Alan Gillanders is an engineer in Victoria, Australia. He spent twenty five years running businesses before drifting back into engineering, and something close to fifty years reading his way through the Upanishads, the Vedas, the Egyptian Hermetic texts, and the sayings attributed to Jesus. His book, The Sacred Hum of I Am, is due out shortly. One idea from the conversation is worth setting down on its own. After decades of trying to reach something he assumed was far away, he concluded he had never been disconnected. He had only failed to notice that he already was.
That is a strange claim to test, because almost everything built around it assumes the opposite. Most religious instruction begins with a gap and then offers a method for closing it. Practice more. Believe harder. Get the doctrine right and something will open. If the gap was never there, an enormous amount of sincere effort has been aimed at a problem that does not exist.
The claim has a weak point, and it should be named rather than smoothed over. A person sitting inside a marriage that went quiet years ago does not feel connected to anything. Neither does someone six months into a grief that has not lifted. Telling that person they were never separate is not comfort. It sounds like a technicality, and it can be used to skip past real difficulty rather than sit inside it.
So the claim has to mean something other than a feeling of closeness. If it means a fact about what a person is, rather than a mood a person is currently in, then it survives the hard days. The connection would still be there on a Tuesday when nothing works.
The more testable part of the idea is smaller. Guidance, when it comes, seems to arrive as feeling before it arrives as language. Something registers in the body a half second ahead of any words for it. You are in the right place. Look again. This is not the sort of evidence that holds up in an argument. Anyone who says the answer came as a sensation in the chest is going to lose that debate every time, and probably should.
Most people already have a version of this. The call that came at the exact moment it was needed. The decision that seemed to make itself. The thought that arrived from an angle nobody was looking at. These usually get filed as coincidence, which is the safest place to put them. Moving them somewhere else means admitting you noticed in the first place.
What would it change to take one of those moments seriously? Not to build a theology around it. Just to hold it as information rather than as noise.
There is textual ground for treating this as more than sentiment. Psalm 82 has God standing in the divine assembly and saying to those gathered, you are gods, children of the Most High. John’s gospel puts that same line in the mouth of Jesus during an argument about blasphemy, which is a strange verse to quote in your own defense unless you meant it. In Luke 17, ten men with leprosy are healed and one turns back. He is told his faith has made him well. The credit is handed to the man.
That last one is hard for anyone who has believed with everything they had and watched nothing happen. If faith is the mechanism, then the person whose prayer went unanswered is left holding the failure, and that reading has done real harm in real families. It may also be a misreading. The Greek word there is closer to made whole than cured, and wholeness and cure are not the same event. If that reading holds, the man who came back received something the other nine also had access to and walked away from. The healing was the smaller part.
Some of the distance people feel was taught to them. That is a historical observation rather than a conspiracy. Any doctrine that emphasizes the gap between a person and God creates a need for someone to stand in the middle of it, and whoever stands there acquires influence over everyone on both sides. The teaching does not have to be cynical to have that effect. It just has to be repeated for a few centuries.
What stands out about the conditions people describe for hearing anything is how unremarkable they are. The phone off. A walk early in the morning or late in the evening. No problem being actively solved. Nobody reports the message arriving in the middle of the crisis, when the mind is loudest and most certain it needs an answer. It shows up afterward, in the ordinary gap, usually while doing something else.
That may be the whole practice, and it explains why so few people find it. There is nothing to buy and nothing to complete. It asks for the one thing that has become genuinely scarce, which is an hour of unstructured attention with no input arriving.
Something has probably already happened in your own life that you noticed and then set aside. A moment that did not fit the category you had available for it, so you called it luck and kept moving. Take a look at that one again. Consider what it would mean if it was not luck, and if the thing you were trying to reach had been there the entire time, waiting for you to be quiet enough to notice.
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© Dr. Doug Gulbrandsen