I am being slowly consumed by a way of being in which I cannot help but see that I do not exist, and everything is made of wordless love. Sometimes, despite efforts to the contrary, we sink into a pit of despair. In this same manner, I am sinking into a wellspring of joy. And all I can think is, “Weird!”
The more I taste it, the more it becomes the only thing I want, and the more I want it, the more I receive it. It’s a vicious cycle.
I had some time to meditate on Sunday afternoon, and it was incredibly good. Then about an hour later, it was like the sky cracked open. Finally, at 6 pm, I broke down crying with this visceral realization that every atom in the cosmos loves me to pieces, and nothing is wrong, nothing whatsoever. Even situations that felt wrong somewhere in the back of my mind, subconsciously, were shown to be perfectly resolved.
Can you imagine arriving at a place in your life, a moment, in which everything that weighed on you, in the foreground or in the recesses of your mind, was resolved? A moment in which all was finally well?
At 6 pm on Sunday, as I sobbed with relief, I watched a dark storm cloud soar across half the sky and let out a hard rain while the sun still gleamed in the other half, lighting up the wet streets, and I remembered vividly my first moon dream this year. On February 5, I dreamed that I was standing on a vast shoreline with my two boys. On the horizon (representing the future, I surmised) were dark storms raging and an enormous black moon with three small Earths circling it (which I took to be three months… although it’s been precisely four). The storms blocked the sun, but I moved horizontally up the endless shoreline (the eternal now), and soon we were all basking in sunlight. I was a little confused, because the storms were still blocking the sun. Eventually I realized where the light was coming from. It was coming from me.
The storms don’t disappear. The sun lights them up, and this changes everything.
This morning, after I took my children to school, I couldn’t look at anything without seeing it as mind. The experience was similar to moving from a regular dream to a lucid dream, gazing wide-eyed at every shimmering object, stepping forward and touching them as though half expecting them to dissolve, knowing you are touching a projection of your own consciousness. Then I returned to bed and fell back asleep, except that I was awake the whole time, and it was like resting inside a cloud of love in heaven for an hour. I saw visions of flowers and light surrounding me, dancing as if in cosmic celebration, filling my body as if I were drinking it. I could feel it on my tongue, swimming in my cells, caressing every inch of my body.
I felt exactly as I would if I had met some beautiful person who loved me with all their heart. I felt exactly as I would if I were in love with someone head-over-heels in love with me, except that there was no particular face to it. If I had not felt so dumbly blissful, I would have grown frustrated trying to determine who it was or where the love was coming from.
The universe itself has become my lover, and particular faces are simply facets of this whole. Perhaps that explains why I cannot seem to fall out of love with anyone, no matter what they do, and every day I seem to fall in love with yet another face. Like a mother for whom everyone she meets is a child to whom she has just given birth, she sees the face of her new infant, and falls in love every time. I am surrounded by Buddhas.
I took my dear friend for a walk through the park yesterday. She put her arm around mine, and we strolled to the pond, past the goslings and their hissing parents, past the tiny frogs hopping across the trail, past the dragonflies and purple flowers. She is adjusting to her medication, slowly. She remarked on how it felt to take drugs designed to reduce psychosis and depression. “It feels as if a part of my mind has been shut down,” she said.
“It’s only temporary,” I said. She asked me if I thought she was crazy. She was always so afraid that people would think she was crazy, although she always reached out for help. I shared my perspective.
“What you’re going through now is not who you are. This is just one little stretch of time in your existence, just one little facet of who you are, and it will pass like everything else.”
“I feel smaller. I think I lost some of my soul energy. I thought I was going to die! Now I don’t think I’m going to die anymore. I don’t understand what happened,” she said.
“Transformation is like death,” I told her. “Maybe you just intuited that you were going to experience transformation. Before I went through a period of suffering, I had a lot of dreams and visions in which I was dying. I had really intense visions that I was a fetus, and that I came back in a new life driving a scooter through the streets of New York or Paris. But, I didn’t die. I just went through a really big transformation.”
I remembered a quote by Richard Bach: “What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.” Then I remembered the book I found by Adyashanti just weeks ago, “The End of Your World.” And I laughed to myself, because it occurred to me that the next time I think “the world is coming to an end,” I am going to say, “Yay!” and do a little dance.
“I want to become enlightened!” she said romantically. “Your aura is silver, but mine is only green. Someday I want to have a gold aura! Do you think I could have a gold aura someday?” she asked.
I burst out laughing. “You sound like you’re going for a black belt in karate! You only got a green belt, and that person over there has a blue belt,” I teased her. “Who cares what your aura looks like!” She smiled and commented on how she worries too much.
“Do you think I’m crazy?” she asked.
“I don’t think you’re crazy. I think that your mind was really open to things, really good at dreaming, like having huge windows looking out at this collective dream, which is delusion for anyone, and so many terrible things happened to you, so much injury, that the scenes on the other side of the window were just too much, and that would make anyone crazy. It’s hard to see through a dream, to see that it’s just a dream, when it’s a horrific nightmare. So, you tried plan A, which was to see that everything is mind and that you’re in control, but it didn’t work, or it was taking too long, and you’ve suffered too much. So the universe turned to plan B. Close the blinds. Turn off the dreaming so that you can’t see it anymore, so that your mind can’t create the nightmares anymore. The medication you’re on is basically like a chemical blinder.”
“When you’re ready,” I added, “you can lift the blinds again and look out at everything. When that time comes, the task will be to know that what you’re looking at is a creation of your own mind. In reality, everything is fine.”
Is this not the task of all of us? The sun is shining through the blinds, and when we lift them up and look out the window, even where we see storms and nightmares, the sun is there shining right through them, revealing their utter transparency.
