14 spokes

Greg's 12 Paragraphs

 

 

Central Hub:  From the time I woke up from the dream to the time I woke up from the deep sleep of paradise

 

Spokes:

 

1.  The Henry Noewen aspect of the dream - the whole dream can be interpreted as a symbol of the presence of Henry Noewen in my subconscious mind (the interior book of Noewen) - the exterior book is what he was publically doing in his actual life simultaneous to my dream and the interior and exterior go together. 

 

2.  The aspect of writing the future - I was in a writing class at the time, one of our assignments was to write our own obituary and mine had me being cremated, then my ashes scattered on Saturday morning.  That's the morning I had the experience of being taken up in flame, a temporal connection between my written obituary and the experience of something-like-death.

 

3.  The two waking up experiences reminded me of accounts I had heard of near-death experiences.  Within a few weeks of my experience, I wrote about a near death experience I had heard about years ago from a black man named Dave McCall.  While I was writing about that experience, I was writing the future again, because a black man came to my door who, like McCall, had alcohol on his breath and he had also had a near death experience. 

 

4.  Learning to meditate doing centering prayer and yoga - within the next year, I became involved in centering and yoga, something I did as an expression of what I had learned from the experience, thus the experience became an inner teacher that matched my outer teachers, in moving toward a more inner, enlightened, centered way of being day to day. 

 

5.  Discovering the depth of the mystical Christian tradition, finding Franseco De Osuna, Francis of Assisi, John of the Cross, Claire, Teresa of Avila.   I became convinced that my experience was classically associated with ascent of the soul experiences and long history of tradition about how to live out of that experience in day to day life.  Helped me see how the experience connnected to the New Testament.

 

6.  This is what the neo-Platonists were talking about.  The experience was privileged in terms of neo-Platonic philosophy that existed alongside early Christianity, particularly opened me up to the writings of Platinus.  The relationship between neo-Platonists and Christianity was a love-hate relationship, today, it's mostly Christianity wanting to get rid of neo-Platonic influences.  But my experience helped me to understand why there historically was a love relationship and to rediscover the love that has been lost.

 

7.  Telepathy - it was after my experience that I had a telepathic connection with my dying grandfather.  This helps me to begin to realize that my inner experiences are not mine alone.  I began to reexamine my assumptions, my skepticism, because the connection wtih my grandfather was so physical, it made me want to find an explanation.

 

8.  Whole different way of experiencing my sexuality.  In the moments between the two waking-ups, I realized there was something more pleasurable than sex as I had known it.  This helped me to have more self-control in relation to my wife.  I became less demanding, less moping around.  It helped me see that there could be fruitfulness in my life other than having chlidren, I redefined my life from one of being a future biological father, to one of being a spiritual father in the sense that monks and priests are. 

 

9.  Answering the question of why Jonas Stutzman would wear all white and build a chair for Jesus:  Rapture can do that to ya!

 

10.  Taking another look at the spirituality of St. Paul.  I had studied him formally in the masters' program and learned methods of biblical interpretation, and slowly began to use those same methods to unlock a fresh interpreation of Paul's experience and intentions in writing about his journey to heaven and his understanding of resuurection as a future possibility just as Christ was raised from the dead.   This was influenced by Eli's admonition to his children, my connection to Marilyn McCord, Henri Noewen's wanting to think like Paul in the resuurection.    My experienced helped me understand how Paul could boast of consulting Christ in the spirit, through revelation.  Helped me understand Paul's views on sex,

 

11.  The experience gave me different insight into the motivating force of the gospels, why would anyone go out with nothing but the clothes on their backs to announce the kingdom of Christ is at hand?  I began intrigued and obsessed with the tendency, not only in  Christianity, but in Buddhism and Hinduism as well, among the celebate saints, I found the spiritual source that compels a person to want to do that.

