Tag: infinity

Blue Sky, Bluebirds, Blue Planet

In the classic movie It’s a Wonderful Life, George Bailey realizes that his life is wonderful because of the friends and family he has who lovingly support him through difficult as well as good times. In another touching film, Life Is Beautiful, a man imprisoned with his young son in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II creates a beautiful fantasy world of games for his little boy so he won’t be frightened (or killed). Both of these films hold within them timeless wisdom about focusing on the beauty and love in life instead of pain or fear. In essence, the message is that your primary overview of everything comes from what you hold in your awareness and affects how you experience your life.

Perhaps it’s not always as simple or easy as it sounds, but I’ve found that this perspective helps me live day to day with a more positive outlook. For instance, the temperature may fall below freezing outside on a New England winter’s day, but when I gaze up at the blue sky, the sun is shining and light sparkles off every surface. I can feel its warmth on my face. Further, if I remember that the seasons are always changing, each one unique, I am reminded of the beauty that comes from those changes, and I am grateful for the miracle of each day’s seasonal specialness. If I whine and complain about being cold, I am trapped in a negative experience, which then affects my entire day (or week).

In receiving news about a friend’s health challenge or experiencing one myself, I may initially feel fear and sadness, but if I eventually recall that there is always a soul plan to our lives, I feel comforted and less frightened. Life has beginnings and endings, connections and separations, joys and losses. When I can accept all that as the natural flow of life, my heart remains open, and more than anything else I feel the love that holds everything and everyone together. A friend once said to me, “It’s all in how you frame it.” With every year that passes and every experience I have, I come to see the wise truth of that.

We are all here for a relatively short time on this extraordinarily beautiful blue planet spinning in the cosmos (look again at those views of Earth from space), without a playbook or certainty of any kind, so why not choose to experience that beauty in every moment? And why not feel the love that continuously passes between us—family, friends, and strangers alike? We don’t know why we were born or when we will die, but we know that the sun rises each morning and sets each day in magnificent colorful splendor. A visual representation of the love in our hearts and the light in our souls, available for free on a daily basis.

Look at the sky and in the eyes of those around you. The light you see there will open your heart to the love that flows through the smallest details of your life. Listen to the music of the wind in the trees and the bluebirds and robins singing. The very fact that we are not alone on this journey is a miracle in itself. Together, we are connected to something greater than any one single life. Together, we are the spirit of all life, all consciousness. Infinity magically manifesting itself before our very eyes and ears. As you view it, so it is….

Gender-Free God/dess

God is formless. Everything humanity has created to define God is both true and untrue. We are painting images on an invisible canvas; the colors disappear on contact. Only we don’t realize it. Over the centuries, various cultures and religions have constructed their own views of what God is. Each one differs somewhat: sometimes a male figure; sometimes the Divine Mother or Goddess. Or a multifaceted God with many forms and attributes. These beings become larger than life, seeming solid and “real,” rather than a reflection of our own human images and characteristics.

We humans form-alize the world, turning the formless into specific structures and concepts that we think we understand. Gender, for instance. Babies are assigned a gender at birth. Some languages give every noun a gender (la rue, le soleil; la paz, el tren ). In English, we don’t give nouns a gender but until recently, words like chairman and postman were commonly used, the patriarchal basis for social roles. And of course, many religions have defined God as male: a bearded, all-powerful man sitting on a throne among the clouds. Some religions have both gods and goddesses. All are attempts to make God relatable to humans within their particular cultural framework.

If we delve deeper, if we pull back the curtain, there is nothing there. Or everything. Ultimately, the universe, divinity, and life itself are mysteries. We don’t truly understand any of it. Yet we live it every day, trying to make sense of God and “reality.” The words we use often limit rather than expand our awareness. Perhaps it’s wisest to let go of it all, acknowledge the mystery, and live in a greater peace which allows all parts of life to just be.

Imagine yourself in a movie theater in which an endless series of films passes before you. You watch and react, but when you leave the theater, you don’t take the movies with you. You yourself are not those representations of reality, those people, places, and stories. Such is life. We are born, live lives full of images, experiences, and reactions—and then we transition to other realms, other experiences. On the other side of life as we know it here, everything is more fluid, without definition and boundary. The parameters we have set up on Earth—gender, mind/body, beliefs—dissolve and disappear. There is no “there,” only limitless Presence. And we are part of that. Indeed, we are all of that.

God, Goddess. Great Mystery. Universal Consciousness. Oneness. Every word we have invented to explain life is a story that is both real and unreal. Don’t get too invested in the outcome. It all turns out well. You will walk out of the theater and see infinity open up all around you. If you are fortunate, you may occasionally find yourself seeing glimpses of it now in your current lifetime. All you have to do is let go and accept the fluidity of all things, the gender-free God/dess that is everything, including you. The field beyond belief. Let’s meet there, shall we?

