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The Veil, the Body, and the Gift
From Revelation to Embodiment
An autobiographical and philosophical reflection. Altered states and religious interpretations are presented as experience, possibility, or symbol, not as scientific or theological proof. It is not a recommendation to use psychoactive substances.
I was twenty years old when I spoke a sentence I did not understand.
Not partly understood.
Not metaphorically understood.
I truly did not understand it.
And yet, in that moment, I knew with a certainty I had never known before that it was true.
I was with my girlfriend at the time and one of her friends. I had taken psilocybin. No one was having a theological conversation. No one had asked me to speak about Jesus. Religion was not the centre of my life. I had prepared no teaching, carried no sermon in my mind, and had no plan to convince anyone.
Then I heard myself say:
Jesus died on the cross for our sins.
They looked at me as though I had lost my mind.
From where they stood, that was probably not a particularly complicated diagnosis.
A young man under the influence of a psychedelic substance had suddenly begun speaking about Jesus and the cross with absolute seriousness.
But from within, something entirely different was happening.
I did not see Jesus before me.
No figure stood in the room.
No voice came from outside.
It was deeper and harder to describe.
I felt his presence.
Not as an image.
As reality.
As if, for one moment, every cell of my body had been immersed in something I could only call love, while knowing the word was still too small.
There was joy.
Gratitude.
A happiness directed at no object.
I wanted nothing.
I had achieved nothing.
I was overwhelmed simply because anything existed.
Because I was alive.
Because love was possible.
Because these two people were with me.
Because the world existed.
And with the joy came a second movement at once:
Other people must know this.
Not me.
Not my story.
Not my specialness.
This happiness.
This freedom.
This love.
Something wanted to continue.
I had no language for it then.
Today I would say:
That was where my gospel began.
Not as religion.
Not as church.
Not as a claim to authority.
As a surplus of gratitude that did not want to remain with me alone.
The Problem with Revelations
For years, I could have told this experience in either of two easy ways.
The first would have diminished it:
You were on mushrooms. Your brain produced a religious hallucination.
The second would have enlarged it:
Jesus Christ spoke through me and revealed an objective truth about the universe.
Both answers are tempting.
Both close the question too quickly.
The first claims to know more about the interior of an experience than neurobiology alone can know.
The second claims to know more about its metaphysical cause than my certainty can prove.
Today I need neither.
I can say something more precise:
I had this experience.
It was real as experience.
The certainty was real.
The love was real.
The joy was real.
The speaking was real.
And in that moment, I could not distinguish where the words came from.
That is not a weakness in the memory.
It is the memory's actual shape.
Research into exceptional states uses a helpful term for experiences of this kind: noetic quality. A person does not merely see an image or feel an emotion. Sometimes something is experienced as immediate knowing. Not: this might be true. But: this is how it is.
What does not follow matters just as much.
The force of certainty does not prove the theory through which we later explain it.
That may have become one of the most important insights of my life.
A revelation can be wholly real without my first explanation of it being wholly right.
Revelation Means the Veil Moves
The word sounds enormous.
Revelation.
As though the sky must tear open.
As though God must speak.
As though a prophet must climb a mountain and return carrying tablets.
At its root, however, it names something simpler:
Something is revealed.
What was hidden becomes visible.
The Greek apokalypsis carries the same motion.
Uncovering.
The removal of a veil.
Perhaps this is why I have written so often about revelation.
Not because I believe I received all the answers.
Because I know what it is like for the order of what can be seen to change for a moment.
A revelation may add nothing to the world.
It changes the gaze.
A person you have seen a thousand times suddenly becomes precious.
A body you fought against suddenly becomes your life.
A scientific question that seemed trivial will not let you go.
A sentence heard a hundred times reaches you for the first time.
Perhaps revelation is less the possession of truth than a changed relationship to truth.
And that is where responsibility begins.
After every revelation comes a second question.
