It surprises me that I’m about to talk about some visions that I have experienced in my life as a self-styled seeker. I’m talking about actual visions that occurred while stone cold sober— scenes I could see perfectly that I knew no one else would be able to see. I never said much about them till now; for many years, I was not willing to expose these private phenomena to criticism from rationalists, religionists, or would-be psychics. I never even called these moments “visions,” for fear of being drastically misunderstood. I feared equally the responses of the overly gullible and the self-described “realist.” Like Scrooge, the realist scoffs at the vision; it is the result of “an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato.” The case is closed as soon as you feel faintly like a moron.
However, I am emboldened by the stories and reflections of others, and by the fresh attention that visions and other altered states seem to be receiving now. Scientists now routinely study the states of mind that induce visions, dreams, or states of meditation and prayer, both with and without outside pharmaceuticals. (See this example; there are others.) Establishment Christian churches or non-believers need not fear being overrun; to my knowledge, there’s no Million Mystic March being planned. But traditional churches might consider that people may be leaving the fold because they increasingly value personal, spiritual, first-hand experiences over the second-hand stories of tired preachers or irrelevant prayerbooks. Somehow, more and more people are finding spiritual affirmation not in the sanctuary but in the mind of the world.
So, now that visions are cool again…
I want to relate three events I have only recently mentioned in public, and let’s see where these might have come from.
First vision: as a child of about seven.
I am outside, alone, at night. I see a deep black night sky with glistening silver clouds blowing fast across the moon. I know deeply that I am connected to this infinity, to the moon, and to the wind that blows the clouds. I know the wind has purpose, and I know I will seek it out.
Though I don’t recall how this vision originated, it is one of the clearest, sharpest, most evocative dream or fantasy I have ever had. I can call it up in my mind today with scarcely any loss of image quality. Moreover, the tableau describes the essence of my inner orientation ever since then. All my life, I have been searching for the meaning of things; looking for the purpose of the wind that blows the clouds across the moon. In that scenario, I know myself to be connected with the infinite natural world and its deep truths. This doesn’t mean I plunge myself into the Great Outdoors all the time; I could not survive 72 hours in the wild. It means that I know we are not merely creatures of abstract thought. We are part of an ecosystem.
Next vision: as an adult in seminary
In a meditation class taught by a former Buddhist monk, my monkey-mind gets surprisingly quiet one day. With eyes closed, I see before me a monk in saffron robes, sitting comfortably in lotus position about four feet off the ground. Behind him is a high wall built of books, mortared together with blood.
This brief but detailed vision was unprecedented for me, as I had not yet gotten the hang of meditation and was unimpressed with my results. But this vision was oddly affirming as I struggled to discover what in the world I was doing in seminary and where it all might lead. It told me that one could find and follow teachers in many places; could even become a teacher, buoyed by all the testaments of faith into a place of enlightenment. But I also understood that those testaments come at a high price.
Third vision: as a minister
While driving to the Los Angeles airport for the funeral of an elderly loved one, I see that very loved one walking and talking with a man I recognize as Jesus. He has traditional long Jesus hair, but he wears a pink button-down shirt and a pair of jeans. He is easing her along the path while gently explaining to her all the things she had gotten wrong or missed out on in life. She understands everything now, she is sorry, and she is surprised and shyly pleased that he would trouble himself with her, since she had never really troubled herself with him.
Again, unprecedented in my experience. But my response to this scene was not awe or spooky chills. Rather, I was glad to think that maybe, as she was transitioning from this life to whatever is next, she received some comfort and some simple directions. In this vision, Jesus was literally showing the Way and telling the Truth. Just as Jesus is supposed to have promised.
And even as an agnostic, I could see in this vision a way to understand “the Way and the Truth,” though I humbly cannot confirm or deny the Eternal Life part. In my vision, Jesus is not the gatekeeper of heaven. He is the greeter. He offers us the cosmic straight-line: “Walk this way!” So why has Christianity focused so intently on “believing in” Jesus rather following the Way of Jesus? I don’t know. Perhaps it’s that the Jesus Way is really, really hard to walk. Talk is easier. Say some words, eat a wafer, and call it a day.
But that’s never been enough for me, so I was glad to see this simple scene as I sped down the highway, hypnotized by driving and pondering the mysteries of our life and death.
Where do these pictures come from?
Rather than characterize these visions as weird symptoms or mental errata, I have always understood them to be natural activities of my brain/soul/self. Like dreams, these waking moments touch upon areas of knowing that are usually hidden to the seer, as others have observed in even greater depth. But I have been asking for years: Where did these images come from? How can I remember pictures I have never seen?
Now, I am wondering if these visions are windows into what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin first described as the noosphere in the 1920s.
Teilhard, a Jesuit paleontologist, suggested that a layer of conscious knowledge, the noosphere, was forming around the earth, creating a new, observable aspect of the earth’s reality that was beginning to transform our habitat and our human experience. It may sound improbable or fantastic, but it is being studied at Princeton in the ongoing Global Consciousness Project. That project seeks to show meaningful correlations of random data by a process which I do not pretend for a moment to understand. But I think I broadly understand the hypothesis they offer on the home page:
I’ve never seen that black night sky, but somewhere it exists for me to see with my internal eye. Nor have I ever seen a small levitating monk, or Jesus in a pink Oxford shirt. As an agnostic, the truth claims I can honestly support are few. One such claim that I do support is that an individual human consciousness MAY be linked, somehow, to a broader consciousness that individuals usually cannot describe. I can’t prove it, of course, but I have intuited this conviction, and… well, why not?
Inevitably, we will want to connect the noosphere with the internet. Indeed, this web we have made seems to be the logical next step in the evolution of human communication from our earliest gestures onward. When we learned to speak, we used the physical tools of our tongues and larynx to increase the range of our interactions. When we learned to write, we used exterior physical tools to further widen our interactions, across both space and time. When print technologies accelerated the dissemination of ideas among literate societies, huge social changes followed, and quickly. Now, internet connectivity provides an explosion of communication through words, images, sounds, and representations of events a world away.
Does this expansion of our communicative reach necessarily indicate an expansion of our spiritual reach? We are tweeting and texting and blogging out millions and zillions of messages into the ether, hoping to connect, hoping to be heard. Are we also learning to listen? More important, are we extending our awesome global wisdom and compassion to those we see and hear and care for in real life? At the market? At work? In the living room, where the child stands at your elbow while you are engaged with your phone or your tablet or your keyboard?
Teilhard did mention technologies as part of the noosphere; I would love to know what he would say about what we have now. At the very least, his ideas remain timely and relevant; perhaps we are now ready to understand them better. But the mind of the world must guide us toward each other as well as to the splendor of our visions.
Perhaps my odd experiences are merely examples of my consciousness wandering off to play, and finding, in another part of the forest, other ways of knowing truths. I wonder now whether we, as a species, might all begin to find each other in that forest? Could our mystical worlds meet? Are we poised for a new Axial Age, a new emergence of consciousness? I don’t know.
But as more and more people timidly emerge from the shadows and share the breadth and depth of their spiritual experiences, perhaps the totality of those experiences will exceed the parts.
Perhaps, together, we will learn the purpose behind the wind that blows the clouds.
Rev Dr Sparky on Real/igion 
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