“If God is everything, then nobody is wrong.”—Panache Desai

Phoenix Rising

On the day of my first radiation treatment for breast cancer, I had a sudden thought during my morning meditation: “This is the fire that will burn away the imprints of all that came before.” Meaning, what we each carry around with us from our past, whether pain, suffering, loss, or uncried tears. Every human being faces challenges in life that because of their intensity imprint us deep inside and thus affect how we live day to day, with hesitancy or fear perhaps. When the imprints come to the surface and are released, freedom and peace arise. Mostly my life has been filled with love and happiness, but I have also had difficult experiences, including breast cancer and a lifelong fear of death/eternity. Ironically, this current cancer path has opened up a deeply soothing and expansive soul connection. Now I am at the last fiery gate. The phoenix stands before me.

The legend of the phoenix, also associated with the sun, is one of rebirth and renewal, of letting go of the past and rising anew in the present. In various cultures, including Greek and Egyptian, the bird was said to live several hundred years and then die in flames, its successor arising from the ashes. The idea of resurrection and immortality is often connected with it. It is a universal human theme—life beyond death, reincarnation, and “fresh starts.” How we live these possibilities in our own lives is part of our individual design as a human soul. Personally, I have always found the phoenix legend fascinating. I read a children’s book about it when I was 9 or 10, and it has always stayed with me. Is this my time to personally live it, symbolically, so many decades later?

At the end of my first week of radiation, beloved Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh died at the age of 95. His teachings had had a profound impact on my spiritual growth. I knew there was some significance for me in the timing of his transition because the day before, I had prayed for further help in fully accepting infinity/death. Over the years, I had come to a deeper peace about it, primarily because of my work with Panache Desai, but I could feel a kernel of fear remaining.  That morning, a friend posted a link to one of Thich Nhat Hanh’s talks, “Overcoming the Fear of Death,” and in his daily online meditation, Panache spoke of releasing the past and living completely as your soul. On my morning walk, a vividly colorful rainbow stretched across the sky during a sudden shower. I felt my prayer being answered.

Insight and deepened awareness come to us in many ways—through wise teachers, through magical moments in Nature, and through inner epiphany. All of these touched my heart that day. In his talk, Thich Nhat Hanh spoke of “no-birth” and “no-death”—the continuity of all being in the cosmos, or “interbeing” as he called it. “It is possible for a wave to live its life as a wave, and to live its life as water at the same time.” We are waves that have arisen into form from infinite consciousness at birth, and we will return to formless “water” at death. Nothing is born or dies, in Thich Nhat Hanh’s view; there is only eternal Presence always. Panache too continually speaks of the infinite divine Presence beyond form.

This is the wisdom I have been repeatedly guided to on this breast cancer path. As I gradually released attachment to my body’s appearance and my past identity with it (form), I found myself becoming more and more fluid (formless) in my day-to-day life. Surrendering to that fluidity brought deeper trust and acceptance of all of life/death/eternity. I was experiencing the flow of interbeing in which there is no birth or death, just awareness. Loving awareness. It is something that can’t be explained through the mind but only experienced through the heart and soul. This is our life’s journey, every one of us. Each path unique, yet all connected in infinite consciousness. The waves and the water as One.

So in the ashes of what appears to be a life or an experience ending is only the phoenix rising continuously. And fear falls away in that rising and that continuity. Peace. Radiation begins and ends, and the grace of a rainbow appears suddenly in a gray sky. That multicolored light is always present. Our true nature is timeless, formless, eternal. We are the multiverse expressing magnificence in the world.
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Note: My last radiation treatment (surgery and chemo also complete) was on 1 Tijax in the Maya calendar. Tijax stands for healing and miracles. Who could ask for a more perfectly aligned synchronicity?

Precious Moments

Whatever your current age or state of health, you have probably experienced moments when life feels exceedingly ephemeral, as if it could disappear in a split second. This is raw truth. We are here on Earth as human beings for a tiny moment in eternity, yet time itself is always relative—sometimes racing and sometimes “stopped.” As our lives move forward and evolve, we experience the various aspects of life and living and come to know both impermanence and loss. In doing so, our hearts may break, yet we grow wiser. And we begin to see beyond time to eternity itself.

When my mother and father were first married and living in Chicago, they went to see a show called Knickerbocker Holiday. In it, one piece of music, “September Song,” particularly touched them, and they carried it through their lives as their “favorite.” Every time someone sang it on TV or radio, they would pause, listen, and look across the room at each other meaningfully. The main lyric was “It’s a long, long while from May to December. But the days grow short when you reach September…. These precious days I’ll spend with you.” I have such a clear memory of this, which I’ve carried with me all my life. The songwriter, and my parents, had tapped into both the sweetness and the poignancy of life.