What will you do with it now?
What Took Years
At twenty, I did not know what my sentence meant.
Later I began to interpret it.
I learned about Jesus.
Gnosis.
Sin.
Guilt.
Forgiveness.
The difference between a historical person and the meanings later centuries placed into Christ.
I read texts that understand his death as sacrifice.
Others that read Christ as a cosmic principle.
Others that interpret the cross psychologically as surrender.
Others that see resurrection not only as a future event, but as a transformation that must begin within life.
Eventually I noticed:
Perhaps I had not received a finished truth simply because I could not explain it at once.
Perhaps the experience was the beginning of a sentence my life would have to finish writing.
I prefer that now.
Not:
I knew everything then.
But:
Something touched me then whose meaning I still had to learn.
Revelation was the spark.
Understanding came later.
And later still came the more difficult task:
Embodiment.
Gnosis: Remembering What Was Forgotten
When I approached the Gnostic texts, I found a language that felt familiar.
Forgetting.
Remembrance.
Light.
Source.
Sophia.
Demiurge.
Archons.
The idea that a person can identify with a limited reality and forget that it is not the whole.
The image of the Demiurge especially fascinated me.
Not because I am now certain that a false cosmic god administers worlds somewhere.
Because I could recognise the structure within myself.
The human mind has to build models.
It orders.
It evaluates.
It says:
This is me.
This is dangerous.
I need this.
This must not happen.
This is how the world is.
This is necessary.
Without that ability, we would hardly survive.
But something can happen that the Gnostic myth portrays with almost frightening beauty:
The model forgets that it is a model.
An interpretation becomes truth.
A wound becomes identity.
Fear becomes reality.
A belief becomes destiny.
The inner Demiurge need not be evil.
It need only forget its limit.
The Archons can then take another meaning too.
Fear.
Control.
Shame.
Adaptation.
Resentment.
The urge to be right.
The need to be loved.
Strategies that once helped us and eventually begin to rule the life they were meant to protect.
And Sophia?
In a modern symbolic reading, perhaps she is wisdom itself, lost in its own expression.
We see light in a person.
In success.
In a religion.
In a substance.
In an insight.
And suddenly we believe:
If I receive that, I will be whole.
What is touched by light is mistaken for the source of light.
Then grasping begins.
Perhaps gnosis begins where the confusion becomes visible.
But Was the World Really the Error?
Here, for a long time, I felt a tension.
If awakening means remembering an original unity, a temptation follows easily:
Everything after that unity appears as loss.
Body.
Individuality.
Time.
Relationship.
Matter.
Life becomes a long return journey from a cosmic mistake.
Then I encountered a religious tradition I had not expected.
Joseph Smith.
The Book of Mormon.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
A story that can sound almost deliberately improbable to a modern European mind.
An angel.
Moroni.
Golden plates.
An ancient record.
A restored church.
New revelations.
Prophets.
Priesthood.
Temples.
It would have been easy to discard the story for its strangeness.
Yet beneath its surface was an idea that reached me.
Perhaps embodiment was not the mistake.
The Veil Takes on Another Meaning
In Latter-day Saint theology, human beings exist with God before birth.
Earthly life does not begin from nothing.
But memory of that prior existence is ordinarily unavailable.
A veil.
The same image again.
Only now the veil is not merely imprisonment.
It creates a space.
A space in which a decision is not merely the answer to complete knowledge.
A space in which trust can exist.
Responsibility.
Courage.
Faithfulness.
Love.
The possibility of acting otherwise.
Agency.
That word remained with me.
Not only freedom of choice.
Agency means more.
The capacity not merely to be the location where something happens, but to become one who acts.
Not entirely free of biology, history, or conditioning.
But not entirely reducible to them either.
Suddenly, human life carried another dignity.
Perhaps we do not mature despite limitation.
Perhaps something can arise only through limitation.
Can a being that was never vulnerable know care in the same way as one who can lose?
