Tag: presence

What Is God?

Who or what is God? A question without an answer really—or with an infinite number of answers. For God is not really a concept that can be explained or a puzzle that can be solved. God is an experience, one that is as unique as every individual on this planet or every soul in the universe. And it cannot be contained within any description or answered question. Perhaps metaphor comes closest to expressing what God is.  And we each have our own inner metaphors for the experience of the Divine.

For me, God is the seed at the center of all creation as well as the flower that arises from the seed. It encompasses creation itself. God’s essence is gender-free, formless. God is birth and death, inhalation and exhalation, shakti and shiva, yin and yang. God is the eternal harmony in which there are no false notes, the truth within which there are no opposites, the Oneness that holds everything. God is an endless ocean of love, a light that shines from each individual soul and from the collective Soul of the cosmos. There is nothing I can imagine that is not God, nothing I can experience that isn’t God.

That has been my experience of God thus far in my life, so much of it arising from my time spent in Nature. When I am standing alone surrounded by the stillness of trees, God is an audible breath in the air: the sweet sound of the wind through the leaves. When the birds sing at sunrise, God’s voice uplifts my soul. When a butterfly floats by and dances in the sunlight before me, God’s tears fall from my eyes. At these moments, God is a loving Presence within me and all around me. There is no separation between the seer and the seen, between my soul and the Divine Soul. My mind has no questions, my heart is connected to all being.

Each moment of connection like this fills me to overflowing, and I long to live in that place always. Yet life offers us more than bliss and beauty. There is pain and sadness in the mix—and the longing itself. As I continue on my journey through life, I expand into greater inclusiveness of all parts of the human experience as God. I realize longing and pain are divine catalysts. They are moving me beyond the idea that I can only experience God as a peak experience. The truth is that God is ordinary as well as extraordinary. The dirt as well as the daisy. I know that on some level, but part of me is still caught in remnants of polarity, separation. I am One, and then I become distracted by everyday details like grocery shopping and making dinner. Or taking a shower….

Every single life event is a stepping-stone into more expansive awareness. Even a simple shower can be an opening to the cosmos. This morning, as the water poured over my head, and I looked at the sky through the small window above me, suddenly my perception completely shifted. I was aware of a consciousness looking out through my eyes, something that has happened fleetingly once or twice before.* I knew it was God experiencing the world through me, through my senses and awareness. Actually God is that awareness. An awareness that loves every experience, peak or mundane. As my gaze turned to look at the shower curtain and then the droplets of water running down my body, I realized at the deepest possible level that it was all God—because God was within me seeing it all, with love. This is what Ram Dass called “loving awareness.”

That shift in vision is available to us all the time as we open our hearts to the possibilities of life. We are each on a journey home to that loving awareness, which is who we are. We are awareness, infinite consciousness; we are God. In that awareness, the distinction between peak and mundane disappears, and there is only Presence. And the question “What is God?” disappears within it.

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*See my blog “Whose Hands Are These?” 2015

Internal Weather

What if the weather outside your window is actually a reflection of the weather conditions inside you? What if your perceptional framework for viewing life shapes everything, including how you see physical conditions such as rain, snow, clouds, and sunshine that appear to be outside you? What if nothing is quite as it seems to be to the mind? What if the world is as you are?

Ever since I was a small child, I have carried within me an at-times-overwhelming grief about the nature of life, death, and eternity. The “human condition” terrified me; infinity terrified me. Late at night, I described my fear to my mother as “the world goes on forever and ever.” She comforted me and tried to help me learn to distract myself with happier thoughts. But the core unease never really disappeared. In college, I found infinity hiding inside my astronomy and philosophy textbooks. Fear of death and whatever came after was always hovering in the back of my consciousness. In my 30s, I turned to a spiritual quest to try to resolve it. That was the beginning of a shift in my perception.

Over the years, I came to a much broader view of life and of God’s presence in the universe. I have experienced a vast inner peace arising from my soul. At times, when I am completely immersed in it, the peace is as infinite and all-consuming as the fear once was. I “know” with every fiber of my being that infinity is actually divine love, which permeates every aspect of life. There is nothing but infinite consciousness expressing, always, everywhere in the cosmos. It is inside me and outside me, and actually there is no inside and outside. There is a seamless Oneness to all Being. This is what I experience, and within that is peace.