 

12.  Thief in the night:  When Paul was "caught up" in the third heaven, the Greek in the septuitian, refers to what theives do, snatching up against the will of the owner.  That's what it means to say that the kingdom comes like a thief in the night, relates directly to the way the revelation began. 

 

13.  This spoke is connected to the family spoke, but also a different issue - the early formative experience of my grandfather's death in Mississippi in 1965 and from Henri Noewen I see the civil rights struggle, from Al Young I see an African American man from Miss. who is a mystic in 1965 trying to appeal to all people to get them to see their mystical core, because of the black  men with alcohol on their breath, it's a way of dealing with the grief of the loss of grandfather, by connecting to the grief of a black man in the segregated south, that links with my near death experience, links with St. Paul, and how I became a catcher.

 

14.  Sleep paralysis, brain science:  What I experienced, almost everything, fits the profile of a phenomenon that cognitive psychologists call sleep paralaysis - aspects of the dream, the out of body experience, the spiritiual benefit, the sense of the holy:  it's all there, with concepts like disafforentiation of associative capacity, knowing where your brain is in space.  There's been a lot written on that lately.

paralysis

    Was it "sleep paralysis"?  Years later, Nathaniel found a natural explanation for what happened that night.  The name for it is "sleep paralaysis."   Psycologist and sleep researcher, Al Cheyne, defined it as follows:

"A conscious state of involuntary immobility occurring prior to falling asleep or immediately upon wakening. An episode may last from a few seconds to several minutes. Although individuals in this
state are unable to make gross bodily movements, they are able to open their eyes and
to perceive and subsequently report on external events."

    Around that core if difinatiive features, there are some assciated features including commonly, fear and in rare cases, "out of body" experience.  The vast majority of sleep paralysis experiences are anxious and fearful, but  those rare few who have a sense of going out of body, often report bliss.  

.....................    Different cultures report have their own myths of the meaning of sleep paralysis.  In Norway, there was the "old hag" who attacked and sat on the chest.  In current American culture, there are reports of alien abductions which fit some aspescts of sleep paralysis.  Nathaniel was in his own subculture.  One of Chyen's papers addressed the sense of presence in terms of the viewpoint of Rudolph Otto, the theologian who wrote about the experience of the holy, and who coined the terms "numinous" and "mysterium tremendium."   And here, insofar as Nathaniel was concerned, Cheyne was brilliant.  He had felt the mystery that makes one tremble.

was it flight

    Was it a kind of "rapture" that the Teresa of Avila called "flight of the spirit"?  When Nathaniel read the experiential descriptions of Teresa, he felt he had found a rare soul who could help him understand what had happened.  It was difficult for him to read her testimony over long periods.  Very quickly, he would find a new insight, a fresh reflection of the gift he was given that night, and then he would be strongly drawn within, his eyes loosing focus, his eyelids heavy, and when he went into recollection, he felt a desire that could not be satisifed except in prayer.  Nevertheless, over the years bit by bit, he to press on and and found the courage to read Teresa's account in it's depth and breadth.

    Very few people know what it is like to experience of felt sense of an spiritual force not only elevating her soul, but seemingly taking her physical body up with it too.  Teresa knew.  She asks:  "Do you suppose a person in perfect possession of her senses feels but little dismay at her soul's being drawn above her, while sometimes, as we read, even the body rises with it?"  It is not a "little dismay," it is a huge dismay, thought Nathaniel.   She had felt that initial terror of sudden, rapid, irresistible elevation.  Like Nathaniel, she had tried to resist, and realized his complete powerless, and so he surrendered.  As Teresa expressed it cleverly, he had "seen it best to make a virtue of necessity."  Nathaniel did not share Teresa's apparent belief that it is possible to defy gravity, and to levitate, but he certainly did know what it is like from the inside, while fully awake mentally, and eintensely aware of your bodily weakness, to feel suddenly as if a spiritual force is lifting one's own physical body in defiance of gravity.  It is an utterly convincing sensation.  It is not dreamlike.  But there is no outward confirmation from the exterior senses.   In Teresa's words, drawing on the apostle Paul, "...he cannot say for some moments whether he was in the body or not."

