Don't Just Study Pears
Soul Snack #2
(for an audio version, click above)
During 20 years of ministry, I collected a lot of books about religion and spirituality. And I love them. Many are now tattered and dear companions and the ideas they introduced me to have shaped my life.
So don’t get me wrong when I say, remember: studying God is not the same as experiencing God. Reading books and listening to podcasts and watching YouTube videos of people talking about ‘God-Love-Spirit-Mystery-Ocean-Source’ are an important part of a sincere spiritual path. And they can be a place we hide from the very thing we say we’re looking for.
Like the proverbial person who became a renowned expert on pears, wrote a book on pears, lectured across the world on pears, but had never actually tasted one, many of us prefer the comfort and control of an intellectual understanding of God.
But actual encounter with the Mystery, by definition, is an act of intellectual unraveling.  Study is a form of gathering, collecting, and controlling. To sit before the Holy is to let go of what we have gathered, collected and tried to control.  To taste God, we must put down our arrogance (thinking we know things). We must put down our selves (our constant self-reference). We must drop our labels, our stories, our awards and even our shames and, for a while, just dissolve.Â
So, for this Soul Snack, here’s an unusual invitation: take a few minutes today and let yourself disappear. Aren’t you tired of yourself anyway? Just dissolve for a while. No one has to know. While you’re brushing your teeth or walking around the grocery, imagine that ‘you’ have died and now you are just two eyes, looking out as the Mystery, at the Mystery, in love with the Mystery. Â
Quietness
by Rumi
Inside this new love, die.
Your way begins on the other side.
Become the sky.
Take an axe to the prison wall.
Escape.
Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.
Do it now.
You are covered with thick cloud.
Slide out the side. Die,
and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign
that you have died.
Your old life was a frantic running
from silence.
The speechless full moon
comes out now.Â
You have put a lot of wisdom in a few words. It is a wonderful invitation for me to come, as I am, to taste a pear. And more.
Your message is like life -- Deep -- and Light. Here you have us imagining ourselves dead. Challenging us to feel what that feels like to be nothing. Eyeballs alone looking outward. That was different. It required me to feel the moment and I appreciate the exercise. But you open with the value of tasting a pear--not just talking about it. Coincidentally, I just returned from Prague, Czech Republic where my first food there was a pear. It tasted better than any pear I've ever tasted in the US - I don't know why. I just know, it was delightful. Like this message of yours.