MEDITATION: Welcome to the Party
INTERACTIVE: Three Views of Reality
For this weekly instalment of November’s devotion month, we’re going to explore what it means to be goo goo ga ga in love with the hottest sexiest meanest and most ass-kicking entity in all of reality – that is, Reality itself, aka the existential wrapper thing that you, me, and everyone seems to find themselves inside, now and always, for reality just keeps on being real. What could it mean not just to love this beastie, but also to treat “it” as both intelligent and in constant meaningful communication with us? Can one have such a view without being committed to an asylum, or being roundly mocked by your boring social scientist friends?
We start with a simple welcoming meditation to set the mood. And then for part two we’ll imagine ourselves into three contrasting conditions or views of reality: a magical or New Age condition of experiencing the world as inherently animist and participatory, where everything we do and think is meaningfully connected to everything else; a rational-humanist condition where we experience the world as a largely indifferent clockwork, where it is up to each of us find and create our own meaning (an equally beautiful view), and finally an agnostic condition of not having any idea how the world really is, but living dignified inside our not-knowing anyway. Forget what you really believe. In this practice, you get to try on all three, one after the other, exploring the unique gifts – and challenges – that each view holds for you at this time. Finally, for our dance party closer, we get free (with a little help from GM).