While my coworker and I chatted, he dropped a coin on the ground, picked it up, kissed it, and placed it briefly to his forehead before he returned it to his pocket. He quickly explained this uncharacteristic (to me) mannerism with, “it is my belief that all things have god in them.”
The Alan Watts Collection on Sam Harris’s Waking Up app reminded me of this vignette—his forceful description of the Mythology of Hinduism clarifying that divinity—a oneness with the godhead—is the Hindu reality not just for the holy men, but for everything.
Begging the question: how could you illuminate the ordinary into bright vibrancy unless you were divine? An aspect of the godhead yourself?
I like this manner of thinking for the profound appreciation it gives to our experience of nature. Our lives can be lived in the bounty of what approaches a paradise, but only when the mind is set to appreciate the intricacies, processes, and contrasting suffering without grasping or aversion.
The illuminated nature of ordinary run-of-the-mill reality when set in a mind lovingly aware is exactly the sort of quality of experience we attribute to our gods.
The beatific vision is possible for anyone. It is not something you will into existence, you are already one with it, not separate from it. We believe our ego, our identity is made special by achievement and is made divine by achieving some state, arriving at the end of a pilgrimage. Nothing could be further from the truth.
You are it. It is all in your head.
The conditions for realizing heaven on earth are available to anyone of any faith or faithlessness, are deceitfully intuitive, and are all along the journey, not only at the destination.
Don’t separate yourself from what is. It is all in your head (in some way).
Your mindset of loving and appreciative awareness sets the tone... if you appreciate the majesty of it all, it’ll be more majestic.
Prepare for it to change. Don’t grasp at the divine, don’t push away the ordinary. The journey is what’s important... and it is always starting over, finding yourself and your loving appreciation.
That I—a long-time atheist—am taken with the divinity of everything is a horseshoeing of arguments—an all or nothingness—that I appreciate. It is hard to convey what it is like to be my collection of neurons and their plastic relationships. The mystery that it is like something at all to be an emergent phenomena of one identifiable consciousness from either just the complex brain or from something more fundamental to the fabric of reality seems, from here, like magic.
And there are ways to stand in relation to the mystery of the ordinary’s ability to offer noetic experiences of oneness—in simply being with the phase space of consciousness. I chose to appreciate it with loving equanimity approaching devotion. To learn and question all there is to know about consciousness, but to also experience it prior to concepts—both in formal meditative practice and in my normal day-to-day life.
I am interested in how you—gentle reader—consider your relationship between reality and your experience of it. Are you an outside observer or a dynamic part of it all? Does your ordinary state seem more dutiful or divine?