Most Friday afternoons, I go with one or two students from CSFC to talk to people on campus about their thoughts on spirituality. This particular Friday, Wei, Diogo, and I saw a guy in saffron robes and decided ask him about his spiritual background. It turns out that he’s the Hindu chaplain on campus, and he leads a weekly Hindu discussion group on Friday evenings. This week’s discussion topic was the mind and dreams, with some clips from the movie Inception and some verses from the Bhagavad Gita (holy text). He invited us to join, so I accepted, although Wei and Diogo had prior obligations.
Through my four years and school (and 1.5 in campus ministry), I’ve never attended a discussion group outside of CSFC. However, as I observed this Hindu discussion group, I realized that it wasn’t so different from CSFC large group. Both CSFC and this discussion group gather to learn about spiritual truth. Sometimes these gatherings include food, sometimes there’s an illustration of a particular point with a movie clip, and there’s always the question of what the texts say about a particular topic and how it applies to our lives.
The discussion itself was pretty interesting, and I actually participated quite a bit, which is really uncharacteristic of me (just ask anyone who was in my Lit Hum class in college). Some food for thought:
· You can never trace the beginning of a dream, so you never know if what you’re experiencing is real or a dream until you wake up….but what if you never wake up?
· It seems that one of the ways to achieve a higher spiritual state is to learn to control your mind. However, you can’t control your subconscious, so then what?
· If our dreams are our subconscious replaying things we’ve experienced, and there’s evidence that babies (and even fetuses) may dream (ok, technically, all that was proved was that they go through REM sleep), what do babies dream about? The conclusion was that since they haven’t experienced the world yet, the most likely solution is that they dream about previous lives.
From the last point, we got into a long discussion on past lives and reincarnation, but personally by this point I was just getting frustrated because I felt that a lot of what was being said was internally inconsistent.
However, as I continued listening, I started wondering – what would it look like for a few Christians to attend this group together regularly, build relationships in this group, and have ongoing dialogue comparing perspectives? In other words (to use jargon from the Epic Movement Launching class) what would it look like for CSFC to be a missional community to other groups on campus?
I don’t know, but this experience has gotten me excited about checking out other spiritual/religious discussion groups on campus. I’m dreaming of a time when CSFC will finally stop living in its own little bubble and wait for people to come to us, but instead proactively step out into different pockets of campus.
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