Does choice mean the same when every consequence is visible from the beginning?
A love that cannot be lost is love.
But perhaps a love that must be freely chosen is another experience of love.
I do not know whether we lived with God before birth.
This work cannot prove it.
But I can allow the question:
What if the world is not where consciousness arrived by mistake, but where certain forms of experience first become possible?
Exaltation
Then I encountered a second word.
Exaltation.
It sounds dangerous.
Like self-aggrandisement.
Like spiritual hierarchy.
Like an attempt by a person to declare themselves God.
Within Latter-day Saint theology, however, it names the human development toward a greater divine fullness.
Not merely rescue from the world.
Becoming.
Growing.
Receiving.
Embodying.
Again, I found something that collided with my former understanding of ascension.
Perhaps the highest development is not the dissolution of the individual.
Perhaps individuality can remain while becoming more transparent to the whole.
Perhaps the wave is not redeemed by ceasing to be a wave.
Perhaps it is redeemed when it knows it is water and still lives its form completely.
My own idea of ascension had become questionable too.
Ascension to Where?
I have written about ascension.
Higher levels.
Light.
Human transformation.
Joshua David Stone.
Body, emotion, mind, and spiritual development.
The light body.
Frequencies.
Geometries.
The Kathara Grid.
AzurA.
The descent from source and the path of return.
Some of it was written in a language that joined metaphysics and natural science more closely than I would today.
I placed symbols beside biophotons.
Subtle fields beside quantum physics.
Water structure beside the development of consciousness.
DNA beside spiritual transformation.
I still understand the longing beneath it.
I did not want to accept two worlds.
Spirit here.
Matter there.
Mysticism here.
Science there.
I wanted to know whether life might be one relationship.
I do not think that longing was wrong.
But I know now:
A relationship does not become stronger when its distinctions are blurred.
Perhaps the more mature synthesis is not:
Everything proves everything.
But:
Everything may speak with everything else from its proper place.
The Rose upon the Cross
This is why the Rosicrucian symbol reaches me more deeply today than some of the great metaphysical mechanisms I once attached to it.
The rose.
The cross.
The rose as soul.
The cross as form.
Body.
Matter.
Time.
Limitation.
The rose does not grow by leaving the cross.
It flowers upon it.
Perhaps the whole movement is there.
Not spirit against matter.
Not soul against body.
Not heaven against earth.
The question is:
How does something invisible become visible?
How does love become action?
How does insight become character?
How does truth become flesh?
This question is greater than the claim that the Rosicrucians already knew modern biophysics.
The symbol needs no biophotons in order to carry meaning.
Perhaps that is the real alchemy.
Not lead into gold.
Not carbon into silicon.
But:
Experience into wisdom.
Wounding into compassion.
Insight into responsibility.
Love into form.
The Kathara Grid after Physics Falls Silent
My relationship to the Kathara Grid changed too.
I do not have to discard it simply because I cannot present its metaphysical dimensions as established physics.
A map can be valuable without depicting the territory literally.
Perhaps the grid is strongest as a mythopoetic coordinate system.
A way of thinking movement.
Source.
Expression.
Differentiation.
Experience.
Integration.
Return.
In my later account of the Tree of Life, a movement appears that I recognise in my own history.
Keter as original trust.
Chokmah as the lightning of insight.
Binah as insight maturing into understanding.
Da'ath as knowledge that changes the knower.
Chesed as generosity.
Gevurah as boundary.
Tiferet as heart and orientation.
Hod as language.
Yesod as translation.
Malkuth as embodiment.
And AzurA as movement between source and form.
At twenty:
Chokmah.
The flash.
The revelation.
The sentence I could not yet understand.
Then years of Binah:
Understanding.
Reading.
Living.
Failing.
Interpreting again.
Then Da'ath:
The knowledge began to change me.
It had to pass through the heart.
Through relationship.
