Posted September 20, 2013

The Divine Source (also known as the Becoming Everything and by many other names) is able to be present for and participating in and manifesting through everything at every level. Every atom and star and person is God and expresses God’s infinite individuation. Since mind is also a dimension—really, a whole set of dimensions, some of which we don’t know about at all, some a little, vaguely, by some mystics; some more familiar, like music—then the Divine Source is present for and sensitive to every level of all sorts of hierarchies that humans can create-imagine.

This mandala expresses that, or perhaps it’s a cross-section of a tiny tendril at the edge of a larger sense organ of the Becoming Everything that senses in multiple ways, symbolized by the different kinds of configurations, the potentialities, struggles, frustrations, triumphs, losses, and so forth for every particle or wave in our cosmos. Of course that’s a lot, and yes, it quite transcends anything that humans can conceive of, even if we can conceive of the general idea. That’s why the “tendril” is so complex.

The idea of “infinite sensitivity” was put forth as an attribute of God by the late Brother Wayne Teasdale, a pioneer of interfaith spirituality. It’s a fun mythic trope to contemplate, taking my mind far beyond what it can digest.

Imagine in the "cross section of the tendril" pictured above that each element is a complex three-dimensional structure that is capable of sensing subtleties undreamed of by ordinary humans, such as the "taste" of gravity, or the "smell" of different kinds of weather. Each one-celled animal eats, and it senses what might "taste" good to eat, and what might taste "bad"---for its own health and preference. Sensitivity can be directed in so many ways, and we might even wonder how far beyond our own expectations it goes.