The Mystery Behind Existence
My teacher once said, “when I say Universe, I mean not only that which arose from the Big Bang, but that from which the Big Bang arose.” (Francis Lucille)
Take a moment to be with the beauty of this picture. There is something within nature that knows, that expresses, that celebrates…an intimate interconnectedness…. Like one single Reality expressing itself arising from an Ultimate Underlying Mystery. Contemplate its Beauty.
What Trust in Life Truly Means
Perhaps the greatest gift we can be given is a Trust in Life.
We all have had glimpses of this understanding. By glimpse, I mean the experience of being touched, taken to what we might call HOME, the experience that somehow ‘all is well’.
A flash of recognition…as if we have just seen behind the curtain of Life and know its Source, ‘that from which the Big Bang arose.’… Like an experiential Truth has revealed Itself.
It’s closely related to something we all know well. That there is something within us that ‘knows’…It knows what to do…. often called integrity. And when we violate this inner knowing, we suffer, don’t we? And that’s a good thing because it reminds us to pay attention to what truly matters.
Understanding Our Unhappiness
If we are unhappy, that’s a good thing. It is telling us we are missing something fundamental about Life.
These glimpses are important. Most people make the mistake of trying to get back to these moments. Their purpose, however, is in the message, not the momentary high. Perhaps Life is telling us the Truth. That we have seen behind the curtain, to our timelessness, ‘that from which the Universe arose’.
See if this makes sense to you. Psychological suffering is rooted in the belief that we are a separate entity.
It’s a belief about ourselves we inherited from culture…the belief to be a separate self….
It’s not a problem to function as this specific body when dealing with practical matters like navigating a room to avoid bumping into furniture, or driving a car, or planning a trip or even doing scientific research.
The Illusion of Separation
But when it comes to understanding Life, to understanding what we are and who others are, the belief in separation eventually brings suffering both inside and out.
Life is intimately interconnected. We all know that at some level. Anything that happens is part of the Universal flow. Life knows what it is doing. When understood experientially, there is an unshakable background of peace even when mind and body may be in turmoil.
Living from Our True Nature
See what it is like to live from this extraordinary possibility, that the knower of our human experience, the Awareness perceiving our thoughts, bodily sensations and sense perceptions, is Life itself… One eye seeing through all eyes.
Perhaps, at our very core, we are ‘that from which the Universe arose’. See what it is like to live from that, to test this radical possibility by seeing others as ourself, the earth as our body, and letting the feedback we get from Life be the evidence.
When we discover our trust in Life, it frees body and mind to be all they can be. Life then becomes a celebration as we serve from our joy.
Embracing Our Imperfections
Notes: My teacher would say…Notice that when we feel bad about ourselves, we are perpetuating the belief to be a separate self, the very essence of the problem. Anything that happens is part of the universal flow.
But, these moments of doubts, of suffering, of feeling bad happen to everyone. Nobody is perfect, not Buddha, Jesus, Ramana Maharshi, Muhammad nor Meister Eckhart.
So, when it happens to us, ‘don’t feel bad about feeling bad’. Things happen and when we know what we are, we no longer take these feeling so seriously.
This intuition of a single Reality is found in modern science in its drive to find a unifying theory and in the teachings of all the world’s spiritual traditions…. Atman is Brahman, love our neighbor AS ourself, I and the Father are one, wherever the eye lands, there is the face of God, there is only the Tao (Dao), the unnamable Source, etc.
