The Living Universe (14 page)

Christianity is founded on the understanding that love is the essence of God and that our supreme task is to cultivate our capacity to bring a loving presence into this world. “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love” (I John 4:8). “God is love, and anyone who lives in love, lives in God, and God lives in him” (I John 4:16).

The Christian usage of the term
agape
(selfless and unconditional love) comes directly from the teachings of Jesus. When asked what was the greatest commandment, Jesus said “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (Matthew 22:37—41). As we extend our love into the world, it mirrors the love that God has for creation. In the words of the fourteenth-century English mystic, Julian of Norwich, “We have been loved from before the beginning.”
¹⁴
We are created from love for love.

Islam celebrates
Ishq
, or the divine love of God. This is also the focus of Sufis, who see the universe as a projection of God, whose essence is love. In turn, Sufism is often referred to as the “religion of love.” The great Sufi philosopher and mystic Ibn al-Arabi saw God as the “Beloved” everywhere. Through our eyes, the Beloved looks out and sees the world and is ultimately able to look back at himself with love. God loves himself through his creation. Al-Arabi wrote: “God is necessary to us in order that we may exist, while we are necessary to Him in order that He may be manifested to Himself.”
¹⁵

Abu-said Abil-Kheir (967–1049) was another Sufi whose passionate
spiritual poetry expresses his intimate connection with the Beloved:

Love is Here.
It is the blood in my veins, my skin.
I am emptied of my self.
Filled with the Beloved.
His fire seizes every part of my body.
Who am I? Just my name; the rest is Him.

Here is the wisdom of the Sufi poet Rumi with regard to love:

Through Love all that is bitter will sweeten.
Through Love all that is copper will be gold.
Through Love all dregs will turn to purest wine.
Through Love all pain will turn to medicine.
Through Love the dead will all become alive.
Through Love the king will turn into a slave!

In Hinduism we also find the idea of
bhakti
, which is loving devotion to the supreme God. This is not romantic love, but an unselfish, sacred love that wants only union with the divine. Tiru-Mular, a Hindu poet of the Middle Ages, sang: “The ignorant say love and God are different. . . . When they know that love and God are the same, they rest in God's love.” When the love of the devotee meets the love of God, there is an experience of undivided union.

The Buddhist meditation teacher Jack Kornfield describes the unbounded love at the foundation of the universe in this way: “I will tell you a secret, what is really important . . . true love is really the same as awareness. They are identical.” As we deepen our awareness, we find that love is our core essence—at the very heart and center of our experience. Buddhism teaches a path of
compassion, where we see ourselves as inseparable from the overall ecology of life. A core practice in Buddhism is cultivating
metta
(lovingkindness) toward all sentient beings.

All religions recognize that a life force, whose essence is love, sustains and permeates all existence and is accessible to everyone. The Mother Universe holds us in love as, with limited consciousness and great freedom, we make the long journey of awakening. When we learn the greater our love, the greater our awareness, we further our evolution.

Physics has revealed that beneath the seeming separation of things there is a deeper unity—a nonlocal connectivity to our universe. We live in a holographic universe in which everything is exquisitely connected with everything else. Everything is mutually interpenetrating. The world's spiritual traditions agree that by going into the center of our life-stream we tap into the flow that sustains the entire universe and this naturally has great wisdom within it. The wisdom of creation is directly accessible to us as the hum of knowing-resonance at the core of our being. When we relax into the center of ordinary existence, we penetrate into the profound intelligence out of which the universe continuously arises.

Because the universe is a unified system, it contains within it all of the conscious experiences of all forms of life. Understandably, to touch into the consciousness of the cosmos even briefly—to experience “cosmic consciousness”—is a profound experience.

Jesus declared “The Kingdom of God is within you.” If we look within, we will discover immense wisdom within our direct experience. The “Kingdom” is also all around us. Recall Jesus saying in
The Gospel of Thomas, “The Kingdom of God is spread out upon the earth and people do not see it.” The treasures of this kingdom are both within (the felt wisdom and love of the heart) and without (a divine presence infuses all of creation).

All of the world's wisdom traditions declare this world is infused with sacred meaning and knowledge. The direct experience of life carries its own meaning and requires no intellectual explanation. Playwright and Jungian analyst Florida Scott-Maxwell offered this wisdom when in her nineties she wrote: “You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you possess all you have been and done, you are fierce with reality.”

When we allow our ordinary experience of knowing to relax into itself, we find a self-confirming presence. When we rest in the simplicity of “knowing that we know” without the need for thoughts to confirm our knowing, we directly enter our stream of being. The nature of the soul is knowingness itself; when we rest within our soulful knowing, there is no distance between the know-er and that which is known. In turn, the familiar knowing of the soul is experienced as an inexhaustible mystery.

When our physical body dies, will we recognize our subtle body of light and knowing-resonance? Will we recognize the unique orchestration and music of our being, the distinct way we light up the world with our luminous knowing? If we fail to recognize ourselves in this way, if we require the assistance of a physical body to anchor our self-recognition, then we are limiting ourselves to a world of three dimensions. The afterlife is unknown; however, the body of resonance, light and love that lives in eternity is knowable. Our
responsibility is not to be concerned with the afterlife, but to be so fully present in this life that we recognize the familiar resonance of who we are, wherever we might be.

Many spiritual traditions tell us how important it is to be awake to our soulful nature at the time of death. What happens after we die seems likely to forever remain a mystery. However, if we do not become familiar with our subtle self while we have the precious vehicle of a physical body, we can fail to recognize ourselves when our physical body dies. In The Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says, “Take heed of the Living One while you are alive, lest you die and seek to see Him and be unable to do so.”
¹⁶
Because we are created from the non-visible reality of the Mother Universe, we may die and not see that this is who and what we are. Our physical body is an anchor for light illuminating light, knowing recognizing knowing, and love appreciating love. If, in freedom, we have not made friends with ourselves during this lifetime, our physical bodies can die and the animating life energy of our being may dissipate and lose its coherence. We may then require the constraint of a material world to enable us to encounter ourselves once again.

Years ago, in catching glimpses of myself as a being of knowing-resonance, I confronted the stark question we are each called to answer: Will I recognize myself without a physical body when I die? When I asked myself this question, in truth, I wasn't sure I would. I had not made friends with myself sufficiently for me to feel confident that I knew myself as a body of luminous knowing-resonance. I was not yet adequately familiar with the music of my own being to recognize the unique orchestration I brought into the world. Looking beyond my short lifetime, I realized this unfamiliar-ity with myself would likely require further returns to our physical reality, so I would again have the opportunity for clear encounters with my cosmic Self. With this understanding has come decades
of meditation and contemplation as I have sought to become a more intimate, soulful friend with myself—my own best friend who “I” recognize intuitively.

Why should we be concerned with recognizing the “Living One” or the eternal being within ourselves while we are alive in this physical realm? Jesus gives an important answer when he says, “In my Father's house are many rooms. If it were not so, I would have told you.” (John 14:2). I believe Jesus is saying that, in the vast ecology of the cosmos, there are living spaces suitable for all beings. Another saying attributed to Jesus—found on an Arabic inscription on a city gate in India—makes the function of this world clear: “This world is a bridge. Pass over it, but do not build your house upon it.
¹⁷

Buddhists also believe we must discover our subtle, inner nature so we can recognize ourselves when we die. They emphasize it is precisely while we have a physical body that it is important to recognize our core nature as pure awareness or as the “ground luminosity.”
¹⁸
Because the essence of who we are is so subtle, when we die we can become confused, disoriented, and unable to sustain self-recognition. To keep from becoming overwhelmed by the sights, sounds, colors, and visions that arise in the passage with death, Buddhists teach that we must attain some degree of stability in self-recognition in the here and now. If we pay attention to the natural wakefulness at the core of our everyday consciousness, we will be familiar with ourselves at the time of death.
¹⁹
The Dalai Lama counsels that, because we don't know when we will die, it is of great benefit to be well-prepared as, at the time of death, the total responsibility for awareness falls upon us. He writes, “The body is compared to a guest house; it is a place to stay for just a short time. . . . When the day comes for consciousness to leave, the guest house of the body must be left behind.”
²⁰

Turning from Buddhism to the wisdom of the fifteenth-century Hindu and Sufi master Kabir:

The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic
just because the body is rotten—
that is all fantasy.
What is found now is found then.
If you find nothing now,
you will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death.
If you make love with the divine now,
in the next life you will have the face of satisfied desire.
²¹

If we use our time on Earth to come to self-referencing awareness, we will have anchored the gift of eternity in direct knowing. We can then evolve and grow forever in the infinite ecologies of the Mother Universe.

If the universe is non-living at its foundations, it will take a miracle to save us from extinction at the time of death, and then to take us from here to a heaven (or promised land) of continuing aliveness. However, if the universe is alive, then we are already nested and growing within its aliveness. When our physical body dies, the life-stream that we are will move into the larger aliveness of the living universe. We don't need a miracle to save us—we are already inside the first miracle of sustaining aliveness. Instead of being saved from death, our job is to bring mindful attention to our enduring aliveness in the here and now.

I do not view awakening to our participation in the Mother Universe as the end of our spiritual journey; instead, I believe it is only the barest beginning
. As we learn the skills of consciously recognizing ourselves as flow-through beings of cosmic dimension and purpose, we are meeting the basic requirement for our journey through eternity.
Once knowingness knows itself directly, then that knowing-ness can live and learn forever as a luminous stream of being in the deep ecology of the Mother Universe.
Awakening is never finished: We will forever be “enlightening” ourselves—becoming lighter so that we have the ability to participate in ever more free, subtle, open, delicate and expressive ecologies of being and becoming
.

When we die, we will not need to remember the material details of our lives because the knowing-resonance that we are embodies the essential wisdom of our lifetime of experience. In the words of the spiritual teacher Thomas Merton, “Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth plants something in his soul.”

As we cultivate our capacity for mindful living we lessen the need for a material world and a physical body to awaken the knowing process to itself. If 96 percent of the known universe is invisible, then, when our body dies (the visible four percent), that does not mean that the invisible aspect of our aliveness dissipates and dies as well. Ultimately, the physical body that provides the structure for aligning conscious knowing will die, and we can endure as a self-confirming body of light, love, and knowing-resonance.

Once grounded in our capacity to recognize ourselves as a body of awareness, we can be self-remembering without fear of forgetting ourselves. When we die the full responsibility for self-luminous recognition falls upon each of us. Now is the time to recognize ourselves. In consciously becoming intimate friends with ourselves, we are directly participating in the life-stream of the universe and consciously cultivating the body of knowing that lives and moves within the deep ecology of the Mother Universe. At the heart of life is a simple task: to become intimate and forgiving friends with ourselves and to grow ourselves as a stream of light, love, music, and knowing.