I grew up believing that the truths in the Bible came through revelations to individuals chosen by God. I didn’t think that anything similar was happening today. For me, God was simply a felt presence that I had pondered in and out of school throughout my teens and twenties. I had heard of the revelations of the founders of the Morman and Christian Science beliefs but was more interested in discussing the relevance of the truths of the Bible and those of science. (I may not have been alone in that view. The editors of the Britanica Great Books do not include ‘Revelation’ in the one hundred and two great ideas—ranging from ‘angel’ and ‘animal’ to ‘wisdom’ and ‘world’—in which they list the pages where these ideas are addressed in their fifty-four great books selected from writers such as Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Darwin, Marx, and Freud.)
My pondering the nature of God’s presence dramatically ended the night that I experienced the little self. I was reading George Mead’s Mind, Self, and Society. Although his ideas were transforming my sense of self, I didn’t feel they were revelations of God. The personal, marital, political, and institutional truths encountered when flying over the GCT can be taught and learned. The transforming significance of a revelatory experience is a personal experience. Its time, manner, and circumstance cannot be mentally duplicated or resurrected.
As a case in point, consider the night my wife, Martha, suddenly said, “I saw Jesus!” She then described a radiant figure whose engulfing presence left her totally humbled and completely fulfilled. We had been seeking medical and spiritual answers to what turned out to be a clinical depression associated with the birthing of our two children. Through many agonizing nights we had read in the Bible and prayed. I had shared and read Bible verses. She often mentioned Corrie ten Boom’s book about her older sister’s finding joy in helping others in the women’s concentration camp at Ravensbrück. Martha’s seeing Jesus that night didn’t lift her out of the deep hole of her depression, but it did leave her feeling that Jesus was more real than the material world in which she lived.
What happened on the Night of the Little Self as described below was also unexpected and inexplicable. It changed my reality as well. At the time, I didn’t have the words for satisfactorily describing what changed or its significance. I knew that I had been encountering the needed understandings in the Bible and would be encountering them in our other world scriptures as well. The following is a glimpse of some relevant quotes bearing on what it meant to see Jesus after his crucifixion, conveying the life-changing experiences of some of our religious pathfinders, and ending with some of their takes on our guiding spirits.
Here is an attempt to describe the twenty year quest to understand my sense of God that ended in a revelation of God’s nature in me. It overturned my sense of self and what was important in the change.
Some useful words in understanding the reality of Jesus before and after his crucifixion.
Our religious pathfinders are known—some largely through legend—for the lives they lived and the understandings they shared. Here are some revelatory experiences that sparked their joy in sharing their sense of self..
Some takes by our spiritual pathfinders on unity vs division; self-insistence vs selfishness; truthfulness vs deception; humility vs superiority; self-responsibility vs faultfinding; generosity vs greed; service vs dominance; immortality vs mortality.
