The Presence of God

No matter what I go through in life, no matter the pain or the joy or the brain chemistry being messed with by PMS, I always feel a solid presence beside me.

I'm wondering if this experience is unusual or if it's what most people feel and maybe label it differently.

I constantly feel a conscious force around me, particularly just to my right side, but it spreads out from there to encompass everything. It doesn't look like anything, and yet it almost has a personality in my mind. I direct a lot of conversation in my thoughts towards it.

Because of this presence I feel self-conscious even when I'm alone in my apartment. I know there is something always listening. Not in a creepy or upsetting way, just in a way that I can see how crazy I'm being because there is a calm and unflappable aura next to me that reflects back to me how I look.

In the past year and a bit as I've mourned the loss of my dear friend, I've been overcome by tears. I tend to cry a lot and it embarrasses me, but I don't feel in control of it at all. However, this crying is huge shaking sobs that I wouldn't want anyone to ever see. I do it in my car or alone in my bed at night. Even then I feel that presence and it looks at me gently, but it knows that grief is temporary, that death is not real, and that these gut-punched, can-barely-breathe sobs that give me headaches are not the ultimate reality.

Never, never, never have I had a time when that feeling of a presence nearby has been gone. I felt it when I was a small child and played by myself for hours and hours. I've always felt it and maybe that's why faith comes as naturally to me as breathing.

I recognized this feeling in Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor* (one of my all time favorite writers). Her character has a different response to it than I do. "[Jesus moves] from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark..." Hazel Motes feels that Jesus is haunting him, a figure in the woods, always just behind him. He is determined to reject this figure that follows him.

On the other hand, I have always felt that presence as comforting, strong, steady, and loving. I don't know what it is or why I feel it, but I give it the name of God and no amount of despair in my heart ever causes it to waver.

*[This book is very complex and cannot really be broken down and analyzed without spending months at it, so I'm skeptical of the summaries and reviews I see of it online, I feel that they are mostly all missing the point. O'Connor is a very unusual writer and her work defies easy description.]

Lack of Confusion

Another lesson that I can't control how others see me, Tandava let me know that someone on his blog said that I seem confused a lot!

This was my response:

I just like to ponder a lot. I wouldn’t say that I’m confused.

I have a lot of knowledge and I’m always trying to work at how to apply that knowledge to life, just as we all do.

As I always say, that’s just part of the journey!

I never want to assume that I know something and then stop thinking about it and stop revising my thoughts and opinions, I don’t sit back and rest on one achievement or one thought, I’m always rethinking and reworking my life to try to get the most out of it.

Actually, my lack of confusion is one of the reasons that this blog has slowed down quite a bit. I had a lot to say at first, but now that more than a year has gone by, I feel that I've addressed most of my issues and worries.

I've settled into a comfortable relationship with my spirituality and my cultural behavior.

I'm sure every once in a while I will still find things to say and have opinions about, but it's going to be few and far between, I believe.

To those just starting on the path, you can see that the self-consciousness fades and the fears fade and then you just have yourself, doing what feels right.

Foundation

Some interesting discussion is going on in the comments of the Unhappiness post. As I said yesterday, I've been working through some things from my past and still in the middle of a journey on that.

I really want to tear back everything and go back to the beginning, back to basics. What do I believe? Why do I believe it? Why is my spiritual life so important to me? What do I hope to gain in the living of my life?

Why do people start on a spiritual journey?

Why did you start yours...?

Seen and Heard

Just like the column in one of my celebrity gossip magazines, Seen and Heard is little snippets of spirituality in unexpected places of every day life and just things that resonated with me.

My dad downloaded some spiritual lectures that Oprah has been doing and I listened to the beginning of one today. A Catholic priest on her panel said, "The idea that God is separate from us, and that we are separate from each other, is an illusion." A Catholic said this! I'm looking forward to listening to more.

I've been reading Amy Tan's The Kitchen God's Wife, and it's quite excellent. As I try to navigate moving away from my parents and their spirituality and into my own life and my own understanding, one quote that really stood out to me was this:

"I no longer denied I was betraying my father. I no longer looked for excuses. I knew what I was doing was both true and wrong. I could not make just one choice, I had to make two: Let me live. Let my father die. Isn't that how it is when you must decide with your heart? You are not just choosing one thing over another, you are choosing what you want. And you are also choosing what somebody else does not want, and all the consequences that follow." p. 360

Even though my choice is not nearly as dramatic, I also have that sense of my choices not just effecting me.

*************

I've been quiet lately because I've been dealing with and processing some things to do with my past. I'm not sure of my thoughts and feelings on the subject, and it is closely connected to my spiritual growth, so I'll need some time to sort through it all.

The Right to Unhappiness

I was chatting today with an Internet friend and our conversation left me with a sense of revelation. This might sound stupid or obvious, but...

There are no rules. There is no answer.

I've said similar things before, but never felt it on a gut level like this. My life has been consumed with rules trying to achieve the goal of enlightenment: I should be kind, I should be generous, I should be a vegetarian, I should meditate, I should eat healthy, I should read scriptures, etc. Should, should, should.

Why?

To be happy. That's the reason for all the advice and all the religions and all the philosophies. We want to be happy. But what's so important about being happy? Should not being happy fill us with guilt?

If you want to be unhappy, that's okay. It isn't a crime. We tend to feel like we're bad ppeople if we're not doing everything possible to be completely happy at all times.

What's wrong with bring unhappy? It's just a feeling, feel it if you want to.

If you want to be happy then take advice into consideration, try out the practices and see what works. But remember that the reason you do things is to be happy. So you keep trying things until you find what causes you to feel deep, content joy and bliss.

Fun Next Week

I'm excited about an event next weekend. There's a benefit dance happening that my boss is inviting everyone at the company to and it turns out, it's Bollywood themed!

Quite unexpected. I went to talk to the guy who is organizing it and when he found out that I owned saris, he set me up to lend them out to the ladies in the neighborhood and teach them how to wear them.

I love an opportunity to get decked out in my Indian finery!

There will be Indian food and Bollywood music and dancing. I'm going to have to go on YouTube and try to learn some appropriate Indian social dancing, bharatnatyam is little good in those situations.

I'll post pictures afterwards (and if anyone is in Maryland and would like to go, send me an email and I'll tell you where to get tickets)

Hindi Teacher Over Skype

This is a bit of an advertisement, please forgive me! But I actually was getting tutored by this woman for a while and found it really a neat way to learn.

We would set up Skype sessions and she teaches from India to anywhere in the world. Her rates were very reasonable too.

She just told me about her webpage, so I wanted to share it with you all in case anyone else was interested in learning Hindi:

http://talkingbees.com

She also teaches Bengali.

Pass this on to anyone you think might benefit from it! Thanks :)