Through loss.
Through love.
Through boundaries.
Through language.
Eventually, everything had to reach Malkuth.
The body.
The work.
The ordinary day.
What I actually do when no one thinks I am spiritual.
Perhaps that was the whole ascension.
Not a road away from earth.
An ever deeper arrival within it.
Jung Might Have Given It Another Name
Individuation.
Not the destruction of the ego.
Not the rule of the ego.
Its place within the whole.
The shadow is not breathed away.
It is seen.
Projections do not disappear because we speak of unity.
We have to take them back.
Love does not mean having no boundary.
Sometimes love requires one.
Wholeness is not a sweet unity in which contradiction disappears.
It is the ability to carry our contradictions without being torn apart by them.
Perhaps this is the psychological sibling of what I can now understand as exaltation.
Not becoming greater.
Becoming more whole.
Not rising above others.
Entering responsibility more deeply.
Not becoming less human.
Becoming more fully so.
My Body Was There All Along
This is where every great metaphysics has to be tested.
While I thought about consciousness, source, Christ, gnosis, fields, geometry, and ascension, I lived in a body.
This body had needs.
Limits.
Exhaustion.
Sexuality.
Fear.
Digestion.
Breathing.
Sleep.
Desire.
Pain.
Tension.
Joy.
This body carried every revelation.
Including the one at twenty.
It did not happen outside my nervous system.
It happened in a state of this body.
That does not mean the body fully explains its metaphysical cause.
It does mean:
There was no revelation without embodiment.
The body is not the packaging of my spiritual story.
It is the place where the story happens.
And this is why water became so important to me.
What Water Must Carry, and What It Need Not
At some point, I asked too much of water.
I wanted it to prove molecule and Grail at once.
I wanted biology, information, consciousness, and memory to converge in one substance.
I wanted science eventually to confirm what I already felt intuitively.
More careful scientific work taught me something more valuable.
Water is already extraordinary before we add a single metaphysical property.
Its polarity.
Its dynamic hydrogen-bond network.
Its thermal properties.
Its role as a solvent.
Its interactions with ions, proteins, membranes, and biomolecules.
Its fundamental importance to the chemistry of life.
That is not a small story.
It is immense.
But a dynamic molecular network does not automatically imply a stable memory for human thoughts.
Biological importance does not automatically imply consciousness.
Quantum effects do not automatically imply metaphysics.
Water does not become smaller because of those limits.
It becomes more honest.
I can investigate water scientifically.
And it can remain the strongest Grail in my book.
Not because both meanings possess the same form of proof.
Because a real molecule and a human symbol can meet without being confused.
Perhaps the Grail Is Not the Water
Or not only the water.
Perhaps the Grail is the principle of the vessel.
The capacity to receive something.
To hold it.
Not to possess it.
To examine it.
To let it change you.
And to pass it on.
That would explain why the Grail in my story changes form again and again.
At twenty, it was a Christ experience.
Later, books.
Then water.
Then scientific questions.
Then people.
Then this work.
Perhaps I was never searching only for a substance.
Perhaps I was searching for the question:
How can something that touched me so deeply find a form through me that serves another person?
My Family
The longer I ask that question, the less my story begins in heaven.
It begins at home.
With my mother.
My father.
My sister.
With people who loved me before I could explain anything.
People who held me when my own explanations did not.
My sister was the first to say:
Write a book.
How strange.
A sentence.
Another sentence.
Not from an angel.
From my sister.
And eventually it became a work.
Perhaps revelation need not always be spectacular.
Sometimes it comes through the person at the kitchen table.
Through someone who believes in you.
Someone who stays.
Someone who corrects you.
Someone you have hurt.
Someone whose forgiveness you thought you did not deserve.
Through a relationship that ends and still leaves love behind.
Through a friend who asks a question at the right moment.
Through a song.
An embrace.
An illness.
A dismissal.
Work you thought was only temporary.
