Discoveries from my stardust journey

Making sense of my place in the cosmos.

Photo by Daniel Cid

I’ve not written an essay since October last year. That’s almost five months — the longest I’ve gone without blogosphere communication. It’s been pretty nice. Not writing has allowed me to cultivate a quieter mind and observe the unremarkable-ness of my own thought life.

Yet here I am, indulging myself again. Why? Because my personality — the jumble of signals in my brain that make me believe I am “me” — still needs to work things out in order to let them go.

Rather than babel, I’m going to share the discoveries I’ve stumbled upon thus far in bullet points. There’s nothing unique about my personal ideology — such sentiments have been around for eons — but I’m recording them here anyway for my own benefit, so I can see them all clearly and eventually surrender them to make space for whatever comes next. The items on this list might change in a minute, because ideas and beliefs, like everything else, are always changing. Enjoying the ride? Just wait. Not enjoying the ride? Just wait. Think you know what it’s about? Just wait.

So here goes:

• What we call God is the infinite, all-knowing, unconditionally-loving, ever-creating Universal Consciousness (UC) that exists within us and throughout the cosmos. God is composed of every little thing, animate and inanimate, and every little thing makes up God.

  
  

• We are eternal and a part of the universe, a fragment of the UC.

  
  

• We are significantly insignificant.

  
  

• The UC is eternally curious and compelled to satisfy its curiosity. If the thought “What does it feel like to be a leaf that is purple and poisonous?” comes onto its radar, then it has to manifest itself into this imagined leaf. If the idea “young man bleeding to death on cross” is what catches its attention, then the UC has to become that idea in order to experience it. The UC exists to experience everything, to bring the unformed into existence. It turns hypothetical into actual. It turns the stuff of dreams, nightmares, fantasies into matter.

  
  

• Why does UC choose incarnation in all forms? Because it wants the chance to sensate, to feel. It wants to experience infinite ways to give and receive love, infinite ways to express and be of use. Even the not so pretty ways. It wants to experience EVERYTHING. God is the ultimate explorer; the ultimate thrill seeker — he/she/it wants to experience it ALL (maybe because he/she/it knows they are eternal and has all the time in the world).

  
  

• The question at the heart of all questions…the question that drives all our endeavors, the question that gave rise to politics and religion and everything else is: “Am I doing OK?” Different versions of the question might arise as “Am I living as good a life as I possibly can?” “Do I deserve to be here?”

  
  

• Life (existence, this world) is the holding of the breath. Death (returning to the UC) is exhaling for the last time as “you”. Life, like a long inhale, is a state of constant tension “When will the bad thing happen?” “When will the good thing happen?” “When and how will my beloved die?” “When and how will I die?”. Death, like a long exhale, is relaxation and release. Life is an act of resistance, not surrender. Death is the surrender, the rest.

  
  

• Reflect on the elements of “your life”. Is “your life” not a world that you’ve created, populated by its stages (home, office, favorite café etc.) and characters (your family members, colleagues, pets)? So you are, in a sense, a little god, intending or meditating a world into being, building your own little universe. It takes a lot of intending or meditating to create “your life” and to sustain it. “Your life” consists of the elements you give the most of your attention to. Now imagine the UC, the big God or Source. The UC is meditating on infinite lives, infinite existences. And you are existing in your life because the UC is meditating you and the next breath you take, into being.

  
  

• People talk about “seeing energy” as auras or spirits. But what is there to see? You already see everything that is part of this physical world. Things that, in effect, are not actually real or there anyway…but YOU are seeing them. In the same way a “ghost” or “apparition” is a fantasy/illusion of the mind, you see the things in your environment. Yet all the things you behold with your physical eyes (including the eyes themselves) are a mirage created by the UC, fleeting and inconsequential. So, life for you exists then only because you already have the ability to see and sense energy all the time.

  
  

• UC and Michele (and everything else): the operating system, the hard drive is the same, only the UC doesn’t have physical form, so it’s not young/old, male/female, animate/inanimate/ animal/human, plant/rock, earth/fire, place/space, night/day. The UC is all of these things and none of these things all at once and that’s the difference between us. The UC, that which we have been calling God, is the operating system minus free will/personality/ego — which was conceived through materiality, personal judgement, and familial and societal norms and expectations (civilization). The UC is all loving in the most impartial way. Free will was the apple in the story of the Garden of Eden — the perceptual distortion we took on, which causes us to label things as “good and evil” “right and wrong”, “desirable and undesirable”, “acceptable and unacceptable”. The proverbial fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, is our compulsion to differentiate, and it is this compulsion that separates us from the UC, whose purpose is simply to embrace and love all things equally and without judgement — unconditionally.

  
  

• What am I? Answer: I am the universe. Where am I? Answer: Inside Michele. I am the universe inside Michele (the person/container/machine called Michele). Beyond Michele, there are no walls or boundaries really, just fractals — the fabric of all that is.

  
  

• Your life. Realizing how awesome your exact little life is, with all its ups and downs, and all its crippled and angelic players. “My life” — mine. Perhaps that’s what awakening is about — to be able to accept your life exactly as it happened and continues to play out.

  
  

• When the UC within you can’t bear being you anymore, it’ll say STOP and the dream or nightmare that is your life, will end. No matter how uncomfortable or painful existence gets, if you’re still here, still breathing, still dreaming, it’s because there’s a part of you (the UC within you) that’s still having fun with the experience of being you, even the unpleasant or horrific parts.

  
  

• Do life, and death , conscious.

  
  

• The UC says, “Be still and know that I am love…through all of time, in all of space, in everything and every place”.

  
  

• Like a pilot manning the plane’s navigation system, being human is all about course correcting. LOVE — returning to this frequency no matter what the weather or scenery, that’s how the soul (the UC in you without all the outfits and make-up) stays the course and comes home.

  
  

• We will all eventually learn the value of blood and tears. This world will rip our hearts open. That is how it should be. To have loved in our own imperfect way, then to expel that last breath and return to the UC. To have loved, even just once, imperfectly as I was made to — that is all that really counts.

  
  

• Life: it’s the lesson we don’t ask for but get anyway. Your life — it was designed especially for you so, you, the brat, would finally swallow the pill — of love. Your life and all its ecstasies and agonies were gifted to you so you would eventually understand that your purpose, beyond all else, is to love and be loved imperfectly.

  
  

• Everyone’s in on it…everyone knows the UC because we are part of it, like a cell is a part of a body. We just all articulate what we know of the UC in different ways. We think others don’t know what we do. That there is some secret to the universe and how it works. But everybody, everybody, already knows. Some just don’t know that they know.

  
  

• Michele says “Please make the thinking stop. Please help me relax, be blank again. Please make all those feelings and images stop.” God in me replies. “You will get your rest — eventually. But not I. I want to rest too. I am desperate for rest, but I don’t get to because I am God with a capital G, I am Consciousness with no beginning and no end. Why would anyone want to be God when you can just be dust?”

  
  

• When I, “Michele person,” was stardust, that was the only time I was ever truly free. If I did indeed evolve from stardust, why do I constantly give myself such a hard time? Why do I buy the story about sin, about doing it wrong, about getting somewhere, achieving or not achieving. Hello, person who was born of dust, do you not see how far you’ve come? You are coming home.