My parents were married 57 years when my mother passed away; my father died nine years later. I think I came to know why that song held such significance for them as I lived through their aging years and eventual deaths. Now, many years later, as I myself am aging, as well as facing breast cancer, it all takes on new meaning. In my heart, I feel strongly that I will survive this health challenge, yet you can’t live through such an unexpected and intense experience without being changed, without taking a hard look at your own mortality. Of course, my entire life I have been focused on the mystery of eternity and death, feeling both fear and fascination. (Maybe it runs in my family genes!) None of it coincidence, I suppose. This is my soul journey. Before birth, I chose the parents I had for exactly these reasons.

Over the years, my spiritual path has gradually led me to a “peace that passeth understanding” about it all. Particularly in the last few months, I have come to see an extraordinary beauty in eternity and the nature of the universe. Cancer can be both frightening and soulfully expansive. In recent weeks, I have experienced moments of timeless immersion in infinity, primarily in Nature, which defy description. The heart and soul cannot translate what transpires at those times. But you are transformed; the inner “enlightenment” you were born with rises to the surfaces and shines through your being. Fear no longer defines your days and nights; light does. And trust in something greater than the mind’s limited view. Your inner vision expands to encompass a magnificence and grace that spans all time and space.

Does every human soul eventually experience this as an incarnated being on planet Earth? I don’t know for certain. I can only express what I myself am living through. Still, the trust I carry within me whispers that this is the destiny of all human beings: to see the true nature of life and what appears to be mortality. In the calendar of life, the days we are given at first seem long, then short, then eventually become infinite, timeless—and “precious” beyond life, death, and meaning itself.

“You are infinity dancing in impermanence.”—Panache Desai

Infinity Vision

“On a clear day, you can see forever.”—Burton Lane

Several years ago, after a somewhat worrisome eye diagnosis, I had the extraordinary experience of looking out my window and seeing the external world moving in perfect synchronicity to the Andrea Bocelli music I was listening to. Every detail—people walking, cars passing, tree leaves in the wind—was part of a divinely choreographed dance of deeply connected oneness. And I too was part of it. There was nothing in the universe that sat alone on the sidelines within God’s creation. And I could see this so clearly that the power and beauty of it moved me to tears. Infinity vision, beyond an eye diagnosis.

Last week something similar occurred. I was taking a late-afternoon walk through our neighborhood when I heard a voice inside me: “Don’t just walk. Look. See!” I stopped in my tracks and looked up at the sky. The brilliant blue was streaked with white clouds like an impressionistic painting. The quality of the sun’s light made everything iridescent, heavenly. When I turned my gaze to the street before me, I saw a man with his dog, a car driving past, and autumn leaves falling from trees all moving together as one. I continued to walk, and everything I saw joined the dance of beingness. A cosmic tapestry so intricately interwoven that each thread was perfectly aligned with every other, and the motion of its living presence filled the universe, and me, with vibration and light. Infinity vision once again.

These are gifts from God, available to us all. Often it is a life crisis or a health diagnosis (like my recent breast cancer) that shatters everything and allows us to see the true nature of the multiverse we inhabit. I have sometimes heard from those who are experiencing it that cancer brings with it both challenge and expanded awareness. I understand that now. I believed I was deeply spiritually connected, aware, but cancer showed me an expansiveness and complexity beyond anything I had previously experienced. It cracked me open and let the full light of infinite awareness in. When disease or illness pries away your attachment to your physical form, magic is revealed. On my walk, I stood speechless before the wonder of everything I saw. Tears of love and gratitude streamed down my face.

If you have been reading my writing over the years, you may have noticed that I have had similar experiences before. Nature is always my profound connector to Spirit and the doorway to something greater. Yet now it is somehow different. The connection is even deeper and more expansive. That is the nature of infinity. You never reach the end of its ever-increasing power and beauty. Birth and death seem like finite experiences, but they are both contained within infinity. There is no end to beingness, ever. And this is the eternal truth that sits quietly at the center of our lives. Each of us is destined to discover it at the perfect time.

Whenever it appears, by whatever vehicle, celebrate its arrival as the greatest gift you will ever receive. The cracks in your life—illness, loss, pain, fear—can be the gateways to seeing with infinity vision. Only then will you understand the true nature of your “one precious life” and all life. Each and every one of us is part of a celestial symphony. The music of the spheres accompanies us everywhere. When you are able to see beyond what your eyes habitually perceive, your vision expands, and you begin to walk on air, immersed in the beauty of infinity, loving everyone and everything around you.