The Night of the Little Self[1]

Walter devotes his May 16 letter to a spiritually transformative moment in the life of Leonard, a close friend, and relates it to the “sudden vision and light” that transformed the life of Paul, who later wrote the bulk of the epistles in the New Testament. I can’t speak knowingly of their transformative experiences. I can speak knowingly of mine.

It was sourced in a quest that may have begun when Mom offered me five dollars if I would read through the Bible. I started reading a chapter or two each night. On paying me a couple of years later, she repeated the offer, so by my mid-teens, I had read the entirety of the Bible twice.

Possibly because I never questioned the truth of the Bible, its words profoundly affected me. The Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament) left me with a sense of the awesomeness of God. The New Testament left me with a deep appreciation of the love and sacrifice of Jesus. Both testaments created perplexing questions that would resurface from time to time throughout my college years. The presence of God . . . miracles . . . revelations, what were they? They seemed to be tied into the nature of that part of me that perceived them—my mind. That too was a question.

Three related conflicts frequently resurfaced in one form or another in college during discussions at meetings of the Lutheran Student Association:

• Miracle after miracle in the Bible defied the assumptions of science.
• The limited time domain of the creation accounts in the Bible conflicted with the astronomical time frames of the creation accounts in science.
• Truth in science was founded on objective observation and testable theory; biblical truth seemed to be founded on historical accounts of personal revelations from God.

For the time being, I dismissed the first conflict as being essentially unresolvable. The only documentation of the miracles with which I was familiar was described in the Bible, and that was the very document under question. It seemed you either accepted it as written or you didn’t.

I also tabled the second and third conflicts. Who’s to say God could not create the world through the processes of evolution? Moreover, answers either way had little bearing on my sense of God’s pervasive awareness of my thoughts and actions. That left me with more personally relevant questions: What is God? What is mind? And how are the two related?

My questions simmered without clear answers or any sense of headway throughout college and into my first year in a PhD program in experimental statistics—until my older brother, Paul, unexpectedly called, saying, “Now I know what God is. God is truth, pure and simple truth.” He came to that realization while reading the book The Origins and Growth of Biology as part of his PhD studies in animal behavior. It changed his life and energized his studies. Although the book also expanded my interest in the nature and transparency of scientific truth, it didn’t engage my awareness of God as a presence in my life.

A few years later, I ran across the book Mind, Self, and Society in Paul’s office. It contained the lecture notes of George Mead, known for his work in social psychology, as compiled by a few of his graduate students. The notes addressed notions related to my vague sense of the mind. Mead saw gestures as a means by which animals communicate with one another. A gesture could be anything—a crouch, a bristling, a growl, a scent, a wink, a fist, a failure to act, even disinterest. Every state, sound, and movement of an organism signaled something potentially perceived by another.

Mead emphasized that the meaning of a gesture depended on its perceiver. The song of a wren singing in a bush may mean one thing to its mate, another to a cat, and another to a poet. But suppose you turn around in a crowded theater and see flames. You might instinctively yell, “Fire!” In that case, your expression would mean roughly the same to all in the theater. The actual fire would spread in slow motion relative to the speed with which your gesture would light up the audience. Mead termed expressions that stand for roughly the same thing in the mind of the sender as they do in the mind of the perceiver “significant symbols.”

I had always thought of my mind as something localized within my head. Now I was seeing it as somehow coextensive with the minds of others. I had resumed reading Mead’s book in my upstairs office one evening, contemplating this new sense of the mind, when luminous fibers suddenly shot out from my midsection. Truth impressions and expressions of which I could catch only the general gist were streaming in and out at numbing rates. I was no longer my body or even my mind (when viewed as something confined to my brain). I was a node caught up in an incomprehensible web of influences through which all of us were somehow connected. I was enlivened by a vast and encompassing spiritual presence of which I was inescapably a part.

At first struck dumb, I began excitedly pacing the room, trying to contemplate what had happened. I, who had so long pondered what a revelation from God might be like, had just experienced one! A dispersive existence displaced my former sense of a materially localized one. Self-importance gave way to inherent self-worth. A material lifetime that waxed and waned in a few short years shrank to little more than a moment in a spiritual existence that somehow originated in the distant past and extended far into the future. The kingdom of God—its joys, its understandings, its relationships—sprang to life. My mind jumped back to an understanding Jesus had expressed. I was in God, and God was in me, and, by the same token, I was in my neighbor and my neighbor in me. I was caught up in an inclusive spirit of acceptance and freedom of which I would always be a part.

The web was so simple. Each expression was materially received, interpreted, and possibly reciprocated. At the same time, its dynamic was awesome and complex. The expressions were endless; the cumulative effect of even the simplest one, potentially profound.

In one sense, nothing changed in that revelatory moment: same material world, same body; no smarter, no new facts or skills. In another sense, everything changed: who I was, how I saw others; I had a whole new way of looking at the world and at what I was about. Walking up the stairs that evening, I was caught up in a competitive “big self” view of the world, proud of my accomplishments—PhD, rewarding job, happy marriage—but wondering what gestures had to do with my mind and my sense of the presence of God. Walking down later that evening, I was caught up in an inclusive “little self” view of the world in which my being and circumstances were incomprehensible and ongoing gifts of a universal and “eternal” web of relationships in which I was inextricably caught up and totally dependent upon. Life-changing experiences like that have to be expressed. But how?

I was not given the needed words and reasons, possibly because the experience was closer to my heart than my head. (Blaise Pascal, a seventeenth century mathematician, philosopher, and theologian, said, “The Heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of” in regard to his mystical experience now called his Night of Fire.) I returned to the Bible for the words it had used to contrast the world of the inclusive little self with the world of the competitive big self. Some contrasts began to stand out: a unifying spirit versus a divisive one, a self-insistent spirit versus a selfish one, a truthful spirit versus a deceptive one, a humble spirit versus a superior one, a self-responsible spirit versus a faultfinding one, a generous spirit versus a greedy one, a serving spirit versus a dominating one, and an immortal spirit versus a mortal one. Because of the intuitive nature of these spirits, I knew similar contrasts would be found in the scriptures of other religions. Finding that to be the case (QGW, 115–121) only increased my need for the critical words and reasons. They finally came in augmenting these letters with my songs.

[1] Mark Johnson, Abiding in God (Oviedo: EA Books Publishing, 2024, 36-41).