Tag: presence

Hold Your Beliefs Light-ly

Photograph © 2019 Peggy Kornegger
Beliefs are tricky, especially in times of uncertainty. They can be a source of inspiration or a heavy chain around your neck. They can uplift you into possibility or weigh you down, keeping you from open-hearted expansion. Historically, beliefs have been the cause of cycles of planetary polarization: renaissances and wars, connection and separation, coming together and tearing apart, hope and despair. Humans have yet to reach the evolutionary tipping point of being present in experience without filters of any kind. Maybe now is the time to let go and see everything as light, including ourselves and our beliefs.

Growing up, we are taught to identify with our beliefs, that they are the “truth” of our experience. Social groups band together around certain values and perceptions, and identification with those views causes any differences to be seen as a threat. Very early in our lives, a sense of “other” is cultivated, as well as an emotional investment in one’s own view of the world. Mine vs. yours; us vs. them. Cliques, clubs, religious groups, sports teams, states, nations. The ubiquitous “they” follows us through our lives, fostering suspicion and stubbornness. This life view becomes an overlay to your inner light-filled soul self who only sees commonality and unity.

Even when you or I embark upon a spiritual path that encourages opening into the oneness of all life, those old tendencies can interrupt the flow of our soul’s journey on Earth. The personality self, or ego, still holds onto past stories and mental habits, which often center on beliefs. It can take years of conscious practice and commitment to awakening for a deeper awareness to break through the rigidity of belief itself. Eventually, the journey becomes about letting go of everything so that life can move through us unimpeded. This is where we are now on this planet.

Is there a place for belief within complete letting go and acceptance? Personally, I’m still coming into balance with this. I find open, expansive beliefs arising from kindness and inclusion to be inspiring and enlivening. My core belief in a divine loving Presence in the universe and within all beings connects me to others and to life itself. But if I go one step further and attach that core belief to a particular teaching or an expectation about how things should unfold, then I can slip into inflexibility and rigidity without even noticing it. If I look at someone else’s behavior or beliefs and judge them in any way, I have lost the thread of connection.

Perhaps it becomes a balancing dance in which we hold a belief so lightly that it can slip away easily when we open our hearts completely to the present moment and to those we share it with. When we relax into Presence fully, nothing else exists except a love that is both endless and wordless. No separation, no need to differentiate or articulate. There is a freedom in that, as well as a profound sense of connection to everything in the universe. Who would want to give that up in order to hang onto a belief of any kind? This may be our collective direction as a species and as a planet: to hold all of life lightly—with light, as light—and to see our own light-filled reflection in all we perceive. After all, we are just spirits passing through, part of a vast oneness beyond believing or not believing.

Living Peace, Allowing Grief

Photograph © 2020 Peggy Kornegger
Yesterday just before sunrise I was overwhelmed by feelings of sadness, grief, and mourning. Tears streamed down my face. The unfathomable loss of life around the world from the coronavirus hit me like an avalanche. The number of cases is continuing to rise here in Florida and throughout the U.S. My thoughts turned to Boston friends who had died of cancer in the last year and the trip home to Massachusetts in May that Anne and I had to cancel. My own and the world’s sorrow and pain rushed through my body in waves as I wept. Gradually, after a time, it subsided, tear by tear, and I sat quietly in the half-darkness, breathing in the silence. The sky began to lighten. Then, as if in answer to my heart’s call for comfort, a mockingbird began to sing its morning song, a medley of every possible birdcall it had ever heard. My heart lifted, as it always does when I hear a mockingbird.

This is how life works. You fall head first into grief, your heart cracks open, and through that crack, grace enters: a birdsong or a sunrise, the comforting words of a friend or the kindness of a stranger. Grace takes many forms, but it always brings us back to the peace at our core, our soul’s presence. I realized that even as I wept in pain and sadness, I had not lost the feeling of inner peace that has been with me since the beginning of the year, an ongoing connection to something greater. Growing awareness of the peace that lives within us will be our greatest strength in these times of huge planetary change. We are learning to let go of the known and trust in something beyond knowing.

My own years of spiritual exploration and questioning have at last settled into trust in a universal Presence (or God) that holds the Earth in its loving embrace. We—meaning humanity—are going through a tremendous shift and rebalancing on this planet. It is a release of inharmonious old patterns, an opening into greater awareness, and ultimately a coming together in oneness. It may not look like it on the surface, but I feel that is what is happening. All of my adult life I have believed in such a shift, foreseen by elders and masters in many traditions and cultures. That vision has inspired and sustained me through the years. Now it is occurring, more and more powerfully.

This paradigm shift is not pretty, a gift tied up with sparkly wrapping paper and bows. It is messy and painful, as all birth is. Fear and anger come up, as well as mourning the end of a familiar but worn-out way of life. In the midst of all those emotions, something new is being born on this planet, and we are all part of the process, midwives and newborns, angels and human beings. What appears to be chaos, conflict, and a shattered world weighed down by suffering is actually the shedding of an old skin and a restrictive structure that has been killing our spirits instead of uplifting them. In the ruins of the current paradigm based in top/down exclusion, a new one is arising that is centered in circular process and inclusion. Humanity is rediscovering its collective soul through the experiences and expanding consciousness of every single courageous one of us.

