Whispers of Mystery: The Oyster

Consider the oyster,
seen as strong for its hard shell.
But do we value the shell?

A whisper of mystery had just arrived, once again interrupting the mundane, petty chatter in my head.

“No, we chuck the shell.” I watched the oyster pass into a hand, then a second hand tried to open its hatch. No success. The two hands grew in strength, both trying to open the hard shell.

Last summer, at an oyster farm on San Juan Island, I learned that an oyster shell grows bigger, thicker, and stronger with age. I also learned it’s not just the shell that keeps the oyster closed. The shell is also held tight by its mantle and its exceptionally strong organ, the adductor muscle which secures the two halves tightly closed. Its job is to keep safe the tender oyster on the inside.

After much struggle, the two hands finally opened the oyster shell. Then they drew out the prizes: the tender inside layers of the mantle, the muscle, and the gills. Hidden beneath these precious, edible layers sat the greatest treasure of all: the pearl.

One hand gently extracted it and held it between its thumb and index finger. I saw the beautiful, round, opalescent pearl shine between the fingers. Then the other hand tossed out the shell into a bin with other shells.

Humans have a shell too.
But they dawn their shell
as clothing, roles, titles,
and other external garb,
the masks that flaunt their pretended individuality.
Many take great pride in their shell
for its strength or beauty.

I was shown many oysters in variety of shapes, sizes, and colors, some quite beautiful. The largest oyster zoomed in and twisted back and forth, showing off its strength, as well as its beauty of iridescent pink and pale blue.

The image zoomed out again, showing the oysters turning into people, also of various dimensions, sizes, colors, and attire. A few strutted toward me, fashion show style, presenting their toned muscles, physique, and attire. Then they turned around and pointed to the others, smirking and whispering gossip.

Those who honor the shell
might mock and scorn,
unknowingly scorning not only the others,
but also their own internal riches.
What could be rich remains poor.

The image returned these people, beautiful and strong on the outside, back to oysters, still with their strong shells and iridescent colors. Their shells were then opened and the image zoomed into their gills, now thin, sickly, browned, and weakened. The camera further zoomed in, revealing a minute grain of sand.

These also carry a pearl within,
but know it not.
If they scorn you,
they scorn your treasure,
If they scorn your treasure,
they also scorn the treasure within themselves.

I listened with a tinge of delight, glad these boasters will get what they deserve. The whispers admonished.

If you be glad for their dismay,
dismay will come to you too.

Uh oh.

You thought the grain of sand
was their pearl grown weak.
No, the grain is only the start.
What you saw was the infant pearl
waiting to grow.

I sighed, realizing now I was the one mocking. I recalled what Plato had said: “Never discourage anyone making progress, no matter how slow.”

That was your limited, human self

My whispers spoke with gentleness, understanding, and without judgment. They have spoken with compassion about our limited, human self, a sacred part of ourselves that battles its limitations. This part holds our feelings and the chatter in our heads. My whispers have said it is not to be called our “lower self,” for it, too, is sacred, but it is limited. The human self is the first-born in the creation of Adam, formed from the dust of the earth: “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being” (Genesis 2:7).

Sometimes you are ashamed of your thoughts or feelings.
So you dawn your masks
to hide your human self, or even the pearl of your eternal self.

Your human self is not your shell.
But your human self sees your shells
and often sees from the lens of your own shell.

Those masks you hide behind?
That’s your shell.

The more glorious your shell,
the harder it is to find your pearl.

In a flash came decades of my wrestling with God over the injustice of human life. I’m one of the privileged ones: a white citizen of the world’s superpower – a great stroke of luck already. But I was also raised in 1980s Silicon Valley, the only child of a computer engineer, a great mathematician who wrote codes to make our computers smaller, more compact, and able to fit into a typical home office. My father had caught the American Dream. Many have not understood this, but the truth is throughout life, I’ve been singed with guilt.

Guilt and a question. Why was I so rich when most of the world is so poor? Could I not be a little less rich to feel, at least, a little less guilty?

