I went to see the Mets with my dad once. We were in Citi Field in Queens. I could telepathically hear the thoughts of all 41,000 people sitting there. It was overwhelming and mind shattering and almost unbearable.
I only heard the voice of God once. I was in my old house, when I was married. I was on our bed reading, I forget what. She wasnāt home. I was all alone. My daughter might have been away at school. I donāt remember the exact situation. You know how you can sometimes āhearā your own thoughts, itās like an ongoing narration. This was not that. This was literally hearing a voice. It broke through everything vividly and sounded like someone was there in the room with me. The voice sounded like an American male actor who Iāve heard before but canāt possibly sift through all my memories of tv shows or movies to pinpoint who he was. It was friendly and non-threatening, it sounded justā¦American like a game show announcer or something. But not announcing anything in a loud way. The voice sounded like it was coming from the top of a well and I was at the bottom, it reverberated. The voice sounded golden somehow. Like I could visualize bursting streams of gold in my mind while it spoke.
It only said one echoing thing and then stopped. āThe way of the living,ā it said. That was all. Just that sentence fragment. Then it was gone forever. Iāve never heard it again.
I thought about this a lot and did a lot of reading and research. People with mental illnesses hear voices, of course. But I wasnāt in the right spot to think about this. I have a religious bent, I was raised in church and my mind goes in that direction, and I was sure it was God.
What does āthe way of the livingā mean? What was the voice trying to tell me? It was like it was blessing me with a sentence fragment and I was challenged to turn it into something meaningful.
I realized in my own probably fucked up way that when God speaks to you (or me) he doesnāt use verbs. That verbs are the domain of men, we live in a space-time where we do things or take actions. Change happens in this plane where we are. But God is transcendent of all of that. There is no need for God to ādoā anything. And even creation is a mysterious verb that in His hands isnāt properly a verb. A verb implies you are bound by something, to natural laws or metaphysics of things following on each other, of being cast in time. Scriptures from God (supposedly His voice) are in complete sentences because that is the meaning imposed on His message by men, an encrustation of time like dipping a string in wax repeatedly to make a candle, by men who need the complete sentence often to make meaning. We are cast in time and are subject to its laws and everything has the condition of constant change. Even ābeingā is a verb that is subject to change because at some point, the being might not be anymore.
But ālivingā is kind of a verb. It is like a noun version of a verb, a ongoing state of being rather than a single transition. āTo live.ā āI lived there.ā āYou live well.ā Instead, āthe way of the living.ā Not just living but THE living. The ideal of living. It was an invitation for me to dig deeper and find out what āthe Way of the Livingā is and where it is to be found.
I will spare you the research Iāve done into finding these words in holy texts or reflections of them. Lots of world religions, West and East, have echoes of this statement. āI am the way and the life.ā
As personal revelations go this was very frustrating and fragmentary. I dropped it. I became aware of the flaws in my mental well-being and treated the voice like it was just a symptom and not a message. I got on medication.
Look, I never wanted to be a religious nut. It makes people uneasy. It doesnāt win you friends to act like youāre a prophet and you have been downloaded some message to give to humanity. Especially when the message doesnāt make grammatical sense. It also could just be that I hear voices. Better this seed of contemplation than something ugly like āgo shoot people at WalMartā or something like that.
The Way of the Living. Maybe youāre supposed to be a human and add the verb or complete the sentence. I can only give you the subject.
This was inspiriting.
This is an interesting take on spirituality/religion.