Seeing God, religious ecstacy, praying... A transcendental experience, colored by your preconceptions and and shaped by your ability to open up your mind to completely unforeseen concepts and realities, can be very overwhelming. Face it, when you access this kind of input, you are literally sharing it with everyone (and everything) that ever crossed this boundary, from any place in space or moment in time. It is like being in the most crowded room possible, without any sense of boundaries on your self, and usually, at least until you are a bit used to it, without any skills at coping with it or acquiring "interesting" information. This can be translated very easily by your space-time taught consciousness as a blinding light that knows everything and is everywhere at once... hmm, what does this remind us of? Likewise, the cacaphony and confusion could seem like an awful nightmare (the universe is a terrible and beautiful place - sometimes you only see one at a time) and feel like the very Devil has your soul in his hands. Jesus is "there," by the way. Of this I am certain. You have in him a man who spent three years, in his ripe, early maturity, wandering in the realm of the spirit. He prayed a lot. When you pray, or whatever we want to call intentional attempts at transcendental experience, you leave time and space and encounter some aspect of every prayer that ever "worked." And however he might appear, stripped of self and ego, Jesus is there, and there's a lot of him there. Think about this for a moment now... for roughly three years of his life, this ancient carpenter-on-the-lam entered transcendental states over and over again, perhaps without much choice. And what there did he find? God, of course. Beauty and terror, I am sure. Personal enlightenment of course. And... millions of people crying to him in their prayers for salvation, putting their faith in him to save their soul, and sharing with him all of their sins! Now, when you "return" from one of these little journeys, you can be pretty incoherent. The experience does not readily translate into words, certainly not for a little while - and even then the words will have to be poetry, as you cannot say what "happened" accurately in ordinary language. This Jesus guy comes back to his senses, as it were, filled by visions of all of mankind down the ages pouring their aching hearts out to - him! I mean, I've been there a few times but no one was ever dumping all their pain on me! Is it any wonder he died for it? I know this little riff reeks of 'self fulfilling prophecy," it's a bit tautological, but it is certainly in interesting avenue for further thought. 12/26/01 
© Huw Powell
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