Perspective revisited

I’ve said this before, but it’s interesting to go back and read old posts.  I catch myself thinking, oh yeah, I remember that.  And being able to put little practices and mindsets back into my life that I let slip over the weeks and months.  I guess that’s why many folks keeps journals and diaries and such.  Hmmmm… Maybe I should keep a journal?  LOL

I had an interesting experience several days ago that I’ve been considering writing about.  Experiences are personal, and subjective, and from a point of relative truth to that person.  But they can also be helpful to others.  I went back through my posts to see if I had written anything similar and came across the one titled, Perspective.  There is a quote from Alan Watts that is referenced that fits nicely with the experience that I had.  ”Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.”  Just sitting and pondering that for a while is pretty mind blowing.

It’s difficult to put the whole experience into words, but I’ll do my best.  I had gotten into the shower on a Monday morning a couple weeks ago.  I’m not a morning person, so I really wasn’t thinking about anything except showering.  But at some point, a thought came into my head, something like, imagine what happens when you die.  So, I did.  In my mind, it’s like I fell asleep.  It seems like I woke again pretty quickly and was aware of everything around me.  Then that awareness quickly spread, like zooming out with a camera.  I became aware of every person, blade of grass, bug, rock, even the space between all the “solid” objects.  Aware like I was those things.  Then the awareness spread quickly again to include the galaxy.  Then, what I imagine was the universe.  I was aware, and was, every star, planet, comet, being of any kind, etc.  Then the thought came to me, God is playing all the parts.  And when I say “God”, I don’t mean the image of the old guy on the throne.  I’m not sure what I mean by “God” other than a very intimate awareness of everything.  Everything seen by us, and not seen by us.  Then the thought came again, God is playing all the parts.  God is the trees and the wind; the cat and the dog; the music and the listener; the husband and the wife; the perpetrator and the victim.  Etc.  God is playing all the parts.  And he/she/it is such a good actor, even the characters believe that they are real and separate from all the other characters.  And even when the character does remember that they are just that, a character in a giant, cosmic play, the fun of being an actor is the acting!  So they go on acting out the part of their character, with a slightly different perspective than many others have.  It’s not a better or worse perspective, it’s just different.

And no, I had not done any drugs before this experience that played out in my head.  LOL

Something I’ve read and heard from many wise individuals is that experiences are just that.  An experience.  I’m not going to build a dogmatic doctrine around it.  I think experiences, whether enjoyable or not, are like puzzle pieces that we fit together throughout the course of our lives.  And hopefully, the picture will become clearer as we go along.  How do I fit an experience (even if it was just in my mind) like that into everyday life?  I’m working on that.  For now, I’ll think about it from time to time and I think it will probably works its way into my day to day living without me even noticing it.  For me, things just seem to work out that way.  I do like the way Alan Watts said it, so I’ll leave you with that quote again, with a little more of what he said preceding what I had written above.  I hope you and yours are well.

“This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.” Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.”
– Alan Watts