Читать книгу God and Love on Route 80 - Stephen G. Post - Страница 9

The boy had no astonishing spiritual experiences like seeing a blazing bush on a rocky mountaintop, nor had he ever heard the voice of God telling him to do this or that like some prophet of old. He was modernly skeptical of such things, although not dismissive. It was only a simple recurring dream that started him off on a different kind of road trip that no one could ever have anticipated, much less condoned. The dream felt like a premonition, and from it many episodes of synchronicity followed. We all have had surprising encounters that are much too perfectly “set up” by the universe to come from chance and that point the way to a destiny of which we know nothing yet, but looking back we can connect the perfect dots.

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The dream came to him about a half dozen times over a couple of years, identical in its details: It was early morning, misty and silver-gray, at the end of a long road to the unknown west. High above the sea, a long-haired blond youth leaned outward over a ledge about to let go, when out of the mist appeared the light blue image of an angel’s face. Speaking softly and with great love, the angel said, “If you save him, you too shall live.” Then she faded back into the silver-gray mist.

The boy understood that some special dreams can express divine intent, but he was no big believer in literal angels. He rarely remembered dreams at all. Yet each time this dream flowed into his sleeping mind, the boy remembered it vividly, and he quietly meditated on its details while seated on his favorite wooden pew in the back of the old chapel at St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire, where he was a young student both whimsical and spiritual. Was the dream a vision calling him out on a journey to the unknown west? Was he invited by the cosmos to head off on a mysterious pilgrimage to a sacred place he knew not where? But the boy never strained to find an answer because he assumed one would flow toward him at the right time if there was one and there was no rushing it. He did wonder if the dream was just a creative delusion his brain tissue had concocted in order to make life more meaningful because beneath any happy human veneer emptiness is always a threat, and we are all desperate meaning-making creatures. But on the other hand, maybe the dream flowed from infinite Mind of which all our minds are some small part, and, if so, it was a gift and calling.

Surprisingly, the answers would come three thousand miles away, at the Pacific end of Route 80, and then a few months afterward up in Oregon. He had to travel far before he could know what the words “If you save him, you too shall live” meant, although he had not been sure they meant anything at all until some powerful westward events unfolded.

The dream recurred in the boy’s sixteenth and seventeenth years. He had felt all along that normal pursuits were pointless. He did not want to be another J. P. Morgan, the most illustrious graduate of what everyone called “the” school, and he disliked every form of class elitism. God calls who God calls, regardless of money or family. There was nothing competitive in the boy, and he figured that it is better to always be kind than to always be right because most people are struggling with things hidden from view. More than anything, he feared being slowly digested by an immoral world at the cost of his soul; evil meant giving up on his sense of inner connection with the infinite Mind in a world where a lot of people wrongly assume that Matter came first in the universe and explains all. The boy could see that Mind came first and from it all things derive.

This book describes a wild spiritual adventure for anyone who wants to reclaim their soul from the doubts imposed by a materialistic culture and by those who insist that our minds are derived from matter and brain tissue, devoid of any unique nonmaterial spiritual substrate. It is a book for those who hold onto the deep mystery of divine original Mind “in the beginning,” sustaining all that exists, and within in us all. It is about God, love, and synchronicity experienced in a new way, framed around an uncanny series of episodes that began with the dream and its alluring message: “If you save him, you too shall live.” This is a story about synchronicity, not luck; it is about perfectly timed occurrences that flow along too miraculously not to be planned by a cherishing universal Mind, with which the boy felt a secure oneness. Statisticians contend that even the most improbable event will at some point eventually come to pass, but they rule out the way divine Mind whispers and winks at us through synchronicities as we move in faith down the highway of life, reassuring us that the journey is meaningful after all, even when we fall for a while into some downward-sucking negative vortex of nothingness. We take the journey so that we can encounter others who are placed in our path and through whom God works. Encounters can be routine, but some are absolutely pre-arranged.

