So Lisa got up at 5am to get ready to go to work. I finally dragged myself out of bed at 6am in time to see her off. I had a tall glass of water and an espresso, donned my running gear, and took off. I ran 17 kilometers, which is 10.5 miles. I did it in 105 minutes.
But when I was running back home I passed other runners going the other way and a couple of cyclists. A few of them looked at me strangely. Some people are quirky, I thought. I never know if a cyclist is going to say hi. But most runners do. Not today. Strange looks. When I got home and looked down at my shirt, this is what I saw:
Yes! My nipples were bleeding. Nice! I’ve told Lisa that my shirts chafe. Today I guess it went on so long they decided to bleed. Lisa says I could wear a sports bra. Hahaha. Or those nipple pads she wore when she was nursing our babies. Hahaha. Or round bandaids. Hahaha. What a joker! Empathetic nurse. Emphasis on pathetic. I don’t want to go topless because I’m hairy enough I might be mistaken for an animal and shot. This is a problem. I don’t know what to do.
That got me thinking about the z-theory. Actually, no it didn’t, but how am I going to segue into the z-theory from bleeding nipples? SO! The z-theory.
Remember my dream of the waterfalls represents a picture of reality. All of it. In my mind it is a unifying picture of the structure of reality. Above the rim is the mystery we can’t see, the infinite source, the fountain of all being. The falls is the revelation, the incarnation of this mystery. It is the invisible made visible. Then the water that hits the earth and spreads out over it is the application of the mystery and it’s revelation upon humanity and the earth. It is the assimilation of the mystery discovered. It is its benefit.
Yesterday on our secret Facebook group page, Wayne shared a story:
“My 29 yr old daughter, when talking about her recent layoff, said to me, “I am very confident in my faith in God.” We were driving home together, so it was hard to pretend I didn’t hear her. I waited a moment and said, “I don’t believe God fixes things.” She then asked how I would say it. Hmm I thought, maybe, “I am very confident in who I am, and feel inspired by my inner higher self.” Then it occurred to me this is all semantics, who I am could be who God created me to be, and inner higher self could be the Spirit of God. Really, sometimes we go to war over word choice.”
I agree Wayne.
I claim that saying something like “All paths lead to the same place” is problematic. I rather say there is no path. There is no other place. We are all already there. We are all, I suggest, caught up in this waterfalls picture of reality. We are all experiencing the same thing. Everyone! Every religion and philosophy, is experiencing the exact same thing. Only we are experiencing it through our own world views and are articulating it through our own languages. There is a very complex and wonderful unity of all things and connectivity between them that we are all in the middle of, doing our best to understand and explain it.
So, as Wayne shared, we can get to a point where we don’t get caught up in making sure everyone employs the same world view or speaks the same language as we do. When someone uses the word “God”, I may or may not know what he means, but I know what I mean when I think of or say that word. It is just a matter of perspective and speech. That’s all. I can let people believe and say what they do without freaking out over whether or not they’re saying it like I would. Or when someone says, “I believe in Jesus,” I know what they mean, but in my mind I know what I mean… that “Jesus” represents for me the whole part of the waterfalls falling over the rim and crashing to the earth… the revelation of all mysteries, the discovery of the unknown, the incarnation of all the Source, the exposure of the ground of all being. That’s what it means to me. Everyone experiences this. Christians call it the Christ.
Does this help? Does this make sense to you?
Now to go Spray-n-Wash my shirt!