“Love is the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world… Love, in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis.” –Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
We live in conscious universe. I spent the weekend immersed in The Science and Non- Duality Conference, exploring the depths of the ultimate truths of existence. It was quite heady and surprisingly reassuring. The conference featured several panels of world-renowned quantum physicists sharing Powerpoints of the immensity of the universe in which our visible universe that goes on for 100 million light years makes up less than 2% of the whole. This new science of quantum physics and its latest breakthrough of Super String Theory leave no question that our Newtonian conception of the material world only reflects the surface layer of reality. What we perceive as solid matter, when studied closely, disappears on the molecular level into energy waves, which envelope us and even lives through us. Science has proven what mystics have been saying for thousands of years: we are not separate, individual beings; rather we are truly all connected.
Yet, even as science creates the bedrock of culture, the transition between changing world views meets resistance, just as it did for Galileo and Newton. In the span of world history it was not that long ago that most did not believe the world round. And yet as we have witnessed, the truth of reality is patient; it will wait for us to catch up. Quantum physics and all its ramifications is the next “discovery of fire” for humanity… How poetically beautiful that it would come at a time when our technology has indeed shrunk the vast world into an interconnected web. We stand at the cusp of an entirely new vision of reality, with the interconnection of all beings at its heart.
As these facts have internalized and become realized in me, I have been struggling with how to reconcile them with the world around me, which is weighed down by very solid manifestations of fear, greed and isolation which consume our communities as effectively as the political landscape. It was one of the spiritual teacher’s words at the conference that have come back to me as I contemplate what to do and how to live with this newly planted seed of the wholeness of life in me. Gangaji lit up the conference with her presence and asked us to do the same: “In this moment can you fall off the tightrope of all the constructs you have built in your life that keep you from not knowing? In this moment can you surrender into your own discomfort and stay?”
I recognized two things deeply with those questions- the first was that it is only in this moment, in the here and now that our presence takes on any meaning, that it offers us any substance. Yesterday and tomorrow are those constructs we build to keep us distracted from our real power and our deepest fears. The second is that the truest part of life occurs when the energy waves that exist within the trillions of synapses in our brains awaken this sensation in our hearts. How we embrace or repress this sensory experience of being is the source of our connection to this infinite conscious universe. Another teacher said it like this: “Your existence is how God feels her/himself. Vigilance in this tradition is a form of prayer; it is the willingness to let go and open for the Divine to express itself through you.”
It is so simple and so challenging to have the courage to stop the story line, stop the distractions and feel the truth of the moment you are in. It is why acting in good faith and telling the truth resonates biologically. This is the how of tapping into the connection between us all. Another word for it is love.
