The Blue Pearl

A persistent myth that many of us hold is the belief that we will continue to improve. Life is seen as being a progression towards some goal. We experience continual growth and enlightenment. The horrors of our beginnings are lightened by our supposition that the end will contain the goodness and love. We are phoenixes arising out of our ashes.

In Christianity, this myth is particularly strong. Once a person is saved, he or she is supposed to give evidence of that experience by demonstrating continually growth and improvement. He or she is to become more saintly and he or she is to obtain more and more of the fruits of the spirit as the years go by.

Does this really happen? I remember visiting a nursing home and observing the patients there. Many were depressed, incapacitated, and childlike. Their state was certainly not enviable but the utterly frightening possibility for us existed on the second floor of the home. On this floor, the severely ill, both mentally and physically, patients were kept. I would sit out in the parking lot and listen to their shrieks, moans, and screams. Hell exists right on earth, and that could be our end too.

It is a difficult thing to think about, but it is important to consider what it means to live in a world where we do not necessarily get better. We may go backwards and regress, like Nebuchadnezzar, to a state where we live with the animals and eat grass like cows. Our cherished dreams of growth and improvement may be shattered by the experience of loosing all that we value.

These past few years, I have experienced a loss of my short-term memory and a fuzziness in my thinking that can be both embarrassing and shocking. Along with my other shortcomings, none of which have gone away, I now the pleasure of often coming across as a complete idiot. When will this end? What else will I loose? And will I truly gain anything worth holding up as an excuse for my plodding existence to show the value and goodness behind it all? Maybe yes and maybe no. I have to consider both possibilities because they are both very real. We can grow and we can shrink, and we may not have as much control over what happens as we would like to imagine.

Once I visited a store called The Blue Pearl and the experience brought me the suggestion of an answer to the reality of a world where we experience a mixture of going forward and going backwards, loosing and gaining, and growing and shrinking. The store contained the artwork of a local artist. It contained many mandalas, painted glassware, mythical symbols, and flowers. The house that held the items had three different floors with narrow staircases. One room contained New Age books and tapes, calming meditation music, and a scent of incense. I felt very peaceful in there. You could look out the windows and see a view of distant mountains. Eternity seemed to be offered to me, and it no longer mattered that my mind is steadily becoming a marshmallow. I am part of Something bigger than the vicissitudes of my conscious experience. It was a place where no mistakes are made and progress is no longer necessary. I already stood where at the place at which I was striving to arrive.

Perhaps if Nebuchadnezzar could speak to us today, he would laugh and tell us the years he spent living as an animal were as important as the years spent living as a king. All of our experiences are to be embraced because the eternal does not shun the darkness as we do but rather it exposes consciousness to a variety of ways of being. If we can let go of our myth, we may find a better replacement for our hope of self-improvement: the realization that all we hope for exists in the whole of all that we are.