    Teresa compared the powerful elevation to a huge wave lifting a small ship, and leaving the the pilot of the ship powerless.  Such immense power, such complete weakness.  "What will be the amazement of the one who experiences it?" she asks.  Nathaniel new the amazement, the thrill, that follows surrender.

    Teresa wrote also about the real sense that the soul is going forth from the body, that is leaving the physical body behind and rising above it.  Yes, Nathaniel had felt that.  And like Teresa, he had seen a light:  "...a light so different from the earth's light, that if he were to spend a whole life trying to imagine the light, along with other things, he would not be able to do so."  Yes, Nathaniel as a "soul" rising had become one with such a light unimaginable.  

    And Teresa knew the "interrior flight" where in her words, "the soul remains in its place and the superior part rises above it."  That was the next phase of Nathaniel's ascent.  In that phase,  one not only does not see with the eyes of the body, but also without seeing anything with "the eyes of the soul."  The lights of imaginative vision go out.  Teresa says that it is "without noise."  That part puzzled Nathaniel.  In his early phase of ascent, he had heard a rushing sound, and it was hushed but still perceptible in the phase of seeing the soul rise up out of the body luminous, and it was quieter still when the eyes of his soul were no longer seeing light.  But there was still a whisper of sound like breeze, or like the sound of hollow space.  Maybe that is close to Teresa's "without noise."  She also said that the elevation was so fast that it was like the speed of a bullet from a gun.  That is very fast.  Nathaniel could not relate that to the first phase, when his body seemed to be physically levitating.  That was sudden, and relatively rapid like the rising of a hot air balloon, but not as fast as a bullet.  However, that last phase, when there was no felt sense, not of light, not of sound, except for that sound of quiet space, in that phase the speed was relative to nothing.  One could say it was absolute speed.  It was speed without reference to any object in space.  In any case, Nathaniel share Teresa's sense of a "superior part rising above" the soul, sheer intellectual awareness "moving" in a perceptual void.  It was an amazing and a very beneficial awareness.  Teresa wrote:  "... while the spirit is far outside itself, from all it can understand, great mysteries are revealed to it."

    And Teresa knew also the benefits felt upon return to the body:  "...virtue, peace, calm and improvement of the soul."  She speaks of a change in the view of the self -- more humility, seeing one's relative inability to accomplish good -- changes the view of God -- awe at the supreme power -- and a different view of the world -- lowering the estimate of how material comforts can offer toward real blessing.  Nathaniel new the feeling of wanting to live on less, and seeing it as a joy, but having others think he was crazy.  Teresa wanted to go back to the old ways of her Carmelite order including walking barefooted.  Oh how Nathaniel longed for that return to basics.

    But Teresa did more for Nathaniel's undersanding of that amazing night.  She discussed what led up to the ascent.  There was the locution, the audible voice from heaven.  Like Nathaniel, she was skeptical of the value of such things.  Her criterion was to judge by effects.  And in Nathaniel's case, the voice in his dream had done what it said both in power and in goodness.  Teresa also mentioned that inability to breathe:  "He takes away the breath... a person cannot speak at all.."  Yes, Nathaniel had experienced that in the moment before ascent.

angel for a moment

spoke 1

   Did it flow from a connection Henri Nouwen? During his dream, that marvelous night, Nathaniel pondered a bibliographical note.  The note appeared in typeface, and so I am in the felicitous position of being able to show you the reader a picture of almost exactly what he saw:

Journey of Angels

(forthcoming)

by Henri Nouwen

    Nathaniel was puzzled.  The note, centered on the otherwise blank right hand page of an open book, rested in the lap of a stranger who was writing intently on the opposite page.  Nathaniel assumed the hand-written words were intended for forthcoming publication in a book by Henri Nouwen titled Journey of Angels.  But this stranger did not look like Henri Nouwen.  Even with face obscured, the long slender bones, the smooth white skin, and the shoulder length straight black hair gave the impression of a woman of solemn, angelic beauty.  And that is when things started to happen fast.

