Sunday morning, just before leaving for Ordinary Life, my youngest stood in front of me with his finger on my chest. “Mommy are you here?” He asked.
“Yes, I’m here. Are you here?”
“I’m in the future!”
“Oh!” I said, “You’ll have to tell me what the future is like!”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, like if it’s happy or sad, beautiful or terrible, or some of both.”
“I think it’s some of both. Isn’t everything always some of both?”
Indeed. Thanks small and wild one. It’s long been said we should follow the ways of our children! The day before Evan said this, I was reading in The Bhagavad Gita: The image of God is found essentially and personally in all mankind. Each possesses it entire and undivided, and all together not more than one alone. In this way we are all one, intimately united in our eternal image, which is the image of God and the source in us of all our life.
Within seconds of reading that, someone sent me this in a text:
In one moment, I was part of two moments, two experiences. I am this, I am that. But it’s not just I — it’s you, us, we...everyone. At first I was like, “Woahhhhhh. What is happening here?! Who is in my headspace?” Then I found myself laugh-crying because this stuff happens all the time. We need just see it.
The magic of these nondual moments was tarnished by the pallor of the viral video of the kid wearing a red MAGA hat in a face off with a Native American elder. The optics of the situation said one thing while the maelstrom of analysis remained decidedly inconclusive. I know my feelings on it, and especially my feeling of sadness that had he been a non-white kid, there would not have been a possibility of two sides. What I am wondering now is whether there was space in that intimate, charged moment for the two of them to wonder, even for the smallest fraction of a second, if they could see themselves in the the eyes of the other. If any small whisper of “I am not you, I am not other than you” wound through their mingled breath, for the space between them was minimal.
Embracing an I/Thou, yes...and relationship with all that is, intending to see ourselves in literally everything and everyone is fundamental to leaning into a new paradigm of being. When could I have been the kid? When could I have been the elder, an onlooker, the one behind the camera? We are, afterall, already interconnected. We know this, we say “yeah, yeah, yeah, okay” to this, but how can we begin to live into it as reality. Our energy will follow our attention — it’s a law of nature. Expansion of everything is happening in this moment. Though we can now prove that on a scientific, cosmological scale, it is no less awesome. For what is happening out there is also happening in here. We, too, are expanding. We can conceive that we are made of star particles, that the light we perceive today is light from the first moment of the universe making its way back to us. Can we put our vast imaginations to work not only to ask the deepest scientific questions that will push us forward, but also to ask the deepest questions of the heart that will bring us together? Let me revise that....we can for certain, but will we choose to?
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. One way to look at this is that an action driven by hate and fear has an opposite reaction driven by love. Both will always exists. This too is a law of nature, Newton’s third in fact. Science is a mystical endeavor in many ways. It wonders things like, “What are the stars made of?” And in this wondering finds out we are actually made of stars. The universe is a singularity, one whole thing, and it is unfurling its majesty through consciousness. Consider the words of Meister Eckhart: The eye with which you see God is the same eye with which God sees you. Supplant any word in the underlined space — universe, a butterfly, your mother...a carrot. This golden thread of existence runs through us all. We are this and that.