Spiritual Awakening

(5-minute read) – I looked out my dining room window at eight o’ clock one morning and had a spiritual awakening. Beauty has many truths. It really is in the eye of the beholder.

The pigeon

Time stood still. The water rippled and splashed as a light-weight, feathered mystery moved. A little beaked head bobbled in the sustaining fluid.

The sunlight refracted through a few drops as they crossed its path between the palm branches on their random dance.

And then they united again with the rippling pool from where they’d come. And from where they’d reform, re-energise and transit to a new beauty.

The feathered mystery finished bathing and took flight, effortlessly.

Jointed, hollow bones, flesh and feathers cut a perfectly aerodynamic trajectory through the air. Tiny molecules and particles floating there were now transformed in the turbulence. Newton’s Laws, Bernoullis’ Laws and Darwin’s fantastic observations were epitomised in this single brief elaboration of a cell.

But all the laws and all the fantastic observations summed up could not account for the layers of beauty of this feathered mystery. The whole is other than the sum of its parts. Beauty has many truths.

The avocado tree

The gentle flow of air stirred up from some unknown space and moved big green avocado tree leaves as I sat there marvelling that morning. It was spring time and the tree was a darker, richer green than it had been in the preceding months. That eight-foot high baby had started as a pip we planted four years ago. Maybe this year it would bear that delicious, creamy fruit.

The molecules of chlorophyll in its dark green leaves worked tirelessly. Energy from the sun fell upon them and changed into sugars as I sat there. The energy came one hundred and fifty million kilometres across the solar system and would penetrate my cells one day as I ate the fruit of that tree outside my window.

Photosynthesis continued on every green patch of this planet to fuel all life. I understood the world outside my window well. Science had explained so much. Yet I marvelled no less.

Suddenly I experienced a spiritual awakening as real as Darwin’s breakthrough:

Everything out there was so beautiful. The truth was so much more than the facts.

The whole is unknown. It cannot be said it is more than the sum of its parts for no more and no less can be known about it. But it is definitely other than the sum of its parts.

This world has something about it that is other than the sum of its parts.

That truth about the world outside my window was unknowable by the scientific method. It could only be experienced by connected consciousness.

My science had no monopoly on the truth outside my window.

We scientists know how birds fly, we know how light refracts and how plants convert sunlight into chemical energy. We have explained and understood so much about the natural world. Sometimes it seems there is little left to know and so there is little need for God. After all, we say, God is only a construct to explain reality to the uninformed. Now that we are so informed, there is no need for a ‘God’ explanation. The God of the gaps is running out of time.

But as much as I understood the bird and the avocado tree that morning, my spiritual awakening to their concealed beautiful truth was no less real.

Spiritual intelligence

I experienced that truth in some capacity of myself that is other than the sum of my parts. Not all the scientific intelligence in all one hundred billion neurons in my brain changed that experience. The experience was spiritual intelligence.

I wished I could describe my experience. I wished I could measure it, record it and document it for others to examine and validate, and so make it a scientific truth. But I couldn’t because it was gone as quickly as it rose up with the gooseflesh on my arms.

For the scientific method, that meant it simply wasn’t valid. Absurd and uninformed science, I thought.

I sat there silently letting go of my brief epiphany. There was just a quiet peace deep within me now. No words were necessary. Nothing was necessary. I was mystically connected to reality and time stood still.

My seven-year-old son

My seven-year-old son’s voice calling my name down the passage broke the silence. I was yanked roughly away from the world outside my window. As he clamoured clumsily onto my lap and I felt his small hands gripping my forearms, a different kind of peace washed over me.

This is my son, I thought. My flesh and blood. And the greatest miracle dawned upon me. There was something that connected me to him more deeply than our genes. As if to underline my experience, I felt the remnants of my epiphany fleetingly once more.

The connection between us was a spiritual love that could not possibly be reduced to scientific terms. Of course this spiritual love was totally unmeasurable, unobservable and unprovable, so therefore it lacked scientific validity in itself.

But that did not concern me now. My little clone sat on my lap and I only cared about the truth of experience. I was happy to bask in the sentimentality of that timeless moment. Unjudged. Unanalysed. Unlimited by science. Just accepted in trust.

“Come on Dad,” he said, “You have to take me to cricket.”

“Have you had breakfast? Relax. It’s only eight ‘o clock, boy.”

“Eight ‘o clock?” He looked confused. He’d only just learnt to tell the time. He jumped up and looked around the corner at the kitchen clock. “No Dad. It’s nine ‘o clock.”

As I looked down at the little marvel of human ingenuity on my wrist, my hair stood on end. It was nine ‘o clock. Where had one hour gone? Had I just misjudged the time from when I sat down by the window? Or had time really stood still for me? Had I lost an hour while I travelled off on my spiritual awakening? I wasn’t sure.

But then my son’s melodic little voice piped up again. He said, “Mom says hurry up. You’ve been sitting there for an hour.”

My new novel “On the Fifth Night” has more mystical meanders like this. You can get a copy of it here:

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