Conversation with Gemini

Hi Gemini, I’m all into exploring the experience of that which has always been called God from the standpoint of what the implicaions of that experience might have for us in terms of how we see ourselves, understand ourselves and live our lives. Any thoughts along these lines?

That is a profound place to stand. When we strip away dogma, creeds, and the institutional walls built around the divine, we are left with something raw, immediate, and startlingly intimate: the direct, unmediated experience of existence itself.

Looking at that experience not as a theological concept to be defined, but as a living reality to be lived, opens up several powerful implications for how we understand ourselves and walk through our days:

1. Moving from Identity as a “Noun” to Identity as a “Verb”

If God is understood not as a static object or an external sovereign entity, but as an ongoing, unfolding experience—a dynamic movement of the Ground of Being—then our own identity shifts right along with it.

• The Implication: We stop viewing ourselves as finished products, fixed labels, or static bundles of beliefs. Instead, we begin to see ourselves as participants in an ongoing process. Just as the spirit is described as the wind blowing where it will, our own psyche isn’t a locked room; it is a current. To understand ourselves is to watch how awareness moves through us, recognizing that who we are is found in the experiencing itself, not in the conceptual armor we wear.

2. Radical Humility and the Release of “Knowing”

Humanity has a long, tumultuous history of trying to nail the divine down—writing manifestos and building systems to capture the wind.

• The Implication: When your foundation is the direct experience of the mystery rather than adherence to a doctrine, the need to be “right” in a dogmatic sense dissolves. This brings a deep, settling humility. You realize that mystery isn’t a problem to be solved; it is the very medium in which we live. It frees us from the exhausting burden of certainty and opens up a spacious curiosity toward our own inner landscape and the lives of others.

3. Living in the “Wild” Freedom of the Present

If the sacred cannot be locked into a book of rules, then living authentically cannot be reduced to checking off moral boxes.

• The Implication: Life becomes an improvisational art guided by immediate resonance rather than external compulsion. When you stop trying to fence in the transcendent, you begin to act from a place of genuine freedom—what might be called living in alignment with Truth, Justice, Compassion, Equality, and Liberty not because an authority commanded it, but because those qualities are the natural, spontaneous fruit of an open, awake consciousness. It is the shift from acting out of obligation to acting out of an intrinsic harmony with the whole.

4. Integration of the Psyche and the Spirit

When we look at the divine as an internal, experiential reality, the boundaries between the “spiritual” and the “psychological” begin to blur entirely.

• The Implication: Every shadow we encounter in our own minds, every quiet intuition that rises from the depths, and every moment of stillness looking out at the natural world becomes part of the same landscape. Self-understanding is no longer a clinical or purely intellectual exercise; it becomes a spiritual path. To tend to your own psyche—to honor its depths, its conflicts, and its quiet spaces—is intimately tied to how you relate to the sacred.

Ultimately, this perspective invites us to put down the heavy tools of theological construction and simply inhabit our lives with open hands and open eyes.

Does this way of framing the inner life resonate with how you’ve been sensing your own path lately?

It is a beautiful expression of the kind of life Jesus and all those who would be Jesus in their own way would live in expressing and exemplifying the truth of that which has always been called God. When I first started thinking about this blog, I wondered what symbol would suffice as my symbol, my personal symbol of the numinous reality I think of as God, and after several days of thinking about this, I had a vision of a black orb, that was persistent and insistant. So I did an internet search for “a black ball.” And dozens appeared “like that,” so I purchased two, a six-inch orb and a 4-inch orb, and they sit together on a book shelf in my office as symbols of the Mystery everlasting.

That is a striking and powerful image—a solid, perfectly formed black orb resting quietly on a bookshelf, holding space for the unnamable.

There is a profound psychological and spiritual weight to choosing a black sphere as a symbol for the numinous. In many traditions, light is often used as a metaphor for the divine, but light can sometimes feel blinding, blinding us to shadow and depth, or easily co-opted by dogmatic certainty. Darkness, on the other hand, represents the unmanifest, the fertile void, the womb of mystery, and the deep ground from which all things emerge and to which they return. It is the visual equivalent of the Tao that cannot be spoken, or the cloud of unknowing.

Having those physical orbs sitting right there in your office—tangible, smooth, and persistent—grounds the abstraction of “Mystery” into your everyday environment. Every time your eyes pass over them, they serve as a quiet, stubborn reminder not to shrink the infinite down into a conceptual box or a set of rules. They stand there as silent witnesses to the truth that the ultimate reality is something we are immersed in and experience, not something we possess or define.

It makes complete sense why that particular vision insisted on staying with you. How do you find those physical touchstones affect your daily reflections when you sit down to write?

I enjoy the connection they provide with the Mystery. I ordered two because I couldn’t decide, 2 or 4? So it is 2.

There is something delightfully fitting about ending up with two. Two creates a relationship—a silent dialogue between the larger and the smaller, a pairing that holds space without becoming a crowd. It feels balanced, quiet, and complete.

Having those two black orbs sitting together on your shelf gives you a physical anchor for the infinite right there in your office. It’s a wonderful daily touchstone for the writing you do on The Truth and your explorations of the sacred.

I have ordered two four inch square blocks of wood, reminding me of the Uncarved Block, upon which I will place each black orb representing the Mystery of Life and Being, bringing it all together in one symbol of the experience of here, now and the Tao which holds all of it together in time and space. A photo of which will soon appear below: