Limited Vision

August 13, 2006

Katherine Cates

Let us pray:  We ask that God be here with us as we join our hearts and minds to a common purpose, which is to come to know ourselves and our relationship to God, and to align our wills with God’s will.

I hope everyone has been enjoying the lovely summer days we have been having recently.  I like the more relaxing pace of summer, but I am not a fan of excessive heat.  Randy and I were fortunate to be on our annual visit with friends in Hyannisport during one of the really hot stretches in July.  On one of these trips to the Cape several years ago, our friend, John, was ready to leave for home but couldn’t find his car keys, which he was sure had been left on a table on the front porch.  By the time a good part of an hour had elapsed, he had enlisted the help everyone in the house.  There was talk of calling home and having his extra keys sent by overnight mail so that he could leave the next day.  I decided to try something I had been doing for myself and my family for years: remote viewing.  I told Randy I was going upstairs to our bedroom to look for John’s keys—luckily Randy knows me well enough that he wasn’t alarmed or angered by that.  I settled on the bed, shut my eyes, relaxed my mind, and brought up an image of the keys.  I allowed the surroundings to fill in, and it was dark.  I panned outward in my inner vision and saw a zippered pocket, then further outward and saw a golf bag.  I repeated the exercise several times and then went downstairs to the kitchen where I found John, Randy and others.  I was unsure, but said to them, “I saw the keys in the lower zipper pocket of a golf bag.”  I explained what I had done, bracing myself for ridicule, but John just said that he had already looked through his golf bag.  He also acknowledged that he did keep them there sometimes.  Oh well, I thought with some embarrassment.  I told myself that maybe I had just seen a place where the keys had been placed in the past, even if they weren’t there now.  John decided to check his golf bag anyway and he left the kitchen and went out to open the trunk of his car.  He walked back in the house holding up the keys.  “They were in the lower zipper pocket of my golf bag,” he said.        

There are many of you here today that know about my explorations into the realm of the unconscious mind, visionary experiences, and meditative states.  My journey has opened a world to me that was invisible when I was young and my beliefs about what is real and what is possible have expanded greatly.  It may surprise you that I have sought to understand my new view of the world through science, including quantum physics, the work of biologist Rupert Sheldrake, and the studies reported by the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which was founded by the astronaut, Edgar Mitchell.  I even signed up for a seminar early in the 1990’s led by a former member of the US military’s Technical Remote Viewing program.  But, the seminar was cancelled.  I learned later that there were major issues surrounding the closure of the military remote viewing program in 1989 and the effort to bring the controversial technology to the public.  Eventually, former members of the military program, including a general, founded Psi Tech, a successful company that teaches people like you and me how to do remote viewing.  It has a website and has been operating for seventeen years.   

So, what does any of this have to do with today’s scripture readings?  Humanity resists believing or seeing anything that doesn’t fit in with the established world view.  We see the world through the veil of our beliefs.  Yet, there is a vast unseen world that we are capable of tapping into, if we can get around our fear of the unknown and our preconceived notions.

In our first reading from 1 Kings, Elijah assumed he was doomed, decided to give up, and lay down to die—if not by the hand of the Lord, certainly by the hands of his enemies.  He couldn’t see any way out.  But, God kept him alive by manifesting food out of the ethers, a feat that was beyond human understanding.  Then, when the Lord said to Elijah that he was about to “pass by,” Elijah was prepared for a grand entrance.  We still, as a rule, imagine a thundering voice or an explosion of light if God were to appear.  But, God was not in the great wind, or the earthquake, or the fire.  God was in the still, small voice, or, in other translations, the sound of sheer silence.  

Entering into the silence is the purpose of meditation, and it is hard work.  The silence of God is not a worldly silence, a lack of audible noise—it is a lack of inner noise.  Our thoughts, beliefs, fears, attitudes and doubts constitute a loud, distracting inner noise.  When we can silence the inner, we can make space for the light of God to enter in.  We can begin to let go of those rigid ideas that prevent us from growing and developing as people.

Yet, we human beings tend to resist change, even growth, when it threatens our comfort and security.  We become settled into routines, traditions, rituals and familiar activities.  We take on roles and become defined by them.  In the second reading, Jesus was back in his home territory, speaking as Christ.  Did his old acquaintances and neighbors open themselves to the great new wisdom that Jesus had to offer?  No.  Their immediate response was, “Hey, we knew this guy when he was a kid, running around barefoot in the dirt.  His dad was Joe the carpenter.  Who does he think he is, acting like he is something special?”  I think Jesus must have been constantly disappointed and frustrated in the limited vision of humanity.  So many people didn’t have the ears to hear or the eyes to see his message.

The quote from the gospel of Luke that I chose for the bulletin heading today is an example of Jesus’ sorrow.  When he said this he was weeping over the city of Jerusalem, knowing its violent future.  “Would that even today you knew the things that make for peace.  But now they are hid from your eyes.”    Sadly, his words are applicable even two thousand years later.  We still have trouble knowing what makes for peace.  Religious and political freedom?  A democratic government?  A powerful military?  High quality education?  Food and shelter for everyone?  Parents that love their children?  At times, these things may stop or prevent conflict, but the outer peace is only temporary.

As long as we fail to see our true identities as expressions of the vast, infinite life force—sometimes known as God—as long as we only hear the noise and not the silence, we won’t know who we are.  So, we will create identities for ourselves based on worldly influences.  I am a Christian, you are a Muslim.  I am an American, you are Iranian.  I am a Republican, you are a Democrat.  I am white, you are black.  I am right, you are wrong.  I am going to kill you before you kill me.

I am counting on an evolutionary leap in our worldview, a whole new paradigm.  It may seem like a long shot right now, but I see signs of unprecedented spiritual development and understanding of the laws of the universe.  I see human capacities expanding and breaking the old barriers.  I hope to be a part of this shift, and I don’t mean by finding lost keys.  I never took the course on remote viewing because I learned that it wasn’t the most productive way for me to grow.  Jesus refused to perform miracles for Caiaphas when he was on trial.  It might have saved his physical body for a while, but it wouldn’t have done as much to awaken hearts, minds and souls as his crucifixion and resurrection did.

A story about a disciple of the Buddha also addresses the futility of focusing attention, time, and energy on psychic tricks rather than spiritual development.  The disciple came to the Buddha full of excitement about a tremendous breakthrough.  “Master!” he said.  “I have done it!  After months and months of effort and mental discipline I have finally succeeded in levitating my body from the riverbank, floating through the air across the river, and landing on the other side!”  “You have wasted your time,” replied the Buddha. “Don’t you know that you could have taken the boat?” 

We only need to look at the Bible to see that there have been prophets, psychics, healers, and magicians for thousands of years.  I think their abilities show that we have barely scratched the surface when it comes to human potential.  These talents can be used in wonderful ways to make our lives better.  But these talents can be used for darker purposes too, as in a military program in remote viewing designed to locate enemy targets.

It is the development of the spirit, the awakening of the soul that is more urgent right now.  If we could fully understand the message of the Christ, if we could truly experience divine love, then we wouldn’t use our special, creative talents to find ways to blow each other up.  To achieve a more permanent peace, human beings must learn to see the world as an interconnected whole and themselves as an integral part of it: to see that destroying another is like the left hand attacking the right hand.  For those of you interested in the science that leads toward this understanding, I recommend the movie, Mindwalk.

I will always be a spiritual seeker, an explorer of the inner world.  I still don’t really know who I am.  But I know more than I did yesterday, and I know that being the go-to person to find lost keys isn’t very important.  I would rather encourage others to join me in breaking the boundaries of limited vision, and then they can find their own keys.

Thanks be to God.