Tag: presence

Awakenings

Photograph © 2014 Peggy Kornegger
Photograph © 2014 Peggy Kornegger
We live in a time of awakenings—people coming to a greater sense of who they are at the soul level, beyond the ego or personality self. Many spiritual masters throughout history (and, increasingly today, ordinary people) have experienced pivotal moments when they in essence “died” to themselves and awakened to a connection to something greater—God, the Divine, Source. The separate personality-self falls away, and an experience of oneness with All That Is moves to the fore. Sometimes these events involve an actual near-death experience, or individuals can feel like they are physically dying when they are not. Actually, it is the individualized self that is dying, allowing for the dissolution of all separation and the unimpeded flow of pure divine energy and unconditional love.

In these life-changing moments, people begin to live as their soul more than as their ego—a kind of death and rebirth in life. Radical awakenings do not have to be dramatic one-time events, however. Many individuals have a series of awakenings over many years, and this latter process is becoming more widespread now as our individual experiences spark other people’s, and the collective consciousness awakens itself through us. What has been called enlightenment can be instantaneous, gradual, or a combination of both, and we need to acknowledge the unique truths of our own evolving lives—and be open to awakenings that are ongoing, leading further and deeper into divine connection.

Looking back, I see a combination of experiences within my own life—in actuality, multiple phases of awakening, which continue to this day. At 18, I had a near-death experience (burst appendix) in a hospital in Italy on my first trip away from home alone. When I returned to the United States and began my freshman year of college, I felt as if my small-town-girl persona had died in Venice, and I had emerged newly born, trying to figure out who “I” was. From this identity crisis came an individual awakening within the larger generational awakening of the radical 1960s and 1970s. It was an extraordinary time that shaped so many of our lives and planted seeds of fledgling awareness. A sense of global transformation and magical possibility carried us forward into our lives.

Later in my life, I began to consciously explore spirituality as a way to understand life and death and address my own fear of eternity. When my parents grew older and eventually passed away, this search became even more compelling. Sitting beside each of them as they transitioned, I experienced another level of awakening: to an all-encompassing loving Spirit that softly enveloped my parents and me and connected our hearts. Several years after their deaths, when I first met spiritual teacher Panache Desai, I encountered this same divine presence in an even more intense way. It came directly through him and vibrationally shifted everything within me. At one of his gatherings, in deep meditation, I experienced myself as pure, intense inner vibration, my soul’s essence within the physical body—cells pulsating with an almost electric charge. It was an extraordinarily powerful opening to spiritual awareness. Frequently thereafter, I would feel the loving presence of the Divine, and it always brought tears to my eyes and shivers to my physical body.

Over the next few years, I kept moving forward, sensing there was more awakening to come but having no idea what that would mean. Eventually, I stood in a raw place of “not knowing,” letting go of mental questioning and attempts to figure everything out. Essentially, I embraced the “Great Mystery.” If Oprah had asked me, “What do you know for sure?” I would have had to answer, “Nothing.” Only mystery. Yet that mystery is everything—God her/himself, the Divine in infinite beingness. Indefinable. Our minds can’t know Spirit, but our hearts can experience it through our souls. This is the global awakening we are in the midst of, each of us affecting all those around us. In this amazing time of profound planetary metamorphosis, we are individually and collectively awakening to the sweet mystery of our own inner spirit. Together, we breathe soulful conscious presence into the world.

The Eternal Moment

Photograph © 2014 Peggy Kornegger
Photograph © 2014 Peggy Kornegger

 Spiritual masters down through the ages have advised seekers to live in the present moment, where all wisdom, peace, and divine connection reside. Those who meditate know that within each breath is that presence, the spirit within, connected to all spirit across time and space. Whether or not we formally meditate or call ourselves spiritual seekers, we all have countless opportunities to access that wisdom in daily life.

Many years ago, my father told me a story about his own experience of realizing how irreplaceable each moment is. He said that when I was a little girl, he used to be upset that my feet wore away the grass beneath the swing hanging from an old oak tree in our yard. My mother told him, “Someday you’ll wish Peggy was still around to play on that swing.” Years later, when I was 18 and on a graduation trip to Europe, my appendix burst in Italy, and I was taken to the hospital in Venice. My parents received a long-distance phone call in which they were told I was dangerously ill and they should fly to Venice immediately. After the call, my dad stood staring out the window, lost in thought, when his eyes fell on my old swing, now hanging by one rope, the grass all filled in on the ground below. He recalled my mother’s words and realized how much wiser than he she had been. “You were all grown up and hospitalized in another country, and I would have given anything to have you safely back home and swinging on your swing in the backyard.”