Boy questers tend to be footloose, open-minded, easily bored, irreverent, defiant, mirthful, likely to make big mistakes, and embarrassing to their families. They sing songs to the open road like Whitman to celebrate feeling connected to the universe. They trust the road come what may; they do not pretend to make their lives so much as they respond creatively to what lies unexpected over the horizon waiting to be found. They believe in an established destiny that finds them more than they find it. They know that those who make no mistakes make nothing, so they make them with a smile. They can take gambles and squander a few worldly opportunities along the way. Their journeys are as confessional as they are inspirational, and as dubious as they are certain, depending on perspective and on how they work out in the end. By their fruits you shall know them.

Read on if you sense a universal creative Mind underlying our beautiful universe, a Mind that also exists in a small but special way within each of us in the form of a peaceful eternal soul, although we must slow down to awaken to it. The world constantly pulls us away from our souls with constant distractions and pressures. Read on if you think that Mind precedes Matter and is distinct from it. All the great scriptures teach of an eternal Mind or Consciousness beyond time and space, creating everything in a Big Bang, beginning from absolutely nothing other than itself.

Read on if you have had a premonition about a loved one imperiled far away, or suddenly encountered someone who was the perfect person to give you, at a desperate moment, exactly what you were praying for at the time. Read on if something that turned out to be absolutely true dropped into your mind as if from heaven, because you had no reason to think of it and it was way beyond anything you ever studied. It felt more like an invasion than an intuition. These things occur because our minds are part of the one cherishing Mind, but we have not yet fully awakened to this so we doubt our spiritual essence.

Read on if you have suddenly felt surrounded by an overwhelming energy of love that warmly and surprisingly revealed the innate dignity of a person near you for whom you had no personal affection or friendship, so that afterwards you determined to be kinder to that person than ever before, and you in fact became so enduringly. Any legitimate experience of infinite Mind has to become active in creative love, and never in destruction or hate.

Sometimes what happens is so completely unlikely that it can only have been caused, although not in the usual sense of a material causation. It is pre-arranged so perfectly with such unbelievable timing and love that it could not be mere coincidence. It even feels spooky, like that lost letter you were searching for everywhere and right after a prayer it slipped out from inside the pages of an old lost book that fell off the shelf into your hands. You begin to gain faith in an infinite Mind indwelling in the universe that cherishes each of us, with synchronicity its modus operandi. The boy was still a tad uncertain until he followed the dream west.

When a young boy who does not believe in angels has a blue angel dream and actually follows it on a journey to the unknown, it is bound to be disruptive of settled expectations, especially for a Swarthmore-bound St. Paul’s graduate. For those who doubt God and a love-enchanted universe, this book can be read as an honest statement by a boy gone wildly wrong on a wasteful detour who was just lucky enough to stay out of the gutter. The boy was fifteen when he first had the dream, a natural-born starry-eyed child wanderer surrounded by colorful fall leaves at a prep school that he loved—a nice pricey orphanage where he was preparing for nothing, since nothing seemed worthy of preparation. He was happy up there in the North, where he studied hard and learned much. No one had ever told him he could amount to anything, but truth be told he appreciated being just a tad overlooked and keeping a low profile. This left the boy open to his kind of journey, when he might otherwise have ignored the dream and gone down Wall Street or to a prestigious law firm.

The boy considered the blue angel to be a symbolic expression of infinite Mind trying to break through his worldly consciousness and awaken him into awareness of the vast nonlocal Mind that underlies the universe and of which our minds are some very small part. This Mind is also a field of love in which we are all interconnected with God and one another, and it is the sole source of all that is perfectly wise, enduring, energetic, and pure. Such spiritual love is not comprised of the same uneven emotional “stuff” of human love, which is always making exceptions, and lacking in wisdom, reliability, and purity. Mere human love turns easily to indifference and even hatred or violence, which is why the world keeps burning. We need something higher.

Take this Route 80 dream-driven trip to reclaim your soul. Read on.