Yet there are still moments, usually late at night, when the fear arises, and a tremendous grief accompanies it. Some people are comforted by the idea of eternity; I am terrified by it. Now, however, I have come to see it as a catalyst for my soul’s evolution in this lifetime. It propels me ever deeper within and connects me to divine Presence, which lives as peace in my soul. My human grief also lives inside me. Depending on my state of mind, I can see that grief as separate from and larger than the peace or as only a small part of it. I realize that my humanity is actually how my divinity experiences itself on Earth. My human life pushes me further and deeper on my soul journey, until I completely merge with God consciousness.

Meanwhile, there are times on this path, this journey, that the catalyst of fear awakens me to a new level of awareness about the nature of reality and my life in it. I begin to understand that my perceptual framework (which interprets the world around me, and how and what I see) is dependent on whether I am in human fear or divine peace. And the seeming separation and polarity is actually for my own expansion and growth. Eventually, I will abide in peace without the interruption of fear or grief. The wisdom deep in my soul tells me this, and I trust it as the expanses of peace in my daily life become more and more seamless. When the old grief or fear arises, it is clear to me now how they can shape my perceptions. Rain and snow are just experiences; life and death are just experiences—all of them part of the soul’s journey in this world. If I see them as miracles, that is what they are in my experience. And grief gradually dissolves within Presence.

Your Soul Knows Best

Sometimes it seems as if life is random, crazy, a mistake of cosmic proportions. It isn’t. There is intent and purpose woven into the fabric of the universe. And your soul knows this. Your soul chose this lifetime for its own evolution, for humanity’s evolution. We humans are on a collective journey through diverse Earth experiences to integrate polarities and find our way back to balance, peace, and harmony. The soul is our guide.

The challenge for the soul-as-human is to reach peaceful harmony within a physical form with its complex emotions, thoughts, and anatomical circuitry. At times it can seem overwhelming. However, if you remind yourself that your soul chose the scenarios and experiences of your lifetime for its own growth and expansion, then perhaps you can come to acceptance and even gratitude. It’s not necessarily something that will make sense to the mind, but your heart naturally allows life to flow through it. If you remain centered in your heart, life will feel more whole and less fragmented.

In truth, we are each one cell within a greater whole that includes the entire cosmos, every part connected to every other part. There are no mistakes at the level of universal consciousness. Everything is unfolding perfectly for our evolution. This is probably the greatest lesson of my lifetime. When I can view all of my life—both the joy and the pain—as a symphony written and orchestrated long before I was born, then I can let go of the need to control and relax into just being. The music of the spheres plays itself unassisted, and I begin to see the miracles. I realize that I am living out a beautiful divine design.

Every morning is a fresh opportunity to remember these truths and live in awakened consciousness. Not always easy, because my mind gets distracted and forgets. My breath is the built-in reminder that I am spirit beyond form. If I begin each day with quiet conscious breathing in meditation, my thoughts slow down and fade to the background. I settle into a deeper awareness that God is breathing life into my physical body in every moment. Taking a deep breath periodically throughout the day (ongoing meditation) returns me to that focus. It aligns me with my soul and with Presence.

God’s presence on Earth is experienced through the soul. When you let your mind’s filter become transparent, your soul’s light can shine fully, and divine Presence is known. This is soul vision and soul awareness. Live life for the experience, not the results. Immerse yourself in the present moment, and you forget about past/future and cause/effect. You are limitless and free. The wonder of the Now is all-encompassing. It’s why we came here. To move through what appear to be challenges and finally see everything as grace. To live the infinite in a finite world. To recognize God in yourself, in others, and in everything. And to understand finally that your soul and your heart are your wisest guides, always.

Do You Remember?

Photograph © 2020 Peggy Kornegger

“God isn’t an attainment.
It’s a memory.”
—Panache Desai

When we yearn for God, we think we have to do or become something in order to find that connection, but that just isn’t true. God, or Spirit, was in the infinite energy that held your essence before you were born and in the emergence of your individual expression in this world. Spirit has never left you because there is no part of you that is not Spirit. No part of the universe is Godless. When you realize that completely, the arbitrary boundaries created to define human existence disappear, and you are at home in a Presence beyond time and space. You remember.