At that point in his life, my father was able to see the greater wisdom. It changed him, I think. He became softer in later years, more centered in the flow of life’s precious moments, especially in the natural world outside where he spent much of his time gardening after he retired. Interestingly, it was during those years that I remember him reading William Blake and sharing quotes with me. “To hold infinity in the palm of your hand/And eternity in an hour” was one of his favorites.

I’ve never forgotten my father’s story or his love of William Blake’s writing, which I share now too. Life presents us with so many doorways to a wider perspective that can open our hearts and minds to timeless insights. Just the other morning, as I sat in meditation, my mind preoccupied with some passing worry, I suddenly remembered Blake’s words and was stopped mid-thought. I opened my eyes, looked out the window at the rising sun lighting up the winter trees, and was filled with such intense gratitude for the beauty right before me in that moment. Spirit gives us these reminders all the time. Our days are full of them. We can fear the future and rail against life’s difficulties, or we can appreciate the world around us in all its infinite wonder and variety. If we step into living our lives fully and openly, we experience eternity  in every passing moment.

Moments of Grace

Photograph © 2013 Peggy Kornegger
Photograph © 2013 Peggy Kornegger

The word grace has so many meanings, depending on the speaker’s intent. Grace can be flowing movement; a prayer of gratitude; or a blessing. It can also be an act of kindness, mercy, or compassion. We talk about dancers or skaters moving with ethereal grace. Many people bow their heads and give thanks by saying grace before meals. Spiritually, grace is associated with an infinite divine love that envelops all humans regardless of their beliefs. The iconic song “Amazing Grace” describes a man lost and then found through God’s grace. The juxtaposition of human and spirit seems to run through all these meanings. For me, grace has come to mean flowing with life’s blessings and experiencing connection to a greater Presence in the multiverse we inhabit. Grace is always with me, and my awareness of it grows with the expansion of my consciousness.

The Presence I speak of some call God/dess or the Divine. Raised outside of all religious traditions, I have found my way to spiritual connection through various teachers and my own experiences, often in nature. In fact, the closest analogy I can think of to the shining radiance of Spirit is the sun. The sun’s light is powerful and ever-present, whether or not we can physically perceive it. Clouds, weather, or the turning of the Earth may obscure our view of it at times, but it is always there. When the skies clear, or the day dawns, and that light hits us full force, we are energetically and emotionally uplifted. Yet we are not able to gaze at it directly or run the risk of blindness. Our physical bodies cannot visually take in the full force of the sun’s light. The same is true of the Divine. Physically, we are not yet equipped to receive all of that heavenly radiance without blowing out our circuits. This is changing, faster and faster now, however.

At this amazing time of transformation on planet Earth, we are evolving and expanding so that we will eventually be able to continuously perceive/receive the Divine in its full expression of light and love. In the meantime, we are experiencing what I call glimpses of God—flashes, bursts, increasing increments of open-hearted joy, peace, and love. Moments of grace. When we evolve to the point of fully embodying spirit in our human bodies, there will no longer be a separation between inner and outer; all will be the oneness of divine consciousness, of which we are each an integral part. In truth, the only separation that ever existed was in our own limited physical ability to see the entire panoramic view. As the doors of perception open wider and wider, the light of conscious awareness floods our being with infinite grace, and we see as we are seen. God’s vision of us and the world becomes our own.

That is how my own life seems to be evolving anyway. I am experiencing Spirit/Presence in rushes of electric energy and euphoric expansion that repeatedly fill me to the brim with light and warmth, like the sun. The Divine is acclimating me bit by bit to the power of its infinite love. These experiences flow and then ebb but always recur, each time with greater expansiveness and deeper immersion. Is this en-light-enment? Possibly. Not the historically known, sudden individual awakening, but a new kind of gradual collective awakening that we are all experiencing in our own ways, each of us influencing the greater whole. Great spiritual masters through the ages have pointed the way to this time, when all of humanity would embody what they embodied. I never quite knew what that meant until now. That is why we are here, to live this. These are infinitely grace-full times. What a gift to be alive now and experience it all!

Looking Back Looking Forward

Photo Courtesy of Mike Dubrovich
Photo Courtesy of Mike Dubrovich
Recently, a childhood friend posted on Facebook a vintage black-and-white photograph of our first grade class. What a strange experience to look at that picture of unfamiliar school children and slowly begin to see familiarity in their faces. Names from the past popped up out of distant memory. I did not, however, recognize myself. I told my friend that I must have been out sick the day the photo was taken. He wrote back, “Isn’t that you on the far left end of the second row?” I peered at the picture more closely and realized in amazement that he was right. Fascinated, I stared at that blondish little girl with big dark eyes, gazing out into her own future. My future. I looked through her eyes and saw myself looking back. Time ceased to exist in that moment of backward-forward perception.

