Unveiling the Mundane through the Epic

Where do you live?  In our space-time continuum of cockpits of conflict, pinnacles of power, slime pits of slavery, mole hills of the comfortable and mundane or foxholes of desire, we get into ruts of expecting and seeing the world in specific limited ways.  Changing things up is just one way to get out of that rut and grow up.  World travelers and globe trotters know all about that. http://masedimburgo.com/2014/06/04/17-things-change-forever-live-abroad/



Bilbo Baggins knew all about it.  His life changed from mundane to epic because he met an interesting friend.  Abraham heard the call to leave Ur of the Chaldees to a land he did not know, but that God would show him.  Moses knew about it when he met God at the burning bush (great clip by Dreamworks' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5BQWubuC8g "Prince of Egypt") and became God's mouthpiece to confront Pharaoh and call Israel out of Egypt (depicted in the "The Ten Commandments" starring Charlton Heston https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahkwQhQZWG8).

World travelers, Bilbo Baggins, Abraham, Moses and the People of God all experienced the epic, where their little stories were transformed into the greater story and explanation of all things.  Another way of stating this is that they felt called to live by a radically alternative vision of reality.  Whether one gets there through geographically external ways, or by gaining new habits of mind to transform thinking, life can be a precarious business when you venture out your front door!  Traveling to new countries in the seen or unseen will forever change our perception of reality, and this is what an unveiling or epiphany is all about.

Turning to the great apocalypse of the Revelation of Jesus Christ and Darryl Johnson's (2004) commentary, "Discipleship on the Edge" helps one focus his or her vision on the journey out of the kingdom of this world into the Kingdom of Heaven:

"The Lamb's people know they are not their own anymore.  They know they are an offering, a living sacrifice.  They know they are engaged to the Lamb, and will do everything they can to remain loyal.  The want to be like the Lamb, full of light and integrity.  They follow the Lamb wherever He goes.  They win the victory over the beast by not fearing the beast.  And they are known by the song they sing" (p. 278). 

This is the Song of Moses and the Lamb, which begins, "Great and marvelous are Your works oh Lord God Almighty!"  So when you are being nudged and directed to leave comfort and familiarity for an adventure to a new land or place of being, don't resist.  Follow the call and allow faith in the promises of God to transport you, putting your toes in the Red Sea and being ready to watch God act.

Dreams from a Sleeping Giant

 "The giant sleeps, and let it, for should it wake the world will shake." Napoleon

During the Ming dynasties through the 15th-16th centuries China was the most powerful land in the world.  The Forbidden City in Beijing was called the world's meeting point.  However, since then China became inactive, falling behind other developing countries, until after the death of their revered Chairman Mao in 1976.  Since then it has been playing "catch-up" with the rest of the world.

Certainly since the Beijing 2008 Olympics, China, the Sleeping Giant, has woken up.   As a nation on the international stage, China lends to most of the developed world.  Its infrastructure is growing by leaps and bounds, and its technological advances nearly match those of the US.  Its cities surpass those of any other nation in size, architecture and transportation systems. Now its cyber wars with the United States have become the norm, and the "Great Firewall of China"  keeps out foreign influences the Communist Party does not want.  Even social media is controlled, with Weibo instead of Facebook, and you had better be careful what you tweet, or how you pun! http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2014/11/28/chinas-latest-crackdown-puns/

Christianity in China is on the rise as well, with younger, well-educated urbanites no longer sensing Christianity as distinctly Western.  The perception that becoming a Christian is like becoming a traitor to China has been shed, but because Christians make up the largest civic group in China, the government is stepping up on repression: http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2015/0111/In-China-a-church-state-showdown-of-biblical-proportions.

One wonders what sort of dreams China has had during their long sleep of being suppressed since the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).  You cannot erase centuries of Confucianism, traditional Chinese religion and culture in a nation with an orientation to longevity. A type of longevity that dismisses the deaths of several hundred student demonstrators protesting inflation, limited career prospects, and corruption of the party elite in Tianamen Square (1989), as just one more sacrifice on China's path to freedom, is a formidable instantiated cultural characteristic.  Add to this value of sacrifice in service of the greater good, the freedom and love of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and you have dynamite for cultural renewal on a global scale. Notably, the only doctrine the Chinese government tried to repress in the state-run Three-Self Church was the second coming of Christ and the eschatology surrounding that.  With patience already built in the Chinese psyche, they are naturally conditioned to believe and wait for the fulfillment of God's promises, and that has the Communist Party on edge.

In teaching international students from China I have noticed a difference in the last ten years in their awareness of the Western world, and their desire to join an international community mediated by the English language.  In a time when most ELT research and practice has gone the route of localizing standards and methods and emphasizing the social aspects of language learning, the Chinese have come on stage in a big way desiring English as an international language.  Within them resides the dream that global communication is possible, and that it transcends nationality and even culture. This is analogical to their attitude shift towards the Christian faith.