If the divine exists, perhaps it is not present only in exceptional states.
Perhaps it has a tenderness for the ordinary.
Gratitude
Here the whole book changes.
Gratitude is not the pleasant conclusion of a spiritual system.
It may be the test of one.
If my metaphysics makes me arrogant, something is wrong.
If my insight distances me from people, something is wrong.
If my "ascension" teaches me contempt for the body, something is wrong.
If my image of God diminishes another person's freedom, something is wrong.
If science becomes only a tool for defending my favourite belief, something is wrong.
If I search for source while forgetting the people who carried me, I may have overlooked the most important source.
Gratitude redirects the gaze.
Not:
What am I still missing?
But:
What have I already been given?
This body.
These people.
This earth.
This water.
This time.
The possibility of asking.
The possibility of making mistakes.
The possibility of asking forgiveness.
The possibility of loving.
Perhaps gratitude is where revelation ceases to be private.
Real gratitude creates movement.
It wants to answer.
The First Missionary Movement
When I think back to that night at twenty, something stands out.
My first response was not:
I am someone special now.
It was:
Other people should know this happiness.
The same impulse returned later.
When I thought I had discovered something about water:
Share it.
When an idea made my life easier:
Share it.
When a spiritual teaching helped:
Share it.
When I notice at work that a clearer question helps someone see their own possibility again:
Share it.
Perhaps that is the missionary impulse in me.
But I understand it differently now.
An immature missionary says:
I know what you must believe.
A more mature witness says:
I experienced something that changed my life. I want to tell it truthfully enough that you can decide for yourself whether it contains anything for you.
The first needs conversion.
The second needs freedom.
Joseph Smith and the Temptation of Authority
Here the encounter with Mormonism matters once more.
I understand why the missionaries moved me.
Their tradition takes revelation seriously.
Not only revelation in the past.
God is still understood as able to speak.
For someone who knows experiences that feel revelatory, that is hardly an abstract idea.
And yet it carries the great question:
When does personal revelation become doctrine for other people?
When does testimony become an institution?
When does experience become authority?
Joseph Smith answered forcefully. His revelations ground church, priesthood, temple, covenant, and new scripture.
My own path leads toward the opposite caution.
The more deeply I understand the dignity of revelation, the less willing I am to transfer its certainty automatically to another person.
Perhaps that is my form of agency.
A revelation may be examined.
A prophet may be examined.
This book may be examined.
Especially this book.
Science as a Practice of Humility
Perhaps I once misunderstood science too.
I thought it had to confirm the spiritual.
Today I see its greater gift.
It makes me step back.
What do I know?
What do I suspect?
What have I experienced?
What can be reproduced?
What is a mechanism?
What is a metaphor?
What would count against the claim?
Where must I say:
I do not know?
That is not disenchantment.
It is intellectual hygiene.
Perhaps even a form of prayer.
Every honest I do not know releases something that a premature I know closes.
Wonder.
Perhaps This Is Exaltation
Not becoming greater.
Not vibrating higher than other people.
Not ascending a scale.
Not possessing more dimensions.
But:
becoming able to carry more reality.
Love and boundary.
Certainty and doubt.
Mysticism and science.
Individual and whole.
Body and spirit.
Joy and grief.
Life and death.
Without destroying one side so the other may exist.
Perhaps exaltation is the widening capacity of the vessel.
Not to hold more power.
More truth.
More responsibility.
More love.
And Perhaps That Was Ascension All Along
Not the road out of density.
The road into a form that needs to lie less and less.
A body no longer permanently fought.
A psyche allowed to know its shadow.
A mind that does not confuse its models with God.
A science that does not deny mystery.
A spirituality that does not disguise hypotheses as measurements.
A relationship in which love does not mean possession.
Work that can become service.
A family to whom one says:
Thank you.
A stranger whose dignity is no smaller than one's own.
Perhaps this is the new human being.