But I also carried a deeper, more troubling question. Why was God so mean? Why would he create a planet so abundant it can feed and shelter every single creature many times over, yet allow half of the humans to subsist in extreme poverty and most of the rest to struggle very hard for sustenance? If this God wanted to give people poverty, could he at least have made the planet less plentiful? Doesn’t the Earth’s abundance make the cruelty even worse?

My whispers, knowing very well I had this bone to pick with God, continued.

Some souls choose poverty
to gain the kingdom of heaven.

They reminded me of a statement of Yeshua’s that it is harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than a camel the eye of a needle (Matt 19:24). Having grown up rich, that statement had scared me.

That “souls choose poverty” is a whisper I likely would never have received had I not read the books of Michael Newton and Delores Cannon or biographies of people who have had near-death experiences (NDEs). Newton and Cannon were both hypnotherapists regressing people into past lives, apparently unknown to one another, who had independently and accidently regressed a subject into the “between life” state. Having made this surprising discovery, they each perfected their method to do so with their future clients. Both of them called it the “between life” state because they could take their subjects to the space both before an earthly incarnation and after one. Their subjects reported the same thing, also reported by many NDEs: before we enter our life on Earth, we, as souls, choose our path. We choose our place and time of birth, our parents, the significant people in our life, and any likely events or circumstances we might encounter.

Often, as I read these accounts, I longed to understand why any soul would choose extreme poverty or harsh physical suffering. Even the “answers” that came from the hypnotized clients that somehow satisfied the clients themselves (and, maddenly, Cannon as well) never satisfied me. Nevertheless, the accounts did provide my heart with something essential: they softened my anger at God.

Even more, they reframed God. No longer, in fact, do I call the divine world “God.” Too masculine, too singular, too associated with cruel divinity. Today, I speak of the divine forces or the heavenly world or some other collective term for the grand, beautiful, and harmonious realm beyond and within.

I paused now to reflect on the whispers’ message: Some souls choose poverty to gain the kingdom of heaven.

By this time, I understood the “kingdom of heaven” was not what I had thought for many years. It is not “heaven,” the afterlife. It is here, now. “The kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matt 3:2). Always, Yeshua spoke of the kingdom in the present tense: the kingdom of heaven is. Present tense. This discovery during my Summer in theTwilight Zone astonished me. This was not what I had learned at church.

Now I faced a new question. If this kingdom of heaven is “here” and “now,” present tense, then what is it? During the pandemic, more profound whispers of mystery arrived, which revealed the kingdom of heaven to be a heightened consciousness, connected to and aligned with our “eternal self,” that other part of ourselves, the second birth and younger twin of Adam’s creation, formed from the divine breath (see again Genesis 2:7).

The pearl is seeing Life
from the inside out.

The human self sees Life
from the lens of the material, physical world,
that tangible world of the five senses.
The eternal self sees it from the inside,
where the pearl is.

They reminded me that Yeshua had compared the kingdom to one who had found a glorious pearl and sold everything for it (Matthew 13:45-46).

One need not be poor to seek this pearl, though poverty can encourage it. Likewise, one is not necessarily incapable of seeking it if one is rich, but is less likely to do so. One has comfort. Why seek anything more?

None of this can be told, only experienced. It can be shared in parables, as Yeshua did, or in metaphor, as my whispers do. But to really see and know this pearl, we have to turn our awareness inward and experience Life from the inside out.

It’s like the astronauts who get that grand opportunity to work in the Hubble Space Station, who watch the heavens through its powerful telescope. When they return, they try, with their faces flushed in awe, to describe what they’ve seen. They’ve taken photos, and they hold conferences and show slide shows on great big screens to share, to the best of their ability, what the heavens look like.

But none of us who have never traveled into space, nor looked through those grand telescopes, could ever know what those astronauts do. Like them, Yeshua tried to explain this heightened consciousness, knowing many could not receive it, so he often closed with the refrain, “he who has ears to hear, let him hear.”

“Those who have ears to hear” are those who have begun to turn their awareness within and have begun to glimpse life from the inside out. They know there is something more, something beyond this material life. They’ve caught the wink from their eternal self. And now, they long to live all the way into it. They wish to live life no longer from the lens of the shell, but from that of the pearl.

The Oyster is part of a series brought by my whispers of mystery called the "Metaphors of LIfe." These are the others in the series: