Debunking a phrase I used to cling onto
There are a few cliché phrases I once embraced enthusiastically. They feature in some of my earliest books, and I wanted everyone to wake up to them as I had. I felt more alive than anything I’d previously experienced, flushed with that first inspirational moment of waking up. I was probably a right nuisance to everyone with it too. My ADHD tends to mean I go over the top with things.
But now I see it as worryingly misleading. It’s funny how as we progress with our insights, acquired through our meditation and enquiring minds, our opinions and strongly held beliefs drop away and in place comes a more open understanding instead. It is certainly a humbling experience if nothing else
We are spiritual beings having a human experience.
No we are not. This suggests there is a genuine and real divide between the two but there is no separation between human and spiritual. The only division between these realities is conceptual. Humans have deluded themselves for centuries that we are something above and beyond the rest of creation / the universe/ call it what you will. We’re not. We’re part of it but that is all, and that, in itself, is also huge. Almost every molecule that exists on the planet also exists in us, we reflect everything.
A few years ago I had a massive breakdown which I self-healed through my spiritual practices, with some limited support from medication. The outcome of this, after six years, led to a three-month sojourn out of mind and out of self. I was floating in a vast abyss of molecules, of which I was just one. I found it very peaceful, but then I started to be aware of my surroundings and found it as utterly infinite, that all the molecules of all that exists are also part of this abyss with me. We are not in anything — simply part of it. What I knew was that I was everything and everything was me, but there is no separate me to be everything, just the vastness of the abyss. Even my molecule floating there was just part of the whole. There was no ceiling or floor or sides to this abyss, just eternity. I likened that sense of being within it to a tiny drop of flesh inside a segment of an orange, it cannot exist without the whole orange, but the orange cannot exist without all the segments. They inter-are as Thich Nhat Hanh puts it. Seeing that of God or the Buddha in everyone and everything is how Quakers and Buddhists apply it in everyday life, but often we don’t really recognise what that means, and take it as that of good in everyone instead.
What I also discovered was that whilst there I had perfect peace and equanimity, but after nearly four months this was boring. I have heard it said that there is a queue to become human, to live on this experiential plane, and now I can understand exactly why that might be. Our human lives should be lived amazingly, joyfully, with love and peace at their core. If we all had this insight they would be like this. But it is duality which denies us this possibility and the point is that we must find it for ourselves. The veil of Maya only lifts for us when we are ready to recognise it and step away from delusions attached to the material world. I think this is where the idea of spiritual beings having a human experience comes from. We are having a material experience, just as everything else on earth and any other planets which are habitable, but it is just the difference between the pith say and the rind or the flesh or the pips of the orange, it is not apart, not a separate thing.
Nothing is important because everything comes from, and returns to, the sea of tranquillity, as I came to name it for myself. And everything is in a constant state of flux. I totally understand why Julian of Norwich saw the entire universe in a hazelnut and said ‘all will be well and all manner of things will l be well’. This is ultimately true, but it does not excuse the ultimately destructive nature of human acquisitive tendencies.
Much of this experience of mine is now translatable into quantum physics but as Jim Al-Khalili (senior quantum physicist) said, even most quantum physicists don’t understand quantum physics fully, so I just listen and notice when it seems to fit my experiences.
During this time we had someone staying who managed to flood the floor of the shower room, above the kitchen. This meant those of us standing around in the kitchen, making breakfast, were faced with indoor rain, and I realised it didn’t matter. Of course, it did matter in terms of the house structurally being sound, but in a deeper sense none of it mattered, everything is part of everything else and thus is complete as it is, even in states of decay, which is part of growth. So we repaired the situation, sorted the problem out and worried not about anything.
This understanding of life is liberating. It has left me with little ambition for the longer term, but happy to be active in the present moment doing things — like writing — that help to share these ideas.
But it equally doesn’t matter what I do or don’t do. After all, it’s just part of the inner structure of that metaphorical orange and will itself become subject to great changes over any period of time.
Change can be instant or take millennia, and thus create a sense of permanence to our perception, but our perception is so very limited. We view the universe in terms of our own limited capacity to understand, perceive and experience, and that is based on our limited sensory apparatus and how we interpret those signals in our brains. Even the so-called uniqueness of human consciousness is being understood not to be so unique nowadays. Most animals have some form of identifiable consciousness but what would we know, we cannot live in their world so cannot understand their consciousness. And now we understand the vast consciousness and communications of trees in a community, the forest which once covered most of the planet’s land surfaces, and which we are so assiduously cutting down at alarming rates.
I am in awe of this life that I have nowadays. Having spent many decades believing I should end it sooner, I am glad that I found this outlook in life, this insight. I am glad that I went through a terrible breakdown if this insight is the outcome, and I am glad I share this life with the man who seeks these insights with me, my soulmate and husband. Everything, every moment is a sacred spiritual gift, and even though I do sometimes forget this, lost behind the veil, I do know it deep down, and can never pretend I don’t.