If You Could Do It All Again….

[jenny-livingston]

This is either going to freak you out or make you laugh and say, “Of course.” The similarities between us are sometimes eerie! As a child, I hoped to one day become a dolphin trainer at Sea World. After that, I dreamed of spending months at a time at sea as a marine biologist. Realizing that wasn’t a job conducive to family life, I thought being a vet would be the best career for me. This was what I dreamed of for years! (Turns out, I did none of the above.)

When I went back to school in my late 20’s, I studied Psychology with a minor in Sociology! They are topics that I find so compelling and enjoyable. In fact, I loved my entire college experience! Honestly, I sometimes think of going back to get an advanced degree (although going to grad school seems like it’d be an expensive and exhausting hobby). I no longer have a dream job, but if I could, I’d love to be a forever student!

[paul-met-debbie]

If I could do it all again …

This thought implies that I think that I did it once before – and I am not at all sure about that. In my perception, it is more like it all happened with little or no real control on my side, as a spontaneous unfolding of cosmic magic. I could not have imagined in my wildest dreams when I was, say 12, everything that happened after that and the life I am having now. And if I could have, I would not have had a clue about what to do or not to do in order to make it happen and to get there. And I don’t have a clue about what it is, here and now, me, life – no one really knows, it is the miraculously Unknown we so desperately try to take for granted with every small thought.

But let’s play the game anyway and see where it leads me.
If everything was free, I would not want anything imaginable, but something real fresh and entirely unknown to me. For instance how would it be, to be a molecule of carbon once made in the explosion of stars, or oxygen, or hydrogen and be at the root of universal formation? Or what is it like to be a spark of electricity, a beam of light, a ray of warmth? Or rather even something really so unimaginable that I could not even describe it because it would be totally outside the realm of my current reality.

On the other hand, if reality is always what it is, and all there ever is and was – all the appearances and the underlying current beneath everything known – then it would be impossible to imagine the unimaginable being outside of reality, it would always be inside reality because there is only the One.

In fact, I àm the molecule of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen (and some other elements) united as they are in my body. I àm the spark of electricity in my every sense. I àm warmth and light. And even after the demise of the body, this will all not change. I can never escape reality as it is, only change form, but never really get lost, being not only the appearance but rather the force of manifestation behind it. There is no way to escape reality or that what is. This is ancient knowledge, but also timeless: “I am that I am”, said Jesus and also: “before Abraham was, I am”. It was also expressed before that in the Upanishads as “Aham Brahma Asmi” (I am Brahman) and Tat Tvam Asi (That essence are you). If you dive into other religious core texts or early philosophies, you will find the same.

I am also the water, the ocean, the marine biologist, the dolphin, the jelly fish; is not all that ever was in evolution – from the first sparkle of energy, appearance of subatomic particles, the first biological life and (on this planet) up to homo sapiens – somewhere encoded and expressed in our DNA in some evolved or rudimentary form? So what remains to wish for or think, that we not already are, do or did? All manifested and unmanifested is nothing less than the twinkle in the eye of the Unknown, shining forth in some appearance, or hiding in the ungraspable possibility that it might appear.

Let me end by quoting the great German writer and poet Hermann Hesse, who wrote in his wonderful book “Siddhartha” (translation from the German by me), speaking as Siddhartha:

“This stone is stone, it is also animal, it is also God, it is also Buddha, I honor and love it not, because it could once become this or that, but because it already is and always was everything – and exactly this, that it is stone, that it appears to me now and today as stone, exactly therefore I love it, and I see value and meaning in every one of its lines and curves, in the yellow, in the grey, in the hardness, the sound that it makes when I knock on it, in the dryness or wetness of its surface. There are stones that feel like oil or like soap, and others like leaves, yet others like sand, and they are all special and reflect the One in its own way, they are all Devine, and at the same time and exactly so it is stone, oily or soapy, and exactly that pleases me and feels wonderful and worthy of worship”.

We cannot help being, or even dream of being other than, a worthy stone in the realm of the Unknown.

Namaste,
Paul