In a book edited by Wong, Kristjansson and Dornyei (2012) called Christian Faith and English Language Teaching and Learning,  both chapters by Don Snow in  "The Globalization of English and China's Christian Colleges" and Peng Ding in "Cosmopolitanism, Christianity and the Contemporary Chinese Context: Impacts on Second Language Motivation" address the ongoing trend of English language learning opening doors of opportunity for Chinese young people. Perhaps this dream was even kept conscious throughout Mao Tse Tung's Cultural Revolution, and even watered the seeds planted by 18th century Christian missionaries to China such as Hudson Taylor and Gladys Aylward. 
http://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=uxFrwwhunzAC&oi=fnd&pg=PR3&dq=Dornyei,+Wong,+Kristjansson&ots=JKKQupztRq&sig=JNMigUCBL22gUerrcCQyi4LXkm0#v=onepage&q=Dornyei%2C%20Wong%2C%20Kristjansson&f=false

In any case, long slumbers lend themselves to dreams of great substance.  When it is a giant, these dreams reconfigure the whole world.

Neverland

Peter Pan is epic.  Why else would the recent TV series "Once" make him the big villain and father of the deeply troubled Rumplestiltskin storybook character?  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ud5w6LIVPk.  Even better is the movie "Finding Neverland (2004)" starring Johnny Depp as author James Barrie, where the man writes his own inner landscape in an unforgettable children's story.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0v3XCUiwAhc.  He speaks to the child within each of us.

However, Neverland is a negation of land, a figment of one's imagination, or pie in the sky.  That is what is often associated with the concept of heaven.  However, what if the thoughts in our mind build an internal landscape for the future of our soul?  Can we get to a good place in our minds that is actually real?  God promises His people a land where righteousness, justice and mercy reign, a spiritual home foreshadowed by the land flowing with milk and honey that was Canaan.   It is promised, and it is a real unseen place seen in the spirit.  The ears hear, the heart takes faith and the mind builds upon its truth, which is both a gift of love and a renewing of the mind as it transforms a person by discovering how things really work in the unseen.

Robin Williams depicts a doctor in love with his wife who ends up in a fatal car accident in "What Dreams May Come." The movie pictures his life after death in heaven, which is a picture of his ruling loves. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o86DCFuUGqE   This is a Swedenbourgian view of heaven, where it is an expression of someone's mind.  This  is an interesting concept, giving further weight to the necessity of the discipleship of the mind.  http://www.mentalsymmetry.com/forum/?p=256

Intuition and the Unseen Realm

In Dr. James Houston's book (1989) "The Transforming Friendship" there are number of insights linking one's spirituality and psychology with daily life. First is the importance of intuition expressed here,  "Our materialistic and rationalistic society is afraid of intuition, because it awakens us out of the sleep of a false world with shallow values.  The devil is afraid of it, because it activates an awareness of the spiritual, inward life" (p. 132). Second, the idea that prayer links the events and people of one's days to what is opening or closing in the unseen realm, provides a metaphysical sense of existence in relationship to God, self and others. For example, the mere greeting, "hello," carries with it an etymology that is quite breath-taking.  It is from the Old English, "to hallow,"  which means to make great, and it begins the Lord's Prayer where we pray, "Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy Name..."  When we greet a person with awareness of the full meaning of this word, we are proclaiming that the image of God in him or her would shine forth.   Third, the function of one's dreams in refurbishing emotional processes, connects one with realities in both the seen and unseen realms. The sense and intuition needed to live in both these realms is within our human capability, but prevalent in individuals more gifted in this area.  This is the world where dreams can speak healing or meaning into our lives, and one's vision can become clearer after it has been veiled.  Often people from Middle Eastern cultures understand and give more significance to their dreams than in the Christian or secular West.  This left-right brain split between science and religion has us tied in knots, except for a fringe of New Age mystics, spiritists, and charismatic Christians. Post-modernism has been the severe remedy for this, but has thrown the baby of structure and coherence out with the bath water of emotional and visionary stultification.

When the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is referenced to the insights above, the splits between thinking and feeling, sensing and intuiting, judging and perceiving and introversion and extroversion, illustrate how the mind can be blocked from a full spectrum of possibilities.  If one looks at psychology or the mind and soul from an integrated perspective (www.mentalsymmetry.com), the first split, thinking and feeling, can be integrated by helping a person see that when bad things happen to a person, it is not necessarily a personal attack, even though it may feel that way.  The ability to separate thinking in general to feeling specifically is a necessary ingredient for intellectual and emotional well-being and development.  In other words, can the structure of your think tank contain the emotional pressure in the tank? The sensing and intuiting continuum is particularly left-brained. Sensing functions concretely in present reality, finding practical solutions such as what you will make for dinner on a given night, whereas intuiting thinks in generalities and theories such as an idea for solving world hunger. The intuitive area is emotional and abstract in its ordered complexity, and awakens a person to the realm of the unheard, unspoken and unseen.  Some may call it energy, spirituality or enlightenment.  This is difficult to integrate in a secular, empirical society, as explained above, so it often gets repressed as children grow older, and people revisit this area of their minds in fantasy escape in one form or another.

For now I must get some rest, for dreams may come as my sleep architecture has gotten more robust in the last year.  Take heed to ask for dreams.  Sleep tight!