How often do we stumble across those flashes of memory that stop us in our tracks momentarily, lost somewhere between the past and the present? Some say human life is a series of beginnings and endings out of which we fashion our remembered sense of self in the world. Yet we are so much more than our memories, which are really just a long parade of Instagram photographs that we identify as our personal history, our life’s story. Beyond the mental perceptions of time and our place in it, however, is consciousness itself—an awareness that is greater than any one life. In those brief moments of backward/forward memory jumps, we are given an opportunity to see our life from the soul’s point of view, wherein all time is simultaneous, and everything is occurring now. There is no real distinction between a past, present, or future self. The soul sees one being, experiencing time but not defined by it.

Why would we want to see things from the soul’s perspective? Well, if we completely open to soul vision, we see everything is of a piece, whole. We perceive the oneness at the core of all life. Conflicts, comparisons, and judgments fall away. We can never fail our childhood selves and the dreams they had for the future, because we are those children and we are living those dreams now. We are not lost, nor have we taken a wrong path or made a wrong decision. Everything is unfolding in a way that is perfect for our soul’s growth and evolution.

When I looked back at my childhood self in that photo, I wondered, Where is the “I” that is all of me, girl and woman? My soul answered: I am no where. I am now here. I am present. I AM. Taking a long, deep breath, I felt the wholeness of that “I AM,” a timeless soul presence beyond “where.” No separation—the adult and the child are one. If we open our hearts to the soul’s vision of oneness, we can embrace all possibilities and all selves, and life begins to flow in a less fragmented, graceful way. We are able to see the perfection that is at the heart of our own infinitely expansive lives. Within that perfection, there is no backward or forward; there is just fluid, unbroken, loving presence.

The Great Wide Open

Photograph © 1998 Peggy Kornegger
Photograph © 1998 Peggy Kornegger

When our dear cat Lily reached the end of her very long life (22 years), her health declined during the last few months. In consultation with animal communicator Teresa Wagner, and thus with Lily, my partner and I made the decision to ask compassionate local vet Dr. Jake to come to our home and help Lily make her transition in order to relieve her of any further suffering. He was to arrive around 5 p.m., so we spent the last day of Lily’s life sitting with her in presence, candles lit, soft music playing. The three of us formed a small circle, Lily in her fleece bed and we sitting in chairs beside her. She would reach her paw out to us periodically, and we would kneel and stroke her head, looking into her beautiful eyes and listening to her purr. At that point, Lily was pure soulful peace and love. Teresa herself had commented that she wished everyone in the world could know Lily and experience that extraordinary peace.

As we sat with her, that peace permeated our souls. There was really no spoken language to describe what we were feeling, except in the words of Mary Chapin Carpenter’s song about the “great wide open.” The veil between life and death had slipped aside, and Lily was indeed in that space. She gave us that final gift of resting in divine presence with her as part of the love the three of us had shared here on Earth. The sky faded toward dusk, and the quality of the light in the room became almost golden. With Dr. Jake’s assistance, Lily passed peacefully in our arms.

Now, four years later, I have come to understand the full power of what Lily shared with us then. A few weeks ago, as I sat in meditation with Panache Desai’s recording of “Being Peace,” suddenly I was once again immersed in that afternoon of peace with her within the Great Wide Open. As the tears streamed down my face, I realized that Lily had given me my first positive experience of infinity, two years before I met Panache. With his help, I have been facing a lifetime fear of infinity/eternity, and gradually, as I stop resisting it, the fear is loosening its grip, and I am able to experience something entirely different—the light and peaceful expansiveness that is the heart of infinity. Exactly what I had felt with Lily as she transitioned, radiating peace from her entire being.

The animal companions in our lives are often so much wiser than we are, if only we would open our awareness to their divine intelligence. In their quiet loving way, they teach us so much about what is really important in life: love, peace, harmony, heart connection, play. We laughingly referred to Lily as the “cat Dalai Lama” because she always absolutely insisted on a peaceful home atmosphere—no arguments, no friction or raised voices. It turns out we weren’t far from the truth. Lily truly was a small bodhisattva; she came into our lives (on Mother’s Day, no less) to share what she was at her very core—unconditional love and peace. And to show us that we too are that. Thank you, sweet Lily. We love you, always.

[Lily: March 14, 1988–January 7, 2010]