Knowing, Truth, and Unknowable Reality

We like to believe we know how the world works. We want to understand and control everything we can, including religious matters. And we want to be right.

But who's right? Religions directly contradict each other. There's no way they can all be 100% correct. So how do we learn what is right and what is not? And why do religions hold things that aren't true in them?

Faith comes from contact with the Divine. Religion, however, is when that contact is codified and rituals created for people to find that same contact. The contacts themselves are True. But everything we create around that contact is just as flawed as all other human institutions. We place our own preconceptions, our own desires and flaws inside the religion. Over time, some people come to see the preconceptions and other human flaws as the religion and ignore the actual faith aspects, causing schisms and broken faiths.

We need to accept that we aren't capable of truly comprehending the Divine. We don't have a box big enough to shove a person in completely, much less a god or all of creation. The more we try to hold all the answers in our hands, the more we're left with smoke and straw. What we can hold is infinitely smaller than what exists, and even what we can hold is larger than what we can express. Humanity as a whole constantly tries to expand its knowledge as to the functioning of the Universe. No religious box can be smaller than our scientific knowledge. Everything that exists needs to be acceptable to religion. The parts that do not match are not Truths, but human preconceptions and flaws that we create to make the world a little smaller and a little easier to hold.

We need to accept that we cannot be 100% correct in how we think the world works. The more we try to hold and shrink it, the more it slips through our grasp.

Questions:
How do you try to hold the world smaller? How does that limit you?
Do you see a conflict between science and religion? Reality and religion? How do you resolve these conflicts?
Do you see faith as something that needs to be constrained or set free? Do you have the faith to let the Universe be what it is, instead of what you want it to be?

Perceiving the Dark Flame

There's a lot of talk about seeing the light, about light vs dark, about light as goodness. Dark is therefore perceived as the opposite, the source or place of evil.

The problem is, however, that this view is shortsighted and incorrect. Life with only fire, only light, burns without control. One cannot see nor function if everything is light and fire. There also needs to be darkness, cool, a chance for quiet and healing and change.

The dark flame is the hidden part of FlameKeeping, the hidden places in ourselves where growth and change can happen. It's the part of life which hides from the light, from scrutiny, from examination by oneself or others. We grow and change in the darkness, in rest, with only the results being seen in the light. It is the flame that comforts and keeps you whole. It is cool and dark, a place to rest and restore oneself.

The bright flame, the normal flame, is a flame we share with others. It is visible in how we act and what we do, shining into dark corners and creating boundaries, showing who we are and aren't. It burns from within to without and shows in our lives. The dark flame is different. It is hidden, quiet, cool. It burns for ourselves. It revitalizes and refuels us. In the darkness, we find ourselves again. We connect with our inner Divine spark through quiet as well as action. The dark flame gives us a point to connect that Divinity to.

Questions:
Are you in balance? Are you even aware of your inward dark flame?
Is the darkness in you nurtured as well as the light? Why or why not? Does this imagery make you uncomfortable?
Can you feel the Divine connection to the dark flame? The lit one? both?

Meditation on the Nature of Flame

You need two candles or oil lanterns. (I personally like the symbology of the oil lamp better, but candles are fine. The biggest difference is that if you've got candles, one is going to burn down while the other doesn't.) They should be next to each other, close enough you can easily focus on both at the same time. Light the one that will cause the other lantern to cast a larger shadow.

Ritually light one lantern. Recite as you do so "I celebrate and participate in creation seen. I bring light into the darkness."

Ritually don't light the other lantern. Make the same motions, but don't strike the match/lighter/whatnot. Recite as you do so "I celebrate and participate in creation unseen. I bring darkness into the light."

Focus on the flame and the shadow. See the flame that isn't burning on the candle that isn't lit as well as the flame that is burning.

focus on the lit flame. See how it sheds light and clarity.

focus on the unlit flame. See how darkness pools.

Find the lit flame inside yourself. Find the unlit flame. Are they balanced? Do you focus more on one rather than the other? Can you face the darkness?

When you're back in balance, blow out the candle. "I celebrate and participate in creation."

Socializing Ecstacy

How do we take our ecstacy, our experiences that simply do not translate into words or our daily lives, and go back to our jobs and our families? How do we balance ecstacy and being a parent, being a worker, being a friend? Where do we find a balance?

There's no room for ecstacy in everyday life. We cling, as a society, to the banal, to the safe. Ecstacy is scary and other, something that cannot be controlled or institutionalized (although we try in our religious groups).

Yet pieces of ecstacy leak through into everyday life. In our creative work, in our dealings with friends, in our quiet moments by ourselves. We never know quite how to handle it, but we manage to keep from bottling it up.

Our society, our lives need more room for the other, for the lack of control and manageablility ecstacy brings. We need to be willing to bring that sense of other into our lives even when it doesn't fit, even when it demands our lives change in response. At the same time, we need to keep up with our obligations or end them honorably. We serve no one when we use ecstacy as an excuse to drop out of our lives, to ditch responsibilities and act like a rebellious teen.

There needs to be a place for ecstacy in our lives and our society, scary and transformative as it is. However, that place cannot be replacing those responsibilities that cannot be laid down. We need to be mature even as we are children, responsible even as our world is remade. That which we claim as ours may change, but that which we are responsible for does not.

Questions:
How have you embraced ecstacy? How have you denied it?
What responsibilities does ecstacy call for you to lay down? Which ones might it? Can you do so honorably?
How do you deny room for ecstacy in the people around you? How do you attempt to hold them to your perspective of what they should be?

The Oddities Of Ecstasy

Ecstasy is something totally outside daily experience. It transcends us, throwing ourselves into a world of beauty and wonder and terror. Ecstasy breaks all boundaries, destroys preconceptions, reshapes the world in a frightening instinct. It is that moment when things become clear that weren't, that the world around you changes into itself, that everything you've ever believed is charged with new significance or destroyed as meaningless.

Ecstasy defies easy description. It is that moment when your soul reverberates with the Universe, and no words can describe that. But we try, oh, we try. We build religions and boxes of words to shove transcendant ecstasy into, and try to contain that ecstasy into safe parts of our lives. We want it in the box where we can pull it out when we want to bask in it again, and shove it back away when it's not convenient. But we can't. Ecstasy transforms all or doesn't come to us. It exists in a place out of words, out of easy understanding.

I cannot say what ecstasy means. The words we have don't describe it. It must be experienced, and each person's experience will be different. Or perhaps they're all the same, but we perceive it differently. We can open our lives for it and never find it, or we can run ourselves to the ground and have it appear out of nowhere. It is a gift and sometimes a curse that blows us away.

Ecstasy needs to be welcomed into our lives. It makes us more ourselves, more powerfully changed by the world around us and more powerful to change the world. We need to make space for ecstasy, even while admitting that ecstasy cannot be shoehorned into specific space, forced into time that's convenient for us. We have to allow our lives to change, to look at more than day-to-day concerns.

There are ways to welcome ecstasy into our lives. We have to give ourselves time for ecstasy, time that allows for our world to change in ways we can't predict and control. We have to allow for change and chaos, to accept the change that will happen to our lives and still seek it knowing we won't know what will happen until it's too late. We have to let go and accept that the Universe is bigger than we are, and just allow what will happen to happen. We cannot control. The best we can hope for is that the transformation is something we accept instead of resisting.

Questions:
Do you allow room for ecstasy in your life? Do you try to keep it boxed?
Could you accept transformation if it happened to you? Do you want it?
If ecstasy came to you, what parts of your life would have to change? What box of words would it open?