The Question: Is "The Universe on my Side?"
I was about five hours out of New Orleans, well into Florida’s panhandle, and I was feeling uneasy. The day was cloudy, rain was periodically dumping down in massive road-blinding eruptions, I’d had trouble deciding whether or not to, at the last minute, store my bike with some of my other things at the bookshop where I worked (I decided to take it), the father of a friend who’s chifforobe I’d been using as a closet called to ask me when he was going to get it back, and for four and a half hours (since settling into the decision to take the bike) I’d been glancing in my sideview mirror to see if the bike was rattling too much on the cheap Wal-Mart bike rack I purchased.
Suffice to say, stress was high.
These things may read now like issues of some minor significance (maybe very minor), but see, I’m a guy who deals with major life anxieties (“Holy fuck! What the hell am I doing!”) by indulging minor neuroses and turning them major (“that damn bike rack is going to snap and the falling bike is going to fall onto the grill and then under the wheel of the massive truck behind me and that’s going to end up as a thirty car pile-up on this highway with manydeathsandinjuries and I will be held responsible…and rightfully so! because it will be my fault!”). So that's the picture: I was driving the car, thinking of this intense fear pulsing through me, the one tied to the reality of my current cosmic situation: I was really traveling around America with the intent of asking people on the fringes of society what they think about God. And I was doing it on nobody’s direction but my own. I mean, really, who does that?
And the radio was on. As is my usual preference and prerogative when driving alone, I was searching out the pop music stations, clicking through the stations as the last one went fuzzy while moving from county to county. It happened that in this fingering search in the midst of my uneasiness, the pop song "Bright" by Echosmith came on, the one that includes the lyrics: “I think the universe is on my side.”
The truth is, I’m not often one to glean major wisdom from today's Top-25 (which isn't to say it isn't there). Indeed, I sometimes think that rocking it to the billboard hits of the right-now, while fun, might be a mistake in these situations, the beginnings of things. Too often, many of the lyrics in this hyper-branded sub-genre of pop music are a means of expressing a kind of shallow angst. And if you're already angst-ridden, having that angst amplified by the, admittedly catchy, words of "baby now we got bad blood" pounding through the small box you're stuck driving in for hours, can be...not ideal. But! I am also conscious of being open to signs, from wherever they might come. Wisdom does pop up in all kinds of places when you’re looking for it, and if the universe were on my side, it would kind of make sense that it would tell me so, from the lips of Echosmith if need be. Ya know?
That said, skepticism can only be suspended so much, and suspending it too much would be to the detriment of my exploration. Beginning a journey that both addresses spirituality and may in fact be spiritual in nature, I felt (and likely will continue to feel) inclined to ask after hearing the song-lyric: Is “the universe” on “my side?” The quotation marks might give away my thoughts about the particular language of the question, but the essence of the inquiry remains. I might ask: Is God - here understood as the deep interconnectedness of all being, the oneness, the great wave which is greater than us all but in which we are all included (see: Perennial Wisdom, about which more to come) - on my side? does that God have some kind of stake in my success? Can such a thing be conceived?
A Popular Idea and an Old Idea
It’s become something of a popular idea that the universe is “on my side.” It's a neat cosmic fit into the realm of self-help literature that says happiness and success are entirely of your own making. To those many who’ve read the bestseller The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho, the more familiar language is “when you want something, the whole universe conspires to help you get it.” In that vein, you must only seek out the thing you want, and you will be enlisting "the universe's" aid. To those, probably fewer in number, who’ve read the collection of writings, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, the idea is very similar to “pronoia,” a word he uses to mean the opposite of “paranoia.” In that work, Dick describes his belief that God is conspiring to save him through what he calls the V.A.L.I.S, the Vast Active Living Intelligence System, a universe-encompassing secret network that operates behind the scenes on behalf of humans and other intelligent creatures. Stop resisting being saved, says Dick, and the conspiracy kicks in to help you. Leave it to a preeminent science fiction writer to understand God as a conspiracy.
Expanded, the idea has older origins as well. In the same passage of the Babylonian Talmud (Sanhedrin 37b) that states that to kill one person is to kill an entire world, and that to save one person is to save an entire world, the rabbis state, “Every single person must say: the world was created for me.” And really, how different is this idea from the notion that “God loves us,” which is fairly prominent in the Gospels. John 3:16, that ubiquitous verse, states, "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life." In that light, the very dispatching of Jesus to the world is an affirmation of God being eternally on our side.
Quick Aside: A Hasidic Story about "The Whole World was Created for Me"
One of the important rebbes of the 19th century Jewish spiritual revivalist movement in Europe known as hasidism was Simcha Bunim of Pshishke, also known simply as The Jew of Pshishke. He used to tell his followers that they should carry two pieces of paper with them at all times, one in each pocket. On the first should be written the Talmudic teaching: “The whole world was created for me.” On the second, the verse from the Bible spoken by Abraham when humbling himself during his bargaining with God for the lives of the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, “I am but dust and ashes.” The master of Pshishke told his followers that the challenge of life was to learn when to reach into which pocket.
