Lately, I’ve been working on devoting my mind to transcending itself for the purpose of getting closer to God. To get closer to the realization that we are one with God and that nothing and nobody is apart from us, including God.
This is a pretty tall order for the mind, because it’s the mind that’s the obstacle. But, it’s our minds in which we live on a daily basis. I understand exercises that can help with transcending the mind such as meditation, surrendering our thoughts, and focusing on the moment. And I do those things whenever possible.
What if we could come up with things in the mind that lead us to understanding? We read spirituality books. We love to hear the words of Wayne Dyer, Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra. They have the words that make sense. The words they express are signposts for getting beyond the mind. Signposts leading to the Source of Life. And lately, my mind has been trying to come up with it’s own signposts. Or even, I might say, doorways of understanding.
I’m not there yet. I want to come up with a metaphor that will help me to understand the nature of God/Source/Universe and how I fit in. I want to understand in my puny little mind how it is that we’re all one, that we’re all connected to God and to each other.
In Dr. David R. Hawkins’ work (which I love) he uses the metaphor of the sun to depict God and the clouds as our ego. And that our ego is simply an obstruction and once we clear it away then the sun shines forth. It didn’t suddenly arrive, it was always there and simply becomes visible by removing that which is blocking it. I love this metaphor and my mind is using that type of conceptualization to figure out my own little mental construction of oneness and allness.
In the Dr. Hawkins metaphor, the sun is like the higher Self, it’s us. The part of ourselves that’s always there but is blocked by the ego. But, in my new metaphor I think of the sun as God Itself, the Source of All-That-Is. And I think of humans and our higher Self as the rays of sunshine. This idea helps my mind to understand how we are actually God or another way of saying it, not apart from God. Can you separate out the Sun from the Sunshine? Our soul, our Self, the energy that is spirit which gives us life is what I think of as the sunshine. But, here is where my mind is having trouble. I haven’t flushed out the metaphor quite yet. I’m still working on it. Where does the human body fit into this?
One possible extension of this metaphor is that our human selves is that which the sunshine illuminates. A ray of sunshine casts its light on a mountain top and through the cycles of the universe and the evolution of life that mountain top someday becomes a river bed or vice-versa. Is the ray of sunshine the mountain top? Of course not. Does the changing nature of the earth change the nature of sunshine? Nope. The ray of sun continues to shine forth. (The sun is literally part of this cycle of the universe so of course it is actually changing too, but, this is just a metaphor for our little minds.)
Writing this out right now is actually helping me to conceptualize this a bit better. I see other people as illuminated beings of light. Some are better lit than others. But, all are lit by the light of “God” or the “Sun”. The spirit that is within them is but a beam of sunlight. The same beam of sunlight that shines in me. Well, a different beam, but all beams of light are the same and all come from the same source and are not separate from that source. Simply Sun on it’s way to illuminating life.
I think I need to leave the metaphor there for now. What do you think about this perspective? How would your change it to fit your own mental perception of Oneness?