Not brighter.
More truthful.
The Greater Synthesis
If I placed Grant, Langan, Jung, Pollack, Gnosis, Rosicrucianism, Joseph Smith, Stone, Kathara, Christ, Akram Vignan, and the many other voices of this work on one table today, I would no longer press them together until every line appeared to coincide.
I would lay them beside one another.
Some lines cross.
Others contradict.
Some are science.
Others philosophy.
Others faith.
Others poetic cosmology.
Others my own experience.
Perhaps the most beautiful synthesis does not arise through fusion.
But through relationship.
Each voice may keep its difference.
Like people.
Like the world.
Perhaps that too is individuation.
A Possible Metaphysics
Still, one question remains.
It follows me.
What if consciousness is more fundamental than we currently know?
Not as a scientific result.
As a metaphysical possibility.
What if the One truly appears as the many?
Then multiplicity need not be the error.
Perhaps difference is what makes relationship possible.
Perhaps individuation is not betrayal of source.
Perhaps it is one of source's expressions.
Then creation is not only distance.
It is encounter.
The One does not only see itself in a mirror.
It meets a you.
I cannot prove this idea.
But I can ask what it does to my life.
Does it make me more loving?
More free?
More responsible?
Less willing to compel another person?
More willing to honour their difference?
Then at least it is a metaphysics that submits itself to a moral test.
The Test
Perhaps every great spiritual system eventually needs the same simple test.
Not:
How impressive is its cosmology?
Not:
How many dimensions does it know?
Not:
How ancient is its tradition?
Not:
How powerful was my experience?
But:
What becomes of a person who lives by it?
Do they become freer?
More truthful?
Kinder?
Clearer?
More responsible?
Can they see their own mistakes more readily?
Can they love without possessing?
Set boundaries without hatred?
Hear science when it contradicts their faith?
Leave a mystery unresolved?
Allow another person to reach another answer?
If not, the most beautiful revelation helps little.
The Gift
Perhaps this is why I understand differently now the sentence that a gift becomes complete only in giving.
I thought I had to find the Holy Grail.
Perhaps I had to learn to become a vessel.
A vessel can receive.
But it does not hold fast.
Water that never flows becomes no river.
Love that must possess becomes fear.
Knowledge that no one may examine becomes dogma.
Revelation that leaves no freedom becomes power.
Perhaps my journey was never about accumulating more truth.
Perhaps it was about becoming more permeable.
And more discerning at the same time.
Open enough to receive.
Clear enough not to confuse what is received with the Absolute.
Humble enough to examine it.
Brave enough to speak it.
Loving enough to let it go.
What I Want to Give My Family
Not my cosmology.
Not my certainties.
Not my answers.
If this work is to leave anything to my parents, my sister, my friends, and the people I love, let it be this:
That I saw what they gave me.
That their love entered this book.
That every person who held me lives somewhere between these pages.
That I understood how precious my time with them is.
That none of my philosophy matters more than being able to tell them while we are still here.
Perhaps this is the immortality I can speak about without making a metaphysical claim:
One person changes another.
That person changes someone else.
A kindness is carried onward.
A question.
A way of listening.
A song.
A gesture.
A sentence:
Write a book.
And years later, someone holds that book in their hands.
What I Want to Give the World
No new church.
No final theory of everything.
No demand that anyone believe me.
An invitation.
Drink water and wonder at what it actually is.
Care for your body.
Study science carefully.
Read the mystics.
Read their critics.
Take extraordinary experiences seriously, but not as a licence to overclaim.
Let religion move you without surrendering judgement.
Examine your projections.
Thank the people who love you.
Ask forgiveness when it is needed.
Forgive when you can.
Set boundaries when love requires them.
Work so that some small part of the world becomes clearer, kinder, or freer through your presence.
And when something truly opens your heart:
Share it.
But leave the other person free.