First Nights: The Two Ends of the Spectrum
Later this week, I’ll write a little more about my first days on the road in Florida. Pertinent to this blogpost and the question of signs and coincidences brought bubbling to the surface by Echosmith, are the first two conversations I had with strangers about my investigation. At a campground outside of Tallahassee and in the Coral Gables neighborhood of Miami, I met two men of very different ages and backgrounds who, when I asked them my questions about God and America, provided two starkly opposing (and assured) answers. The first insisted that he was sure I was going to find that “Godlessness is at the root of this country’s problems, too many people thinking they’re bigger than God” and the second told me, “You know, God and religion are the absolute bane of civilization, right? Those religious people who speak and act on behalf on something that’s not even real!”
I mention this here because it does feel coincidental that, in my very first conversations on the topic, I would find such perfectly opposite sentiments. And in the theology of “the oneness,” of deep unceasing interconnectedness between things, coincidences are never simply “just there.” They must be investigated. (Does this mean that God is on my side? Back to that in The Conclusion).
It does seem worth noting that the responses of these two are perhaps less opposing than they may seem. For both men, what they were really railing against was hubris. The fact that each saw hubris in a different place, in completely opposing places, doesn’t change the fundamental stance from which both expressed their viewpoints. It was as if they were saying “those people who think the whole world was created for them! Harumph! Don’t they know we’re but dust and ashes!” At the same time, both felt assured that they were right, that they understood, that they knew.
The two ends of the spectrum meet in the pockets of the followers of the Jew of Pshishke.
Conclusion to this Blog Post
I’m going to give away my current answer to the question of whether I think God or the Oneness or the Universe is working to help me in this current investigative endeavor: I have no idea. My instinct is that no, the universe is not on my side, it’s not on any one person’s side, it’s the universe, it’s on all sides. I mean, how could it make sense that it’s on my side while I’m driving through Florida seeking out fringe communities to ask about God, but not on someone else’s side? How would it decide such a thing? Is it on the side of everybody? What about the six-year old girl fleeing a war-ravaged Syria with her family, or the tired roustabout who slips on an oil rig and loses a limb, really all the masses of people going through pain and heartache every day? That’s a tough pill to swallow. So I’m not going to.
But I still have my doubts about my "no." I might posit a compromise and say: the universe notices occasionally…once a month maybe. Though really who knows. It all works in mysterious ways.
I was about five hours out of New Orleans, well into Florida’s panhandle, and I was feeling uneasy. The day was cloudy, rain was periodically dumping down in massive road-blinding eruptions, I’d had trouble deciding whether or not to, at the last minute, store my bike with some of my other things at the bookshop where I worked (I decided to take it), the father of a friend who’s chifforobe I’d been using as a closet called to ask me when he was going to get it back, and for four and a half hours (since settling into the decision to take the bike) I’d been glancing in my sideview mirror to see if the bike was rattling too much on the cheap Wal-Mart bike rack I purchased.
Suffice to say, stress was high.
These things may read now like issues of some minor significance (maybe very minor), but see, I’m a guy who deals with major life anxieties (“Holy fuck! What the hell am I doing!”) by indulging minor neuroses and turning them major (“that damn bike rack is going to snap and the falling bike is going to fall onto the grill and then under the wheel of the massive truck behind me and that’s going to end up as a thirty car pile-up on this highway with manydeathsandinjuries and I will be held responsible…and rightfully so! because it will be my fault!”). So that's the picture: I was driving the car, thinking of this intense fear pulsing through me, the one tied to the reality of my current cosmic situation: I was really traveling around America with the intent of asking people on the fringes of society what they think about God. And I was doing it on nobody’s direction but my own. I mean, really, who does that?
And the radio was on. As is my usual preference and prerogative when driving alone, I was searching out the pop music stations, clicking through the stations as the last one went fuzzy while moving from county to county. It happened that in this fingering search in the midst of my uneasiness, the pop song "Bright" by Echosmith came on, the one that includes the lyrics: “I think the universe is on my side.”
The truth is, I’m not often one to glean major wisdom from today's Top-25 (which isn't to say it isn't there). Indeed, I sometimes think that rocking it to the billboard hits of the right-now, while fun, might be a mistake in these situations, the beginnings of things. Too often, many of the lyrics in this hyper-branded sub-genre of pop music are a means of expressing a kind of shallow angst. And if you're already angst-ridden, having that angst amplified by the, admittedly catchy, words of "baby now we got bad blood" pounding through the small box you're stuck driving in for hours, can be...not ideal. But! I am also conscious of being open to signs, from wherever they might come. Wisdom does pop up in all kinds of places when you’re looking for it, and if the universe were on my side, it would kind of make sense that it would tell me so, from the lips of Echosmith if need be. Ya know?