What does it take to open to that awareness? Not effort or searching; trying can in fact push it further away. Instead, remembering God is an experience of letting go and being fully present in your life exactly as it is in each moment. If you practice surrendering to life, that experience can become continuous, unbroken and limitless. And it awaits you everywhere. Spirit is in the sunrise and sunset, in the robin’s morning song and the thrush’s evening trill. In thunderstorms and rainbows, in the expanse of the plains and the height of the mountains. Spirit is present in the eyes of loved ones and strangers alike. Even on a busy city street, you can experience this Presence. Everywhere you look, God is, because divinity lives within you. You were born of Spirit, and Spirit lives through you. So when you remember, in a split second of full awareness, you are seeing the truth of all life everywhere, the multiverse we are part of. You are Presence.

I find that my most profound moments of remembering God occur in Nature. Silence engenders access to Spirit. In the stillness of my soul, the experience of Presence arises. When I wake at dawn and walk outside beneath the cypress trees as the mockingbirds sing and the red-bellied woodpeckers call, I feel a part of something beyond the physical boundaries of my body. In the silence beneath the sounds of Nature, I let go into formless being in which the birds and trees and I are one. Humans are taught to name what they see, but when I consciously drop that mental training, everything opens up. Without labels, the world flows seamlessly, and I flow with it. In the flowing, I remember.

I knew God fully before birth, floating in my mother’s womb, because words hadn’t defined and separated my world into parts yet. Once I entered life and language filtered my experiences, I was introduced to fragmented time and conditioned perception. Western culture doesn’t show us that we are one with all we see and that Spirit is the source of that oneness. God in some religions is viewed as an entity that lives outside us and subjects us to rigid rules, judgments, and constraints. The deeper truth is that God is a loving Presence in our souls, which we can access through present-moment awareness. Not through achievement or striving, but in letting go and surrendering. In each moment, the memory of God spans our consciousness and fills our hearts. A timeless memory within; eternal Presence. This is God.

 

When Opportunity Knocks

Photograph © 2020 Peggy Kornegger

One of my favorite board games when I was growing up was called Careers. It came with a small set of Opportunity cards, which you chose every time you landed on an “Opportunity Knocks” square on the board. Each card directed you to a different career adventure. For some reason, I remembered this game the other day and thought how we all could probably use Opportunity reminders in our lives. The deeper I dive into the wisdom of accepting all life events as part of my soul’s journey, the more I realize that each event is an opportunity to surrender.

Within that framework, even the most painful and challenging experience (such as living through a global pandemic) is a doorway to greater expansion and growth. When I look back at my life, I can see the flowering into something new that occurred on the other side of what seemed like disaster or tragedy. Life is always presenting us with these opportunities to remain open to change and rebirth, often accompanied by fear or discomfort. If we can remember that that uncomfortable feeling is the precursor to possibility, then we can answer the door with peace in our hearts when opportunity knocks. Birth is always uncomfortable, but untold miracles await us if we relax into the process. The emergence of a new consciousness, a new Earth, is part of that.

So my latest self-reminder is to see each experience, each event, each moment, as an opportunity to surrender ever more deeply into the flow of life. Life as it is unfolding on one planet in one dimension in the multiverse. I am part of something so much grander than my own limited perception of it, an infinite tapestry of beingness that spans all time and space. That thought can be either terrifying or inspiring depending on how open I can remain within my heart and mind. And how deeply connected I am to my soul. Because the surrender I am talking about is ultimately to my soul, to the Spirit within.

My soul knows the design of my life. It was in on the pre-birth planning with God (or Goddess, Source, Spirit). The cosmos is not an accident. Your life is not an accident. There is a greater design beyond the human mind’s ability to understand or explain. At a certain point, we have to let go of figuring things out and just experience the Mystery that is life. To witness it with awe and wonder, as our soul does. That is the sacred gift of life: just to be here, to be present within this extraordinary experience of life on Earth and fully appreciate it. Fully receive it.

I spent so many years trying, instead of just receiving. We are taught that. To try to achieve, to accomplish, to create a life that is perfect. The personality-self, or ego, thinks that in striving and trying we are actually controlling outcomes, forgetting that there is a greater divine orchestration going on that our souls are part of. The universe is very generous and loving. When we try so hard to control events, we are actually slowing down the natural process of giving and receiving that life is based on. When we remain open and surrender to each moment, life can flow through us with ease. The ego tries to control; the soul just receives.

So when you hear unexpected change knocking at your door, think of it as a meditation bell reminding you of another opportunity to let go and receive life at the deepest level. This is why we’re here in human bodies, to learn to soften into oneness, into loving-awareness, into a Presence that includes everything. We think life is a board game, but it’s really divine grace unfolding….