A cause for celebration, yes. Still, there is sadness, loss. Life on Earth, even in a new, more open and compassionate world, is never just one thing. A utopian vision must include the full spectrum of human emotion and being. We came to this planet, God incarnated in form through us, to experience it all. When we accept that—the sorrow and the gladness, the breaking and the healing of our hearts—we can then hold within us both grief and deep peace. The grief is human; the peace is divine. If we live life fully connected to our souls, peace and calm never leave us, even as the tears flow. In full acceptance of all that we feel and all of life as it is unfolding, we can experience that peace and live it in the world. It is who we are and why we are here.

Hide-and-Seek with God

Photograph © 2020 Peggy Kornegger

Over the past decade, I have experienced divine connection in a variety of ways—in Nature, in solitary or group meditation, and with spiritual teachers who helped facilitate that falling away of form into formlessness. In spite of any longing on my part to hold onto it permanently, however, my experience of God came and went, arose and then receded. Repeatedly, I vacillated between the appearance and disappearance, almost as if I were playing hide-and-seek with God. Then Ram Dass died.

His longtime friend Krishna Das wrote a memorial tribute and mentioned Ram Dass’s mantra “I Am Loving Awareness.” He said that now Ram Dass would be found in that “loving presence” that lives within us all. Those words affected me profoundly. All day it was as if the mantra “I Am Loving Awareness” came to life within me. My mind’s filtering and perceptual judgments, pro and con, had dissolved, and there was just, well, awareness. Awareness that did nothing but receive the world around me with love. And gratitude. Tears ran down my cheeks. Yes, this was God, but it wasn’t a powerful rush; it was a quiet presence, a gradual awareness of awareness itself. And with that came the knowing that the rising and receding was only in my human perception, which had made divine presence seem as if it appeared and disappeared instead of being always at my core.

Now when I feel as if God has fallen silent and I am alone in the universe, there is a deeper loving awareness within me that reminds me that I am never alone and that God lives in the silence. It may take a few moments to come to the surface, but that awareness is my companion now. It has always been encoded in my very cells, but only my own soul’s journey could eventually bring me to the point of continuously recognizing the truth of God’s ever-Presence. We humans vacillate in our experiences and perceptions on Earth. God, however, remains constant, permeating the universe with divine light and love. When we pass from the Earthly plane, our souls will merge completely with that light.

Each day my experience of God/dess arises from the world around me, especially in Nature. The quality of the golden morning light, the vibrant colors of the flowers, the stunning blue of the sky–all of these awaken divine awareness in me. I remember who I am, who we all are, and everything around me seems to flow seamlessly in a sweet rhythm of being and becoming. We human souls are part of that. We came to Earth to embody divinity in physical form, to experience ourselves as God in the material world. We are God experiencing both Godness and humanness as one. It is a beautiful dance.

Ram Dass spent a lifetime coming into oneness with his mantra, the “loving awareness” that filled his soul. Just like all of us, he faced difficult human challenges, particularly the stroke that he learned to accept with such “fierce grace” over the last years of his life. In a photograph taken toward the end of his life, you can see the holy light of “loving awareness” shining from his eyes. Though I never met him in person, in the days following his death, I felt his presence in the sacred words of his mantra. It touched my heart and opened me to the loving awareness within myself. I stopped playing hide-and-seek and just rested in the infinite beingness that is God.

 

Three Pelicans Circling

Photograph © 2020 Peggy Kornegger

Last week, on my morning walk, three brown pelicans flew overhead, high in the sky, as I tilted my head up to watch them. Slowly they turned in perfect unison and began to circle above me, directly above me. They circled three times, large sweeping circles of which I was the epicenter below them. Then they turned back the way they had originally come and flew off into the distance. As I watched them leave, my spirits uplifted by their brief aerial presence, I thought, “Why did they fly here, circle three times, and then return? Was my presence somehow connected to theirs?”

I am inclined to see the synchronicities of the universe, believing that everything is somehow connected in the greater tapestry of life. We are part of an energy dance, we living beings, and we all affect one another. The thread between us seems invisible, but it does exist. Their circling and my seeing happened simultaneously. No visible cause and effect, yet I felt as if my seeing reached out to them and drew them into a circle. Just as their circling reached out to me and drew me into heightened seeing. A bit like what physicists call quantum entanglement.

Humans on this planet are involved in a similar dance of circling and seeing, invisible much of the time but highlighted when synchronicities catch our attention and expand our awareness. A friend and I recently had a conversation about how everyone affects each other in the dramas of daily life. It became a wider discussion of the polarities of light and dark and the evolution of consciousness on Earth. We came to the mutual “conclusion” that every person and event plays a key role in the expansion of our collective consciousness. Nothing is just a disaster or a godsend. No one is just a hero or a villain. We all have bits of each of those extremes within us, and when we can embrace that polarity, we are free to live the nuances of life. Our life purpose is to accept what is challenging as well as what is inspiring, to come into harmony with everything.