That said, skepticism can only be suspended so much, and suspending it too much would be to the detriment of my exploration. Beginning a journey that both addresses spirituality and may in fact be spiritual in nature, I felt (and likely will continue to feel) inclined to ask after hearing the song-lyric: Is “the universe” on “my side?” The quotation marks might give away my thoughts about the particular language of the question, but the essence of the inquiry remains. I might ask: Is God - here understood as the deep interconnectedness of all being, the oneness, the great wave which is greater than us all but in which we are all included (see: Perennial Wisdom, about which more to come) - on my side? does that God have some kind of stake in my success? Can such a thing be conceived?
A Popular Idea and an Old Idea
It’s become something of a popular idea that the universe is “on my side.” It's a neat cosmic fit into the realm of self-help literature that says happiness and success are entirely of your own making. To those many who’ve read the bestseller The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho, the more familiar language is “when you want something, the whole universe conspires to help you get it.” In that vein, you must only seek out the thing you want, and you will be enlisting "the universe's" aid. To those, probably fewer in number, who’ve read the collection of writings, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, the idea is very similar to “pronoia,” a word he uses to mean the opposite of “paranoia.” In that work, Dick describes his belief that God is conspiring to save him through what he calls the V.A.L.I.S, the Vast Active Living Intelligence System, a universe-encompassing secret network that operates behind the scenes on behalf of humans and other intelligent creatures. Stop resisting being saved, says Dick, and the conspiracy kicks in to help you. Leave it to a preeminent science fiction writer to understand God as a conspiracy.
Expanded, the idea has older origins as well. In the same passage of the Babylonian Talmud (Sanhedrin 37b) that states that to kill one person is to kill an entire world, and that to save one person is to save an entire world, the rabbis state, “Every single person must say: the world was created for me.” And really, how different is this idea from the notion that “God loves us,” which is fairly prominent in the Gospels. John 3:16, that ubiquitous verse, states, "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life." In that light, the very dispatching of Jesus to the world is an affirmation of God being eternally on our side.
Quick Aside: A Hasidic Story about "The Whole World was Created for Me"
One of the important rebbes of the 19th century Jewish spiritual revivalist movement in Europe known as hasidism was Simcha Bunim of Pshishke, also known simply as The Jew of Pshishke. He used to tell his followers that they should carry two pieces of paper with them at all times, one in each pocket. On the first should be written the Talmudic teaching: “The whole world was created for me.” On the second, the verse from the Bible spoken by Abraham when humbling himself during his bargaining with God for the lives of the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, “I am but dust and ashes.” The master of Pshishke told his followers that the challenge of life was to learn when to reach into which pocket.
First Nights: The Two Ends of the Spectrum
Later this week, I’ll write a little more about my first days on the road in Florida. Pertinent to this blogpost and the question of signs and coincidences brought bubbling to the surface by Echosmith, are the first two conversations I had with strangers about my investigation. At a campground outside of Tallahassee and in the Coral Gables neighborhood of Miami, I met two men of very different ages and backgrounds who, when I asked them my questions about God and America, provided two starkly opposing (and assured) answers. The first insisted that he was sure I was going to find that “Godlessness is at the root of this country’s problems, too many people thinking they’re bigger than God” and the second told me, “You know, God and religion are the absolute bane of civilization, right? Those religious people who speak and act on behalf on something that’s not even real!”
I mention this here because it does feel coincidental that, in my very first conversations on the topic, I would find such perfectly opposite sentiments. And in the theology of “the oneness,” of deep unceasing interconnectedness between things, coincidences are never simply “just there.” They must be investigated. (Does this mean that God is on my side? Back to that in The Conclusion).
It does seem worth noting that the responses of these two are perhaps less opposing than they may seem. For both men, what they were really railing against was hubris. The fact that each saw hubris in a different place, in completely opposing places, doesn’t change the fundamental stance from which both expressed their viewpoints. It was as if they were saying “those people who think the whole world was created for them! Harumph! Don’t they know we’re but dust and ashes!” At the same time, both felt assured that they were right, that they understood, that they knew.
The two ends of the spectrum meet in the pockets of the followers of the Jew of Pshishke.
Conclusion to this Blog Post
I’m going to give away my current answer to the question of whether I think God or the Oneness or the Universe is working to help me in this current investigative endeavor: I have no idea. My instinct is that no, the universe is not on my side, it’s not on any one person’s side, it’s the universe, it’s on all sides. I mean, how could it make sense that it’s on my side while I’m driving through Florida seeking out fringe communities to ask about God, but not on someone else’s side? How would it decide such a thing? Is it on the side of everybody? What about the six-year old girl fleeing a war-ravaged Syria with her family, or the tired roustabout who slips on an oil rig and loses a limb, really all the masses of people going through pain and heartache every day? That’s a tough pill to swallow. So I’m not going to.
But I still have my doubts about my "no." I might posit a compromise and say: the universe notices occasionally…once a month maybe. Though really who knows. It all works in mysterious ways.
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