The truly sacred

A momentary glimpse of the truly sacred is not all that rare, the inexplicable collapse of the thought-based paradigm of time-bound perception simply happens, unbidden. What is critical is not the unitary moment itself, but the reaction of thought and its foremost child, ego, in the immediate after moment. Faced with something that cannot be explained, the first reaction of conditioned thought manifesting as the ego is denial of the obvious fact that what has happened refuses to be described or analyzed -- instead, the dis-eased ego resorts to its cultural conditioning, running straight off to "holy scripture" and treating a spontaneous encounter with infinity as an edict to believe in the ancient images of Jehovah, "Sweet Jesus," Krishna, "The Lord," or whatever other inadequate concoction of the thoughts of others the cultural context provides.

Thus is the truly sacred profaned and the fortunate one transformed into an obscene parrot of the words of long-dead others -- instead of simply embracing and thereby embodying the overwhelming reality that language diminishes into "God," the knee-jerk convulsions of the ego lead the confused seeker not to let his/her conditioning fall away in the moment, but instead to acquire yet more conditioning, building up and reinforcing the "box" of intellectual conceit and barring the door with the staff of belief in what is not even remotely understood. When will humans evidence the true humility that surrenders in what is rather than to obscure the truth with the Earl Schieb paint job of the dead past? When will we see the essence of the Commandment to "have no other gods before me?" Surely there is no other time but NOW, the singular and eternal moment of living consciousness!