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An Agnostic's Encounter With God

By Arlene F. Harder, MA, MFT

Page Three of Five Pages

Who's That Knocking on My Floor?

In the years after I first learned about Psychosynthesis, I met many people of different faiths. For the most part I couldn't distinguish between them based on their outward appearance or behavior. Wonderfully kind and generous individuals were sincere athiests, questioning agnostics, and devote Christians, Jews, Muslims, and members of assorted other faiths and philosophies. Narcissistic, overbearing, unpleasant characters espoused a variety of religious beliefs, often fervently.

There was something, however, that struck me as perhaps an important distinction between people. Some people walked through life with an extra measure of grace, peace and calm. As I got to know them, I discovered their genuine love for others and sense of self-confidence arose from a connection with a "power" greater than themselves that they referred to by a variety of terms, but which essentially was "Spirit." It was a genuine connection that seemed to make a difference. "Belief" in a personal God—without the experience of that connection—wasn't enough. Yet even Buddists who claimed there was "nothing" out there seemed, to me, to be gently different because they were in touch with who they were at their core.

I realized that here was the expression of "self" and "Higher Self." It didn't seem to matter whether one interpreted his or her experience as coming from God or Allah or Nothingness or from simply deep in one's core. What seemed to matter was the experience, not the belief that arose from interpreting that experience.

So I began to meditate more frequently and, although I always felt better when I was through and often had interesting insights, I didn't feel particularly connected with a power greater than myself. I didn't feel "enlightened."

Then I began to experiment with various techniques for getting in touch with that "Spirit something."

I would imagine a stream of energy flowing down into my body, filling me with light. Nothing felt particularly different.

I would talk out loud, a method I often use when sitting alone and trying to figure something out, and would say something like, "God, Spirit, Higher Self, Intuition, Great Being, or Whatever you call yourself—that is, if there really is a Being out there somewhere—I want you to know I'm ready to get in touch with who or what you are. Let's just say I'm open and whenever you're ready to talk, I'm ready to listen." Sometimes I'd shorten the request to the single word "open." Nothing felt particularly different.

I added movement, holding my hands up in the air and saying, "Here I am. I'm open." Still I didn't have an awareness of anything outside of myself and there was no sense of a "spirit" moving inside.

Nevertheless, I remained patient and decided that IF there were a God and IF He-She-It wanted to get my attention, He-She-It would have to be the one to figure out how to do it.

It was about this time I began to notice something odd. Primarily during those times I would be meditating, I would hear sounds coming from the floor and doors as though a person were knocking. I didn't believe in ghosts and there wasn't anything I knew that could have made the sounds. I didn't have a clue what it was about.

Then one day I heard a crash in the bathroom. "Strange," I thought. "That sounds like a pinecone has just fallen." Checking it out, I discovered a large sugar pinecone (about a foot high and eight inches across) from the Sierra Nevada mountains, one that moments before had been sitting on the wide edge of the bathtub, now lay in the bathtub with many broken pieces. Weird. Maybe we had a little earthquake I hadn't felt and that's what caused the pinecone to roll off its perch. Maybe a bug came along and pushed it over.

However, there was a disquieting in my heart because I was afraid it had been thrown down by some mysterious force. And as much as I wanted to experience the "God" that others easily accepted, I wasn't ready for anything "weird" and had always dismissed such events as self-delusions when reported by others. Certainly this wasn't how the physical world was supposed to operate.

CONTINUED on Page Four

© Copyright 2002, Arlene F. Harder, MA, MFT