Essentially, we are spores from the Source, which you could call God or the Creator or Great Spirit or Our Father Who Art in Heaven. The names are humble attempts to give definition to that which is so vast as to be beyond definition.
As spores, we are literally fractals of the whole, containing it in our personal singularity, which is referred to as our soul or the Self or the Atman. This is why religious teachings always return to the theme of “the truth lies within.” God is not outside us. We are God…we just don’t know it.
Sometimes we get a glimpse of the God reality, and, when that happens, it feels both overwhelming in its infiniteness and profoundly comforting in its embrace of us. The Source is both Mother and Father.
The Buddha once encountered a traveler who, startled by his radiance, asked, “Are you a God?” His answer was: “I am awake.” Buddha had penetrated all the illusions of his personality and embraced his timeless, immortal Self. Buddhism today does not speak of or worship God as if God existed outside of the Self.
Meanwhile, those of us who have not had the immersive experience that Buddha had are trying to find it in our unique way. This is the journey of life as most of us know it, whether we acknowledge it or not, and is the fundamental reality of human existence, underlying everything we think we are doing.
It all begins long before we incarnate in this lifetime. Before we physicalize, we are in spirit form with a consciousness that has an awareness of the whole in a timeless, bodyless realm. Time in this dimension is a spiraling vortex in which what we call past and future are infinite possibilities of thought.
When people who have near-death experiences describe what this is like, they speak in exalted terms about floating around in a cosmic realm. They melt into a vast and beautiful consciousness that exists outside the physical realm. When they come back into their bodies, they are not the same person they were before. They often feel they were meant to serve as messengers to those of us still tied to the limits of the physical realm.
In dreams and shamanic altered states, the same thing happens. Carl Jung spent his life analyzing dreams and mapping the human psyche. He never lost his awe at the force of the unconscious, which, to him, was the presence of God within, guiding the individual to wholeness through dream images and synchronicities.
In ordinary reality, as we call it, our immortal Self is experiencing excruciating limitation. It is a harsh experience, but that is exactly the plan of consciousness. Our souls planned it, and it is the cosmic plan of evolution.
We start out helpless babies in circumstances we can’t control and in physical forms that shape our lifetime’s experience. Suffering is guaranteed. The primal forces of our instinctive existence will confront us with daunting moral dilemmas. Failure and success are partners, along with every other duality that defines the physical dimension. We are going to experience everything we need to find a transcendent solution to our exploration of consciousness…and die trying.
You and I and everyone we know who is here now came to be witness to and participant in a cosmic moment of truth that is our present time. We volunteered to be in the thick of it. We can view the drama of duality through our ego as events happening to us in some unfair way and replicate the fight in our own personal life, or we can rise above it like the angels and archangels and summon the courage to fulfill our mission.
The legacy of love and compassion and awareness of the vast order of the cosmic realm is ours to live and share. That’s immortality. When the time comes to let our bodies return to the elements of this planet, we will be free of all the ego’s rules and regulations and float like clouds above the battlefield.
Meanwhile, we can make our time here have something to do with inspiration and kindness and sharing. We can seek to see the soul in our fellow beings. We can root ourselves in the mystique of a physical world that eternally transforms but never ends and find secret passageways to divine perfection. We can live heaven on earth.
Elizabeth Whitney is a longtime local journalist and commentator.