Dream Journey Begins

I’d been on Earth for a couple of years already, but I have very little memory of the time preceding this day. I seemed to have mostly enjoyed a natural state, blissful, with no abiding sense of separation between a subject (“me”) and objects (“the world”). Timeless, free of habitual reactivity, bright and shining presence — all just conceptual constructs which merely hint at the mystery/rapture of our inherent innocence.

On this day, my mother was changing diapers on my baby sister, whom she had just brought home after birthing at the hospital. To amuse me, she gave me a little cardboard man with a balloon head. I was deeply enchanted, I felt instant love for this odd little being. Suddenly, his head blew up with a loud bang. This initiation created the perfect platform for what was to follow. My mother sat me in a hallway, about 20 feet from where she is standing at the kitchen stove. Suddenly, incredibly – there is a stark and undeniable observation: She is “there”, I am “here”.

A monumental fear grasps me, a shock of terror I had never known. I open my mouth to scream, but I am paralyzed. Now everything seems to solidify, contract, and dim. Instantly, I have realized a profound state of un-enlightenment. I am baptized into separation, duality, and likewise — the longing of a homing heart. A dream journey begins, another unique holographic vehicle for Spirit to recognize and express itself as who and what I am through the cellular formation of this body-being here, this individualized ocean drop.

How amazing – this human birth! So many sad sayers would have us conceive of this human life as a kind of nightmarish hallucination, and no doubt, there are certainly moments when it might appear so. And yet, there are other moments, more vivid than fear’s pale shadow, when we know deep down that it is all good – truly, beyond good, beyond any qualification the intellect could devise. Rather than representing some sort of karmic trap or low-level prison from which we must strive to escape, we can instead appreciate physical embodiment for exactly what it is, graciously allowing this life to live us, without resistance or complaint. Perhaps that is the real meaning of surrender – to let it all be as it is, knowing that it is nothing other than the divine play of the Beautiful One, the same One who is living us now.