    Moments after Nathaniel awoke from his dream, as he felt that overwhelming thrill of being caught up bodily in seeming defiance of gravity, he was "one with a heavenly angel" -- that is how he thought of it, and that is what he wrote in his journal the next morning.  When he tried to cry out to his wife, what he wanted to tell to her was, "I'm one of them," meaning, one of the angels.  He was recalling that title:  Journey of Angels.  In the inner book of Nathaniel's experience, the Journey of Angels had indeed been "forthcoming," immediately so. But any connection with Henri Nouwen remained obscure.

    Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Nathaniel, there actually was a documentary film forthcoming about Henri Nouwen's latest enthusiasm, the flying trapeze.  "[The trapeze act] catapulted me into a new consciousness," wrote Nouwen,  "There in the air I saw the artistic realization of my deepest yearnings."  The film had been shot just a couple of weeks before Nathaniel's dream during the Christmas holliday season, 1994, when the circus came to Toronto.  In the film Nouwen confesses to being a theologian who taught at Yale and Harvard, and yet he claims, "this one act, taught me more than in many books."  He says that the art of trapeze flying, is like concentrative meditaiton:  you have to be completely "present in the present."  And so we see him gazing, wide eyed, doing is meditation in the realm of the body. In the art of trapeze flying a parable about trust.  Without the catcher catching, the flyer falls.  The flyer must trust the catcher.  The was Rodleigh, the head of the troupe, who spoke to Nouwen in the film, and his wife Jennie, also a flyer, who without words did her dance in the air, her straight black shoulder length hair fanning out and falling back in place with each flight.   Everything Nouen said about flying trapeze was really about his vocation as a priest: "in theory at least," said Nouwen in his Dutch accent, becoming serious with a touch of tearfulness in his tone, "spiritually, I have always liked to be a flyer."  The title of the film:  "Angels Over the Net."

    Nine months later, Nouwen began a sabbatical from his work at L'Arche, (the Arc) a community centered around people with severe mental and physical handicaps.  And as soon as he was free to begin his year of prayer, and solitude and writing, he started a book project he had been planning for some time.  He already had a contract with a publisher, and he already had purchased blank notebooks to write in, each with picture on the cover of an angel in flight.

    "Do you have a thought for your Angel?"  Every day in the first month of his sabbatical, September, 1995, Henri Nouwen sat down at his desk and asked this question.  It was just a fun "little game" to help him write.  Before him, on the front of his hard-covered notebook, the angel descending from heaven to earth on bright outstretched wings of orange and red, evocative of fire.  Amidst the powerful rush, and flash of graceful motion in the air, the face of the angel was peaceful, head tilted to on side, eyes focused downward toward on earth.   Henri wrote:  "My little book, which I carried with me wherever I went, became like a companion with whom I had intimate conversations." 

   At the end of his sabbatical year, on September 21, 1996, Henri Nouwen died.  Nathaniel heard news of his death.  He also heard a passing comment that Nouwen enjoyed watching the trapeze in his last years.  But that is all.  Two years passed.  Then in the winter of '98-'99 the diary Nouwen wrote kept during his final year, Sabbatical Journey came out in bookstores.  Nathaniel was in his favorite East Lansing bookstore, coffee house, Shoeler Books brousing, when he stumbled across the title.  He picked it up with a secret expectation, and skimming through the pages he scanned for one key word:  "Angel." 

    And before long, he saw it: The angel book story.  He was amazed.  He looked to see if the daybook of readings had come out, and there it was:  Bread for the Journey.  He opened it and read a few of the entries, and it was just as he suspected.  The teachings were relevant.  He put both books back and walked away without buying them.  He was not ready yet to dig deeper yet.