Transcendent Experiences
Seeing God, part 1
"As is my want I only reach...to look in Your eyes."
-- Yes, Sound Chaser
"In Your eyes...the light, the heat, I am complete..."
-- Peter Gabriel, In Your Eyes
Throughout the world's religions there many traditions of looking into God's eyes. The general field in known as Theophanies, the appearances of God or seeing God. Someday I should write a book(!)
During this time of the early 80s, after I graduated from college and started working full time in my wife's housecleaning business, I became obsessed with seeing God. Dan had said it was possible. Our religious traditions are full of Theophanies. I had been working with The Name for 4 years. I wanted results.
I wanted to see God.
In days of old, dreams were considered a perfectly valid way for God to communicate with people. The Bible contains many references to Yhwh communicating with people through dreams. It is an amazing study, and each and every single "How to Interpret Your Dreams" books I have ever seen is utterly wrong, and I should write another book, but that's for another time.
I wanted to see God.
And I fell asleep. And I began to dream. And so intent was my desire to see God that in my dream I was walking along the ground in a very lush garden, praying intently that Yhwh would reveal Himself to me.
When...all of a sudden...The blue sky <<zipped>> away, like it had been a tight rubber band waiting to get shot into the cosmos.
And when the sky was gone, the earth disappeared too.
There was me, and...this presence. No shape, no form, no glowing lights, and certainly no face. And it was God. What the Hebrew Mystics call the Vast Face. Nothingness is the zero state, the null set. At the other extreme is No-Thing-Ness, Infinity.
I was staring into No-Thing-Ness Himself.
And this No-Thing-Ness was total, complete, perfect. Infinite peace, bliss and love.
My only reaction was panic and fear. NOT fear of The Vast Face of God, but rather fear for my own ego. I knew without thinking that if I was to dwell in the presence of No-Thing-Ness for even a microsecond, then I would be swallowed-up into Him and cease to be.
My ego-self reacted violently, and I immediately prayed/begged God to go away, putting my hands over my face.
And I immediately sat up in my bed, wide WIDE awake, heart pounding 200 times a minute.
The entire episode, from "When...all of a sudden..." to waking up had taken less than a second of perceived time. It was all instantaneous. Simultaneously I asked for God, the sky and earth disappeared, Yhwh appeared, and I begged Him to go away.
This episode has been one of the cornerstones of my life. And I will share with you what I have learned over the years as I have studied religion, meditated, and contemplated my Divine Vision.
 | We humans regularly think there's a problem with God. That He's too busy or doesn't care enough about us, or that He's too far away out in the cosmos, or that we are unworthy of His attention or love. All of those are wrong. God is here, right now. And God is love. But we are small, week vessels. We can only handle so much. |
| When we are ready, in that moment, instantaneously, we will have communion. In whatever degree we are ready, the circuit is completed, and the "God-Energy" begins to flow. When you connect both ends of a battery to an open circuit, you don't have to wait for the current to begin to flow; it is immediate. |
| My beatific vision was a gift of immense grace. Dreams are real, they are important, and contain much information in a trans-rational (beyond normal thinking) form. God gave me a valuable lesson, priceless, really. |
| And the essence of that lesson is that the real, central problem of my existence is ego. I, me, mine. Which connects to Jesus and the Cross and the Garden of Eden and Name and the Level-5 Prayer of Consummate Love and all of that, in a perfect, seamless whole. |
| The ancient saying is true, that when we take one step toward God, He has already taken a thousand steps toward us. |
| No man can see God's face and live. For to really see The Face of God can only be done by a perfectly egoless being. Only through the death of self, in every way, can God be seen. |
| God, ultimately, cannot be "seen". God is a way of seeing. And I was just not ready to see in that way. |
| God is Love. We are the beloved. God cannot be seen as an object, because He (being the Source and Origin of all) is Infinite Subject. |
That is what I caught a glimpse of. The Infinite Source of All, Limitless Subject, Transcendent No-Thing-Ness.
