Pure love is matchless in majesty; it has no parallel in power and there is no darkness it cannot dispel. It is the undying flame that has set all life aglow.
(Meher Baba)
It all started one sleepless night. Trying to remember and thread moments of my life to get a sense of the road travelled, and the lessons learnt. To appreciate fully what this journey is all about.
There were lots of people and events, actors and scenes that were remembered easily, yet did not leave a mark, others that one wondered whether they happened and why, deviations from the standard script of life, but which left an indelible and deep imprint on the heart. All these people, relations, whether momentary and superficial or deeply significant, felt now like ghost images one felt inside, faded frames on a long movie that had dissolved into thin air, after contributing to unfold plots and consequences, towards a full-grown state of being, yet unknown. Like what happens to a seed becoming a tree.
The past is definitely made of a dream-like substance, of characters and circumstances which appeared and disappeared, that meant a lot or not, where you exchanged views, words, passions, and love, as your character unfolded unconsciously following some inner script.
Your own character, in the remembrance exercise, is made of the ephemeral dream-like substance as the others -fantasy stuff. Just a bunch of film characters playing a tragicomedy in all earnest, with changing up and down plots, framed by a majestically diverse vast scenario, which was also constantly changing. And there were no intermissions.
Most of the time, under this me, the prima donna point of view, life was puzzling, an interactive adventure defined by my biases, culture, and state of mind, by my ego, and defined in terms of how moments lived satisfied my wants or frustrated them. I certainly was the center of expectation. Yet on some very, very rare times, and for reasons not yet known, the film being reviewed collapsed into a continuum frame without ID or name, and all the characters and surroundings became one concert of unimaginable beauty.
I am Existing. Aware of being here now. Full of awe beyond consequence. Not knowing anything but this feeling of existing. This, I, is now a drop in an Ocean bucket. Seeing and imagining are now from an infinitesimal point in an infinite surrounding that smiles inside, Everything.
Almost immediately afterward, I was back to my ID, wondering at the indescribable beauty and tried for a little while to find ways to go back to it, to no avail. I became the usual constricted ephemeral me, with ups and downs perceived as burdens and satisfactions, whereas in that moment of dissolution, even my limited ego, with all its accumulated debris, had intrinsic beauty and was an integral part of the concert.
Here I am now under the trees, trying again. The present is the time. Trying to extend proprioception beyond this body sac and its myriads of orchestrated cells. Mind is alert, sitting on that verandah behind the eyes, attentive to the surrounding sounds, aware of enveloping aromas, aware of the multitude of thought caravans parading in endless processions inside. Exploring every niche of memory in stored data, as well as sense perceptions of the outside. Emotions and feelings side by side, giving life to still moments, adding motion and connectivity.
It is one of those wandering moments when all resources are summoned to review all that one was, had been, and could be, as seen by the me-spectator, by the congregated puddle of ego-self, sitting on that verandah behind the eyes.
Life, as imagined and contextualized at that moment by that me self-group, was teeming, coalescing, reproducing. It portrayed itself in all, including the inanimate stuff, as imagination reviewed, the bits and pieces of information and visualize, through the images seen from the verandah; galaxies palpitating, gas clouds condensing, particles running wild all over the place, in an unconscious joy of being there, somewhere in time. Searching.
The spreading clouds of cosmic stuff started to cool down, decelerating their speeds and started to bond closely. Condensation, solidification, complexification, and structure, started to happen. Like, if unknowingly, I imagined, they wanted to come together. And they did.
They assembled, and their assemblage acquired more complex capacities to interact. They started to experience melting and flowing and things like that. They shared themselves in liquidity and solidity and gas, alternating states while still being the same.
Sometimes they cooled down so much that they froze in rigid form; at other times, they flowed in liquids simple as water, and some others then dissolved and flowed in the new medium. And there, they met and got together and sort of danced, and learned to align and template, and reproduced their own image. Interphases surrounded them, creating globules. Little bubble houses for themselves. And all of this was happening while simultaneously, in the rest of the endless space, all stages were still ablaze. It was a simultaneous and continuous multidimensional and spectacular blast and get-together.
