A neighbor recently posted this photo and commented: “On my morning walk……after seeing houses decorated with fake webs, I came across this, the real thing. Made me happy.”
When we stop to behold something like this, we can’t help but be amazed at the miracle of it all – how do these little creatures manufacture such extraordinary threads within their tiny body, and then weave them into this marvel of design and engineering?
A moment like this brings to my mind a popular image in perceptual psychology:
What do we see? A candlestick? Or the profile of two faces? We can’t see both at the same time…our mind must decide which one is the object we focus on while the other acts as background.
When I am taking a walk, I am often immersed in my private thoughts. My concerns are like the candlestick and the world is the background. But if I see something like these spider webs, my attention shifts: my “I” drops into the background and the web becomes the focus. I am, as we say, “outside myself” in an experience of awe and wonder.
I recently read this by the astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson:
“Humans want to think that they’re the center of the world. Children think this way. Then you come into adulthood and it’s a little disappointing to learn that’s not the case. We still think of events happening locally, in our lifetimes, as significant in a way that is out of proportion with reality. This can be depressing to some people, if you come into it with a high ego. If you go into it with no ego at all, you realize that you can be special not for being different, but for being a participant in life on Earth. That participation, if you’re open to it, can be quite illuminating, even sort of spiritually uplifting. You’re a part of all of life on Earth. Earth is part of all the planets that exist in the galaxy. The galaxy is part of an entire system of the universe.”[i]
Beholding the spider web, which exists entirely independent of me, “…can be quite illuminating, even sort of spiritually uplifting.”
For some of us, it’s more than “sort of” – it really is spiritually uplifting.
When I was in my early 20’s, I was immersed in my own personal world of ambition and desire which led to a personal crisis. One night I was trying to fall asleep and began to feel like my sanity was slipping away. At the time, I didn’t believe there was any spiritual presence or power in the world. But I was desperate. I prayed (I don’t remember what words I used.) Three days later, I was painting an apartment ceiling, and in an instant, the memory of that night came back to me…how afraid and desperate I was. Then I remembered I had prayed for help. Then I realized something had changed within me. Where my inner world had seemed so dark and empty, now there was a small, quiet point of light at the center and I felt a sense of inner peace. I did not hear any voices or get any messages. I did not in any way connect this with organized religion. But I was totally surprised. And grateful. And hopeful. The problems that had led me to my despair were not solved in that moment, but somehow, I knew I would be able to begin repairing and redirecting my life.
Several years later, I found myself skeptically stepping into a church. There it began to dawn on me that my private, mystical experience was like that of many people over the centuries. When this happens, we no longer feel as if we are at the center of the universe. Instead, we become a witness to something greater.
In seminary teacher once used the candlestick/faces image to describe the nature of spiritual awakening: we start out in life assuming we are the candle in the foreground and the world is our background. But then it reverses — we feel like we are in the background beholding a much greater reality. Our ego may not like being displaced. But realizing we are no longer at the center doesn’t feel disappointing; instead, it comes with a sense of liberation.
There is a 3,000-year-old story that has become a favorite of mine. Jacob is traveling through the desert amid his own complicated life. At an uninhabited place of no importance, he lays down to sleep for the night, taking a stone for a pillow. He has a dream in which he sees a stairway leading up to the heavens, and the voice of God speaks to him. In the morning he wakes up, remembers the dream, and says, “Surely the Lord is in this place and I did not know it.” (Genesis 28:16) An environment that had seemed ordinary has become enchanted. He pours oil on the stone to mark the place of his divine encounter.
“…you realize that you can be special not for being different, but for being a participant in life on Earth. That participation, if you’re open to it, can be quite illuminating, even sort of spiritually uplifting.”
It’s a wonderful thing to know we are not the center. Being a participant is a gift beyond measure.
[i] https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/the-writers-almanac-for-thursday-october-5-2023/
Steve Jacobsen, Ed.D 
Your experience is so entirely different than mine. My neurodivergent mind can see both images of faces and candle stick at the same time. I was born into a terrifying world because my mom was in and out of mental institutions getting electro shock treatments when I was an infant and toddler. I never thought I was the center of the world. My struggle was how to survive when I had a brain and body that didn’t fit in with normal culture because of severe PTSD that no one understood at that time. It is now known that severe stress in infancy can shut down parts of the brain. Even so there was and is this unnamed entity or source of power that I was able to tap into that helped me figure out how to survive into old age.
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