Ordinary Wonder

transcendent--"beyond or above the range of normal or merely physical human experience;surpassing the ordinary; existing apart from and not subject to the limitations of the material universe".  Synonyms:supernatural, otherworldly, mystical, spiritual, sublime, ethereal.  Antonyms: ordinary, mundane

I have had my share of encounters with the "transcendent."  None of these happenings were drug or alcohol induced. I was not "on" anything. It's just that several different times in my life something has broken through the fabric of the ordinary, the mundane into some other dimension. What happened  can only be described as "mystical"  or "transcendent."  These experiences left me dazed and somewhat bewildered.  The upside of these experiences has been to put me in touch with a dimension of life that's beyond the ordinary.  The downside of these experiences is that the ordinary in comparison feels mundane. If you remove the "extra" from "extraordinary" then the "ordinary" feels rather empty.

One of my transcendent experiences happened while driving on Highway 78 east from Jasper to Birmingham, Alabama. It involved beautiful music on the radio and a church I was passing along the way. There was no danger to me or other motorists as the whole incident only lasted a matter of seconds. But "transcendence" seems to happen out of time. The most powerful transcendent experience of my life came in a dream in 1982. When I woke up from the dream I knew that my dream self was a part of a transformational experience.  My dream self then transformed my waking self into something new. Thinking about the dream even now, thirty seven years later, I am touched with its beauty, its power and its purpose. Another transcendent experience was on a sailboat in the late 1980s. This experience temporarily  filled me to overflowing with a sensation of buoyancy and wonder.  Although I was very much in the body through the entire experience, my psyche seemed to float to somewhere else.  From a passing of time perspective, this experience lasted about twenty minutes. This was considerably longer in duration than all my other transcendental experiences combined. Another thing that separates this experience with the others is that something very similar happened at about the same time to my best friend; so for the first time I was able to talk to someone who understood what I was saying. Unfortunately, my friend got killed before we could talk about it again. Other mystical experiences have touched me and changed me over the years.

With this said, the secret to abundant living is not to rack up as many transcendent experiences as possible, but to find the extraordinary in the ordinary.  This phenomenon is perhaps best illustrated in Thornton Wilder's play Our Town when the events of one ordinary day in one ordinary town are transformed to the extraordinary. But we do not need to watch a play or sit under a Bodhi tree to see the extraordinary at work. Extraordinary things happen all around us every single day. The sun, which is 93 million miles away, has a surface temperature of about 6,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Yet after the heat and light have traveled their eight minutes to earth and have punctured Earth's atmosphere, the average temperature at the equator is only 88 degrees. With a little sunscreen the heat of the sun is quite bearable to humans. Green living things on Earth use the light of the sun in a process called photosynthesis. This process synthesizes foods from carbon dioxide and water. Of all things, oxygen is a byproduct of this chemical interaction. Ninety nine percent of the gases in our atmosphere are oxygen and nitrogen. A human being dies if deprived of oxygen for about five minutes. In the time you've spent reading this, your life has been spared because of your breathing. Amazing. That the Earth synthesizes enough oxygen every day for all 7 billion of Earth's inhabitants is quite extraordinary.

UNICEF estimates that about 350,000 babies are born every day. That's 14,500 babies born every hour. Or that's 243 living, breathing human beings born in the world every single minute of every day. After nine months suspended in amniotic fluid, these tiny earthlings are now surviving on their own, breathing oxygen from the air like all of us.  Isn't  that extraordinary? ! The world could not contain the books about the extraordinary things  that happen to us every second of every day.

It has been quite some time since I have had a bona fide "transcendental experience". Do I miss them? Of course I do. Do I need them?  I must not or I would have them.  The thing I miss the most about "mystical experiences" is the sense of existential arrival and departure that they provide.  It's as though the experiences provide a cosmic signpost that reads "You are here."  So without some otherworldly guide to point the way, the Universe leaves that up to me. So what do I want to do with my life?   Where do I go from here? I think I'll go to the kitchen and brew a cup of coffee. My Keurig is quite extraordinary.