A WISDOM IN THE DEPTHS OF NATURE.... June 12, 2015

Notice the caption on the picture. One of my first 'big dreams'(there have been only a few) was a bottomless abyss(personally and professionally) in the road. I was pleased to be traveling this road  and most needed to complete it. I was not told to jump but a 'blue collar' man with a beard appeared and pointed way down toward one end of the abyss, so far I could barely see.  There was a very narrow barely visible winding road up the other side of the abyss. It was implied I would need to enter the abyss and find that road out which  would be provided. I was, in my life, sailing on very well when I had the dream so it seemed irrelevant. I wrote it down and shared it with my Clinical Pastoral Education director.

It was two years later that the abyss became stark reality. I was not quick to recall the dream but did and  then decided to take it as a trustworthy resource. Such experiences confirmed for me there is a 'wisdom', an unconscious natural phenomenon, like is  present in evolutionary processes, embedded in the deepness of universal creation and life. It is now second nature for me to return to that understanding and rely on it no matter how unrealistic it at times becomes in routine daily life. That is when I need it most. I think such 'wisdom' is present both collectively and individually for  all that is is  one interrelated thing. I'd say many of the religious stories that Karen Armstrong vividly relates in A History Of God are experiences of such wisdom, which can be as frightening as they are fascinating and attracting. They deserve the word numinous.
 
I think the earth itself appeals to us constantly with its seductive numinosity which is spiritual in nature. But post modern people still consider the earth as 'different' and 'disconnected' from us, an outer object to be observed and tinkered with (We are so deeply influenced by the last 400 years of science and much dualistic  monotheism theology.) Because because the earth seems as the 'other' to us it has, more harshly than probably any temporarily destructive dynamic in evolution, resulted in the human wanting to subdue, control and pillage it for temporary privilege in a completely unattached sterile way. I'm thinking that a much elevated consciousness of our interrelationship with the earth and all its parts and systems and its life giving may be our most likely approach to recognizing God again in ways relevant to humans of this new millennium.