Dear Reader:
I have never heard of a “piggy-back” epiphany but suddenly these days I am feeling it with all my senses….sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. *An”oneness” with everything in life…animate and inanimate.
This new perspective started when I read an article from a reporter who interviewed Edgar Mitchell. Mr. Mitchell was the lunar module pilot on Apollo 14 in 1971. On the return trip back to earth he experienced an epiphany that changed how he saw himself, other people and creatures…even objects in a new interrelationship he never knew existed.
In an interview with Ascent Magazine, he recalled:
“The spacecraft was rotating to maintain the thermal balance of the Sun…. Every two minutes, with every rotation, we saw the Earth, the Moon, and the Sun as they passed by the window. The 360-degree panorama of the heavens was awesome and the stars are ten times as bright and, therefore, ten times as numerous than you could ever see on a high mountaintop on a clear night.
“It was overwhelmingly magnificent…. I realized that the molecules of my body and the molecules of the spacecraft had been manufactured in an ancient generation of stars. It wasn’t just intellectual knowledge — it was a subjective visceral experience accompanied by ecstasy — a transformational experience- we really are made of star dust.”
Growing up Southern Baptist he tried to find a source to explain what he had undergone…Christian doctrines didn’t broach the subject or endless science research…He kept searching desperately for something to explain how he felt those few minutes he underwent molecular transformation and finally found it in sanskrit….two words (savikalpa samadhi) an experience in which objects lose their separateness and are perceived ecstatically as being elements in a vast and borderless oneness.
We are in the universe and the universe is in us.”
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For a long time I have realized that we are all connected in this universe….animal, plant life…even inanimate objects. As I walk each day and am drawn to autumn’s glory… peaking in my home town…some visuals literally make me stop and gasp for just a second…as if that flower, or tree, or bush entered my space, myself, and enriched it.
Each experience we have in our lives adds substance to our own personal being…we are like magnets taking in molecules of life without even realizing we are being transformed by them…the more beauty we acquire the more beautiful our lives.
Example….On any ordinary day (like yesterday) I take a handful of pictures of nature at its best. Now I realize I will always carry these images within me…they have become a part of me…who I am…their beauty absorbed through me. I no longer need the photograph…their essence lingers forever.
So until tomorrow…The greatest lesson from this higher understanding of my place in the world in relationship to the universe is the important concept that everything is made up of the same universal matter…our building blocks from God’s creation.
We are all of the same kind yet humans on earth spend so much precious time from our lives looking for minute differences instead of seeing the common thread we all share. What if we focused on our sameness instead…staying open to acceptance, tolerance, kindness and love of all our fellow man? Conflicts would cease and oh, what a beautiful world this would be. (Editor of Spotlight on Kindness)
“Today is my favorite day” Winnie the Pooh
*John Lennon understood this oneness when he wrote:
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace
You may say that I’m a dreamer…But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one