It all gets down to something my friend/teacher Panache Desai has shared repeatedly: “Everything is perfect. Everything is God.” I receive that wisdom at deeper levels within me each day I live my life. This past week it filled me completely, permeating my cells like oxygen, like light. It was light. I saw that we are all here to come to that awareness, to embrace that full expression of compassion and love. We are here to embody divine Presence in the world. A Presence in which all polarities come into harmony within us and thus within the world. That is humanity’s role and destiny at this time.

The pelicans demonstrated that greater circling and surrendering to invisible energies that carry us to where we’re meant to be. Each detail of our flight is part of our soul’s journey, which we chose before birth. We are living our lives to align with our soul’s overview and to align with the love that connects all of our hearts—human, bird, animal, star. To live in loving awareness, with kindness and generosity of spirit, is the greatest gift we can give ourselves, each other, and the world. You and I are God meeting God everywhere every day of our lives. And it’s all perfect.

No Visible Trace: Vanishing of the Past

Photograph © 2019 Peggy Kornegger

I seem to be living through a time in which everything previously experienced in my life is falling away. In the midst of these changes, I find myself standing face to face with a truth that has always existed but is now front and center in my consciousness: There is no past. When we have lived an experience, it disappears from this dimension. It may continue in another dimension, but here, now, in the present, it quite literally no longer exists. In our memories, it shape-shifts and eventually fades as well. We are left with this moment, nothing else.

What has brought me to this seemingly stark conclusion, which is actually quite liberating? Well, in the past month (and after I wrote my last blog, “Resignation or Surrender?”), I experienced the definitive “loss” of two homes that I felt great emotional attachment to: one in Illinois, the other in Massachusetts. The first was my childhood home (on five acres in the country), the second, the house I lived in before recently moving (where I had an extensive flower garden). No actual visits took place; this was a long-distance visual vanishing, via photographs and Google maps. But no less shocking.

The people who bought the house where we rented an apartment in Massachusetts quickly began to renovate the interior last fall. Then, this past spring, our neighbor told us of exterior changes: the new owners had ripped out all my carefully planted and lovingly cared for flowers and replaced them with a rather bare, professionally landscaped lawn and a few meager plantings. The photographs she sent were heartbreaking.

Since our move to Florida last year, I have missed my garden most of all. I had spent eleven years partnering with Mother Earth in creating a diverse mixture of flowers and bushes that bloomed at different times of the year. I knew every plant as if they were my own “children,” and I felt that they knew me. I celebrated each leaf and blossom, each visit by a bee, butterfly, or hummingbird. Sometimes I just stood in silent appreciation and love for the beauty all around me. To see all that destroyed was painful to assimilate. Yet, on another level, I knew it to be another sign that that time in Massachusetts was done. I could not go back to the home I once knew.

Over the next few weeks, I realized that I was being given a deeper understanding of life’s greatest wisdom: impermanence. It allowed me to see the impermanent in all parts of life—and to accept it. My spiritual journey had become about learning to let go in an ongoing way so that I could be fully present in the moment. Then God raised the bar even higher.

For some reason, I decided to Google-search for my Illinois hometown and the country road I had lived on. It has been decades since I have been back there, so it took me a while to find the area where my parents had built their home in the shade of a group of old oak trees. I switched to satellite mode and began to slowly trace the route from the turnoff onto our road, now widened.

Then, unexpectedly, I noticed that there was a very large highway where there had only been farmhouses and cornfields. I zoomed in and saw it was an Illinois tollway with on and off ramps and barren landscapes surrounding it. My heart beating, I backtracked to where I could see some houses and land still intact. I located the houses on either side of our home, but there in the middle was nothing but wild abandoned land. No driveway, nothing visible but underbrush and trees. I zoomed closer, and then I saw a bare space where our house should have been. Closer still, and I was able to make out what appeared to be remnants of a basement. That’s all that remained of my childhood home.

I felt a knot in my stomach and sat staring in stunned silence. It didn’t seem real. My memories of that house and of the trees, flowers, orchards, and vegetable gardens my father and mother had planted were vivid and alive. I lived my entire childhood and adolescence there—with a deep connection to nature and to them. Yet this was the current “reality.” Anything else no longer existed. Of course I knew this, but seeing a visual representation was different.

After my parents’ deaths, I had stopped visiting Illinois but always held it in my heart. Christmas carols evoked visual memories of the holidays I shared with them over the years. And the land itself was in my blood; I had run across the fields and climbed every tree. Years later, when I planted a garden in Massachusetts, I felt most at home there because that connection was born in my childhood. Now, every visible trace of any of those gardens had disappeared. My childhood and my recent past had both vanished.

I sensed my physical body slowly processing this and my soul’s presence rising to the fore. I felt a clearing within to match the clearing without. For the first time, I was fully embodying the present moment with a crystal clear understanding that there really is nothing else. Oddly enough, it felt freeing. It was like decluttering my consciousness: dropping Google and opting for Soul. In truth, I hadn’t lost anything. I had gained greater awareness of the simplicity and power of my lifetime upon this Earth. At the deepest level, my soul (and yours) lives within the Great Mystery of impermanence and eternity, each precious moment experienced and then released with love.