In those spots where cooling had been cool, little bubbles, in turn, started to congregate and build more complex assemblies with greater capacities to sense. No longer just irritation and escape. Behavioral patterns started to develop, like adaptation to the surroundings, reproduction, feeding, excretion of toxins, predation, camouflage, and motion in sea, air and land.
Also, instincts to codify behavior and protect similar bubbles, the tribe, and communication networks for alert, mating, and predation. So, now there were trillions and trillions of individuals in myriads of species, each with trillions of cells and zillions of molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles -all in nonstop constant motion, in different stages of evolution.
Then came the thought, rationality, self-awareness, imagination, feelings, spirituality, religion, politics, iniquity, selfishness and selflessness, history, languages, personal stories, literature, music, technology, art, and categorization.
Humanness. Multiplied in infinite stories and history, plots and subplots, dreamt in the context of this energy-matter reality, imagined in all sorts of contexts, written in so many books, a song in songs, many songs. So many. So much.
Each human being is an infinite story in time and process, with superimposed levels of multifunctionality, states of energy and awareness. Each human being has a self-aware personality with self-definitions, beliefs, biases, interpretations, genius, instincts, behavioral habits, complexes, imagination, gullibility, perversions, noblesse, empathy, cruelty, indifference to others, love, curiosity, dullness, desires, memories, hopes, expectations, frustrations, realizations, aha moments, desperation, sadness, happiness.
Each is a universe, relating to different patterns of thought and feeling, holding individuality, and relations with others, through culture, relationships, and time. Each with a perception of life and death.
Within each one is also a deep song that is also outside in everything. The same energy, the same motion, the same universe, the same urge to belong, to congregate, to assemble, to find. To find.
Existence undeniably exists, and isness seems to exist all the time, whereas life and life processes seem to be in constant change, transforming, evolving, appearing, and dissolving in form. The mind surge amid it all, the self-awareness, the appearance of reason and intuition, that questions why life, in language and thought.
But deeper, in a sentience that is part of it all, there seems to be an impetus, a pull, a sort of gravitational field that lies beyond the curvature of space and time, that applies to the essence of a substance and sucks it like storm drains, back to somewhere unknown, where it all started, inviting it somehow to flow.
Oh yes, we try to build edifices of words and concepts, theories of beyond and behold, and our imagination flies till it bounces on itself and falls back exhausted on the platform of the rational mind. But that inner sentience manifests itself in ways so integrally simple, in cohesion, we can not call anything but that look and feel, like that which we call, without knowing what it is -love.
Love that pulls that brings things together to build these complex houses of being and thought and sentience that now asks why and wants to know the origin of the flow.
And in simple ways, this love manifested in a silence of words and thought, in a window indescribable of knowing, of totally belonging, where none and nothing are displaced. An all-inclusive beyond-and-behold instant.
And it is expressed in human, in absolutely human sentience, which gives the realm to that everything dispersed in space, in an assembly spectacular, to perceive the beauty of being in the simple joy of love, a Love that is in itself inexplicable because is the source of all flow.
But it is in humans, in stories so perfectly simple, that we start to realize hope, to focus on our own sentience, to grow free of all debris accumulated, as we evolve the capacity to love.
Then Love itself becomes human to meet its own returning flow in an embrace of grace. That is the summit of Being, manifests in humans, in a contact so simple, in a context so natural, in a bus, in a field, in the middle of a travesty or a spiritual practice, in anything conceived important or not, but in human, only in human.
It brings out the real human. and sets signposts again and again, guiding sentience, out of the labyrinthic scaffolding assembled by itself to arrive at the One Love that set all in a forever spontaneity of apparent motion, to Love and Love and Love.
Nothing you can make that can't be made. No one you can save that can't be saved
Nothing you can do, but you can learn how to be you in time
It's easy. All you need is love(The Beatles)