The X Factor

The X Factor

There is an X Factor in life which totally reverses our perception of reality. Although the X Factor seems illogical and incredibly imperceivable, just suppose it were true!

How can one get in touch with the X Factor?

Make a list of the top ten experiences in your life. The highest moments. Those perfect times when everything came together, when the world stood still, when perfection happened, when you felt intensely joyful, peaceful or free. Those experiences in which there was absolute clarity. God was in his heaven and all was right with the worldIt was such a moment in time Whitney Houston sang about a female runner who won an olympic race.

One Moment In Time
Whitney Houston

Each day I live
I want to be a day to give the best of me
I'm only one, but not alone
My finest day is yet unknown
I broke my heart for every gain
To taste the sweet, I faced the pain
I rise and fall,
Yet through it all this much remains

I want one moment in time
When I'm more than I thought I could be
When all of my dreams
Are a heart beat away
And the answers are all up to me

Give me one moment in time
When I'm racing with destiny
Then in that one moment of time
I will feel, I will feel eternity

I've lived to be the very best
I want it all, no time for less
I've laid the plans
Now lay the chance here in my hands

Give me one moment in time
When I'm more than I thought I could be
When all of my dreams
Are a heart beat away
And the answers are all up to me
Give me one moment in time
When I'm racing with destiny
Then in that one moment of time
I will feel, I will feel eternity

You're a winner for a lifetime
If you seize that one moment in time
Make it shine

Your team won the game. A dream came true. You graduated. You said your vows. Or you felt high for no reason. A perfect snowflake. Your eyes connected with someone you felt you had known forever. A déjà vu. A transcendent moment lying on the beach or skiing down a slope or catching your biggest fish. An exquisite vision, revelation, insight. Perfection in a grain of sand or a glint of light. You got your raise. Someone special said you were it. Your baby was born. You re-connected with an old friend. You won the lottery, or at least you imagined you might.

When you have made your list of ten exquisite moments or experiences, notice how you are feeling. Does such a "high" excite you and/or scare you? Can you bask in the power of such a transcendent moment when the eternal enters into time?

Now, double that power, X² . Imagine, if you can, how it would feel to double that joy, that excitement, that freedom, that peace, that "all is right with the world." A famous ad went on for years singing "double your pleasure, double your fun" with Doublemint gum. Go ahead, double your pleasure. Square your experience to X²

Now, raise your experience to the factor of 10. X¹⁰. Can you even imagine X¹⁰? We won’t even mention X¹⁰⁰or X¹⁰⁰⁰. You know the old puzzle about whether you had rather have a $million or double a penny every day for a month. "Double your pleasure" to just a factor of X². That shouldn’t be too hard. "So what!" the skeptic in us reverberates. "Don’t count on it. It was just a coincidence. What goes up must come down. Be careful. Your hopes will be dashed. Only chidlren and fools expect such." Etc. Etc. Etc.

The next step to X¹⁰ Factor is incredible. Unbelievable, but true.

If you have managed to make your list of the ten highest moments and to bask in the sun of such a memory, you have just experienced the X Factor in its most minimum tangential manner. Now if you have been able to double it to X², you have gone further up the mountain. If you have been able to go to X¹⁰, you have suddenly come to a break in your trudging up the mountain. You have come to a clearing in which you see an expansive breath-taking view of clouds, the sun, and other mountain ranges that seem to go on forever. If you reached X¹⁰⁰, it is like you were flying through a cloud cover and suddenly your plane comes out of the fog and you can see the earth below or billowy clouds extending forever. If you reached X¹⁰⁰⁰, it might be what John Glenn and the astronauts saw when they first looked back from the moon at the earth and took that incredible photo of the beautiful blue earth orb below.

Now you have touched the X Factor. Now you have transcended the mundane, the banal, the mediocre. You have experienced Reality. You have reached the borders of Infinity. You have penetrated into the core of yourself. This is the way it is. The rest is just your mediocre story, your imagined picture of the way it is. It is the "Rest of the Story" that Paul Harvey always speaks about on his radio broadcasts. It is the Kingdom of Heaven in which Jesus consciously lived and pointed us towards. It is that liberty for which the soldiers died on the battlefields. It is that spine tingling chill, that goose-pimpled experience when you listen to your favorite music or the crescendo of the Star Spangled Banner sung by the fat lady before the game. It is the thrill you feel for the winner of the Olympics metals. It is the high you experience with your favorite drug, food or sexual encounter. It is when you are filled with the Holy Spirit. It is that moment of re-union after a long exiled homelessness. You have been there and you are still there. Just because the day is cloudy does not mean that the sun is gone. You just forgot where and what it is. You wiped away the tears quickly so no one would see them. You were glad that the shivers were going down your back and hidden from public knowledge. You entered the world of ecstasy but you couldn’t put it into words and so you told yourself it was not real. You got addicted to it, but you kept it a secret lest it evaporate before your very doubtful eyes.

Everyone knows the X Factor. It is a momentary re-connection to a Reality you once knew. All music, art and ecstatic experience point to that trascendent reality, to that timelessness, to that indefinable unexplainable Reality. It existed before time. It is Home. It is Reality. It still exists in the core. It is the Infinite hidden by or concealed through all finite forms. It is that which you seek and for which you have died many times feeling you could never have it. It is God. The X Factor is God in time, God in experience. The X Factor is Reality. The rest is just our impoverished, diminished, and minimized story.

Reduce Reality by a factor of X₁₀₀₀ and you have our impotent dudgerous story of separateness, lack and entrapment. There you see exposed our daily, sad, violent, fear-ridden story of victimization, war and losses. Our daily diet. Our daily view of things. Jesus said to sell everything and find this treasure. Jesus said it is worth forgiving anyone of anything to enter the door of this kingdom. Jesus wept about it, saying that he would have gathered us as a hen does her chicks, but we would not. He cast the seeds of this X Factor everywhere he went, but only 25% produced fruit. It is the same today.

Everyone is not yet aware that we are attached to our symptom-producing, fear-ridden identity story. Jesus saw the divine everywhere, in everyone, and this was the miracle he lived. Every symptom you have ever had was a symbol of the X Factor. It was a wake-up call from the drudgerous nightmare of daily perception. It was a wake-up call to Reality. It is the X Factor, the barely known. That is what the Secret Knowledge is about. That is what your symptoms and suffering are about.

You have been there. You are still there and just don’t realize it. The X Factor is your kingdom, your Home, your core, your Self, your wholeness and perfection. All of your problems arise from the false identification in our story. That is the infinite meaning of every symptom you ever had or ever will have. The X Factor is closer than your breathing. Wake up and smell the coffee. X¹ becomes X². X² becomes X¹⁰. X¹⁰ becomes X¹⁰⁰⁰. X¹⁰⁰⁰ becomes Infinity. Glory to God! Peace on earth. Good will to men. The three wise men traveled from afar to see the birth of this. Xmas is indeed the birth of the X Factor. Welcome home.