and a fair amount of ridicule.
I remember vividly saying to myself as a young researcher that, if someone else had already written a book about something, then I didn’t want to write about it.
Let me have a crack at something new. Let me explore the frontiers of knowledge.
I’ve always wanted to venture into the unknown.
Doing that, I was told “no” so many times that I finally left the box. “No” to studying “cultural” history, enlightenment, popular culture in anthropological terms; no to museum collections of new, instead of old, artifacts, opposing automation, protesting jobs sent oveseas, 9/11, angels, flying saucers – no, no, no, no.
I could have let the whole thing go and come back within the box. But I chose not to. I imagine that’s a familiar story to you. Out there on the skinny branches of metaphysics, spirituality, the New Age.
But I’m writing to continue developing my own understanding of a mystical subject: The importance of the center. (2)
It’s significance shows up especially when we have a disagreement with someone and feel a tug to move out to the extremes of passion.
The extent to which I can disagree with a person while only minimally leaving the center is increasingly important to me with every passing year.
What is the center? For me, saying the “center” is the same as saying the “heart” or “soul.” For me, the center of our being is the portal to the heart/soul.
Focussing on the center leads to absorption in it as a constantly-receding point of awareness and love.
The worst possible thing in spirituality, it seems to me, is to be off-center, which I think of as “self-righteousness.” The ego is off-center and the ego has little place in spirituality. (I originally said “no place” but that seemed off-center.)
Equanimity exists in the center and isn’t spirituality about developing equanimity – at least towards anything worldly?
Egolessness is associated with the center. But a little ego to defend a righteous being who’s being attacked – I allow myself that.
I’m more likely to be a man of the left in terms of politics, economics, law, human rights. But in spirituality I’m lost, speechless, absorbed in contemplation of the center.
Every year, I find myself increasingly interested in the center, more absorbed in it. It holds my attention more than it did. It grips me.
I’m staring at the mashed potatoes, like Richard Dreyfus in Close Encounters, muttering to myself, “This means something…. This means something….”
Footnotes
(1) Like “From Everyman to Everyone – Part 1/2,” at https://goldenageofgaia.com/?p=283717; and “From Everyman to Everyone – Part 2/2,” at https://goldenageofgaia.com/?p=283721.
(3) I now (2016) see no difference between the center, the heart, and the soul. I also acknowledge that the Company of Heaven seems to prefer the notion of the heart.