Revelation and Exaltation
Perhaps I can read this whole journey in a few movements now.
Revelation:
Something becomes visible.
Agency:
I decide what I will do with what I have seen.
Individuation:
I learn what within me still resists embodiment.
Embodiment:
Truth reaches body, relationship, and action.
Exaltation:
The vessel becomes wider.
Not beyond the human being.
Deeper into their highest possibility.
And ascension?
Perhaps ascension is the name we give the movement while we still believe it must lead upward.
Perhaps it leads inward.
And then outward.
Toward people.
Toward earth.
Into the hands.
Malkuth
The kingdom.
The earth.
The body.
The world.
Perhaps it is no accident that so many spiritual systems eventually risk losing the thing with which everything began.
Life.
But I no longer want to leave Malkuth.
I want to be here.
As completely as possible.
Not because I know what comes after this life.
Because I understand what a gift it is that this life is here at all.
That is another kind of salvation.
Not:
Away at last.
But:
Here at last.
Remember
Perhaps this is the sentence toward which all these pages move.
Not:
Remember the correct teaching.
Not:
Remember twelve dimensions.
Not:
Remember that you are a higher being.
Perhaps something simpler.
Remember that you are alive.
That this body is not self-evident.
That the person before you is not self-evident.
That love is not self-evident.
That you can choose.
Not always freely.
Not without limits.
But often more freely than your past tells you.
Remember your ability to ask.
Your ability to wonder.
Your ability to correct a belief without betraying the experience from which it arose.
Remember that you can feel something without possessing it.
Believe something without forcing it upon another.
Not know something without lowering your head.
And remember to give thanks.
The Gospel That Remained
At twenty, I wanted to tell everyone what I had experienced.
I had no idea how.
Today I have written thousands of pages and still do not fully know.
Perhaps that is good.
Perhaps the message was never a sentence.
Perhaps it was this movement:
You are loved.
Not as a claim I can prove to you.
As a possibility I wish for you.
You are not here to be ashamed of being human.
You do not have to overcome your body in order to be sacred.
You do not have to destroy your individuality in order to belong.
You do not need an extraordinary experience in order to be close to life.
You do not have to adopt my metaphysics.
Perhaps you have to adopt nothing at all.
Perhaps it is enough if something within you grows quiet for a moment and you notice the life that has been happening all along.
The water in your glass.
Your breath.
The weight of your body.
The person beside you.
The light in the window.
The fact that you have come this far.
Perhaps that is the Grail.
Not because the glass is magical.
Because at last you drink from it.
I do not know more certainly today than I did then what spoke through me that night.
I only know more about how carefully I want to hold the question.
Perhaps it was my brain in an exceptional state.
Perhaps an archetype spoke from a depth Jung understood better than I do.
Perhaps I touched a transpersonal reality.
Perhaps Christ was nearer than I will ever comprehend.
I do not have to decide in order to be grateful.
Whatever ontology one day proves most adequate, the experience left me a question that still accompanies my life:
What if this love is true enough for me to begin living accordingly?
Perhaps that is the only revelation for which I can offer real evidence.
Not through argument.
Through the life that follows.
When I look back on my family, friends, mistakes, loves, searching, body, books, religions, water, science, metaphysics, the moments when I believed I had found something, and the others when I had to learn to release it, no triumphant certainty remains.
Something quieter remains.
Gratitude.
That I was allowed to be here.
That you were here.
That we met.
That I was allowed to ask.
That I was allowed to be wrong.
That I was allowed to love.
And that perhaps something can still flow through us into the world which is larger than our desire to hold it.
If there is ascension, I do not want a heaven that rescues me from this earth.
I want only to become more fully able to love it.
If there is exaltation, I want no crown.
Only a heart that grows wider without rising above another.
If there is revelation, may it not make me more certain than truth permits.
May it make me more open.
And if there is a Holy Grail,
may I never possess it.
May I learn
to pass it on.