8. Abiding in Bend
Well, well, well. It has been a minute. It’s been about 2 months since I’ve written another entry in this little blog of ours, and for good reason. The last several months have been absolutely wild. Just for shits and giggles, let’s lay out the process of moving in bullet points:
Make the difficult decision that it’s time to move
Find a real estate agent and decide when to list the house
Get the house perfectly clean before the deadline for pictures
Pack up everything you own into boxes for a few months
Decide whether to move out before you have a buyer, or to stay and let the sale dictate when you go
Clean like crazy people every time a showing gets scheduled
Spend a few days loading all of your belongings into a truck
Drive it all to your new place and unpack
In our case, however, that last bullet point took up a bit more space. Our “new place” was across the entire country. 3000 miles traversed with 6 humans, 2 dogs, the largest moving truck Uhaul will rent you (hauling an additional trailer full), plus your family vehicle with your partner driving behind, from Georgia to Oregon.
It’s a dream my wife and I have had for almost as long as we’ve been married, and we finally did it! If you’d like to hear the story, it’s on the latest episode of The Ground Podcast.
One thing has been persistent through this process of moving, and that is a feeling of groundlessness. When your home of 5 years is empty, and there is a span of 3000 miles and a week or so between your old living situation and your new one, it feels like some kind of base jumping experience for the soul. It’s difficult to adequately describe it without making it sound like a terrifying experience (as I suppose is the case with many adventures), because while you know you are having the experience of a lifetime and you’ll never forget it as long as you live, there’s also this muffling overwhelm that tends to knock the edges off the wonderfully novel sights and sounds and smells, if you aren’t careful. The magnitude of what you are doing really comes through, especially if you’re the adult in a cross-country move.
“Everything I’ve ever known is changing, drastically and rapidly…but at least I still have my family.”
Truly, my family was my saving grace; they kept me present for the incredible experiences our road trip held for us, sometimes in ways I couldn’t appreciate in the moment.
Throughout the last few months, the idea of a “dwelling” or how and where we “abide” has been impressed on me very much. Maybe it’s because of the literal significance of a house, or the idea of being “at home”, either of which could be responsible for the persistence of this idea in my consciousness. I have been listening as hard as I can to what God might be telling me in this big dream of Hers, in the seemingly insignificant as well as in the downright synchronistic. A few key points keep recurring and sticking out.
I heard a like-minded individual say that the message of Christ is so simple that most of us miss it entirely, and not in the technical way our minds tend to default. You can’t “technically” miss it because it’s just not technical in the first place. The idea is simply that “his message was himself,” and his gospel is nothing more than pure realization. When he says, “Before Abraham was, I am,” he shows he does not regard time the same way we do. Therefore when he says “I am [fill in the blank],” we can assume he’s often talking about something cosmic and eternal, yet pervasive and inherent…something right here, at home.
Jesus: “Abide in me as I abide in you,” and, “I am the vine; you are the branches.”
“You’ll know you’re on the right path when the path disappears,” a statement from an old wisdom teaching.
This whole new-agey idea of “manifesting” stuff keeps coming up, too, but I’m learning to read into it very differently. After all, the Nobel Prize in physics was awarded in 2022 for proving that reality is non-local (we don’t have to jump into this deep end right here, but…it does prove there is more to manifestation than you might have ever thought).
“As a man thinks, so he is.”
Ok, so…let’s mash all of this together, and I’ll tell you how it’s falling on me right now.
If Christ’s message is himself (and it really cannot be anything else, can it?), and if before Abraham was, HE IS, then it stands to reason that when he told the disciples to abide in him as he abides in them, he was making a statement about a present reality. He wasn’t saying, “I will abide in you,” as if he had to die first and all sorts of doctrinal flimflam had to settle into place first. He said he abided in them right then in the present, which to me seems to point to a deeper idea of abiding in Him that—surprise, surprise—the disciples did not fully grasp in the moment, and few have grasped since. He also said in the same passage, “You did not choose me; I chose you.” While many have used statements like these to argue for a totally superfluous, Calvinist stance with a cascade of superstition to follow, the implications I believe are far, far deeper. I chose to create you, I chose to dream up your universe, and I am in you right now; you did not choose it…I chose it. Before the singularity, I, the Dreamer, I am.
Now for “the disappearing path” I will bring in that groundlessness I was talking about, and our conscious trope of “the void.” Have you ever seen a fractal? There are many ways a fractal pattern can be illustrated, but there is one shape—The Mandelbrot Set—that became the most popularized. I’ll make this post’s featured image the fractal I’m referencing. There is a striking pattern in this popular fractal shape, and really in every fractal: that of a vine and branches. The vine is before all things, as Jesus said, and we are the branches. But we are not simply one clean being are we, friends? We are a collective colony of bacteria and cells and organs and systems, and down below that we are molecules and atoms and subatomic, quantum universes, just walking around on planet earth doing our cute little human things. The vine is the dreamer, and we along with all of the cosmos, are the branches. The patterns repeat, ad infinitum. The vine is the base shape which spreads out in an ever-repeating array, in every direction, through its branches. Beginning to realize one’s place as a branch on this infinite vine can make one feel quite small, like a lone life raft adrift on the fathomless, limitless ocean. You cannot escape it. It chose you, it is in you, and it is you.
Now we’ll shift gears to manifestation and “as a man thinks, so he is.” If we find ourselves encasing some kind of primordial awareness—this consciousness that knows it is here, that knows it is a branch from an infinite vine—and if our 2022 Nobel prize winners are basically telling us that the non-local reality around us is informed and indeed formed by our very observation, then it seems logical to conclude our thoughts and beliefs are holding some sort of very real sway over our reality. We are at some level projecting out onto the world what we believe we are going to see, and as we all know, “you will find what you’re looking for.” We have programming from the way we were raised, or from the indoctrination we’ve received, or just from myriad life experiences. If we aren’t careful, those programs can assemble themselves into predicable patterns and we can get stuck perceiving the universe the same old way, over and over again. When you begin to step outside those perceptions and deconstruct your beliefs, to align more closely with your soul and to embrace your own oneness with all things, you find you can begin to change the drama playing out around you with greater peace and joy. You can project something new, something exciting and fresh, onto your reality, quite literally. This is what manifestation is.
To bring it home, parts of this process do feel like the void…the blackness of the unknown below our feet. What my wife and I have found through the process of reimagining the drama of our lives and by projecting something new in the world is that our groundlessness is in fact pure realization: the universe is magnificently vast, leaving us simultaneously lost and right at home in its infinitude. Our awareness is fully intact. Our consciousness is one with all, and we are completely safe, abiding in reality (as it abides in us). And guess what? The gravity of our new choices is already pulling new possibilities toward us. We are simply here to say yes to the next wave from the ocean, and the next, and the next.
We cannot help but be shot through with the glory of God, as is every single thing in this physical universe. Abiding, indwelling, making our home in that reality requires intentionality and mindfulness. That’s what it means to be awakened to the kingdom of God within you.
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If anyone reading this needs to step into new realms of courage and possibility, we are here for you. Email us at ground@cathedralproject.com and we’d be glad to talk with you, anytime.
Grace & Peace.
-wjc