keep going

This Liz Gilbert quote (from Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear) speaks as perfectly to making the connection with spirit as it does to making a connection with the creative impulse that lives in all of us.

She’s talking about writing, about the arts in all forms, but she could just as easily be talking about that first breakthrough of Big Awareness when it comes thundering out of nowhere, the impossible thing made possible.

You try and try and try, and nothing works. But you keep trying, and you keep seeking, and then sometimes, in the least expected place and time, it finally happens. You make the connection. Out of nowhere, it all comes together.

Making art does sometimes feel like you’re holding a séance, or like you’re calling out in the night for a wild animal on the prowl. What you’re doing seems impossible and even silly, but then you hear the thunder of hooves, and some beautiful beast comes rushing into the glade, searching for you just as urgently as you have been searching for it. So you must keep trying. You must keep calling out in those dark woods for your own Big Magic.

You must search tirelessly and faithfully, hoping against hope to someday experience that divine collision of creative communion—either for the first time, or one more time.

Because when it all comes together, it’s amazing. When it all comes together, the only thing you can do is bow down in gratitude, as if you have been granted an audience with the divine. Because you have.

Driving through Tulsa on an ordinary day, seven-or-so years ago, I saw a man walking on 6th Street with an immense yellow light all around and streaming behind him. It was vivid though somewhat transparent. As one not that sensitive to energy, I was shocked. Was that an aura? Holy smack. It was! But why? Why then? Why that regular guy trundling his document case down the sidewalk?

I wasn’t thinking about spiritual matters. Wasn’t trying to see anyone’s aura, not even my own. I hadn’t ever really thought about auras except as a means of judging myself. At a metaphysical shop in Phoenix, my friends and I had our auras photographed, just for fun. Oh look at lovely Val, Rosemary, Brenda. Theirs are so beautiful! But of course, they’re sooooooo spiritual, such elevated beings of light. Master spirits! How very affirming to see all of that in a photograph.

My own aura photo, along with, thank goddess, my friend Raven’s, were all the wrong colors. No delicate purples or whites for us. We were shocking yellows and oranges and reds. And isn’t it interesting that such a thing can cause us (and by us, I mean me) to question ourselves? As if a photograph carries more weight about who we are than our own internal knowing? And, of course, as I would later come to know, each one of us seemingly separate beings, as aspects of the One, carry within us all potentialities, light and dark, delicate purples and shocking reds. We’re ALL of it, expressing any little piece of the One at any given time.

But back to that real-to-my-own-eyeballs aura I witnessed. I tested it out at a spirit fair the following weekend, excited that I may have become One Who Sees Auras. So very exciting! But gazing around the big crowd waiting for (the amazing) medium Cyndy Green’s gallery reading, there was nothing. If you can’t see energy in a room full of people all jazzed up and excited about hearing from their loved ones in spirit, then you can’t. Maybe I only imagined that guy and his yellow energy cloud on 6th St. Such a disappointment.

And yet, a little over an hour later, about to leave the room, there was a brilliant pink light around a woman just signing in. With a softened gaze, I glanced away from her and around the meeting space and there were lights around all of the others as well. All colors, all sizes, lights everywhere! And then they were gone, but I saw them. They were real. Everyone had one. (My momentary ability to see them probably succumbed to the massive rush I got when I saw a room full of people and their energy bodies. Yikes! Also, wheee!)

I tried many times after that. Taking a tip from The Celestine Prophecy, I learned to see my own energy field in small ways, like the glow between my fingers held against a dark background. In a workshop on Chinese energy medicine, I felt my Chi. (Really. In my hands. A near solid thing, but slightly spongy.) Then, more surprisingly, I came to see a blue glow surrounding my hands in complete darkness: lights off, eyes closed, sleep mask in place, yet still able to perceive the movement of my hands and see the beautiful blue light. Freaky.

We do not see with only our eyes.

How we can see things that allegedly aren’t there, at least according to the Human Rule Set (a set lies, for the most part, trickery to allow us to forget who we are), is something I don’t understand. But that I have seen things and experienced things deemed impossible is enough. Once is enough, and yet I’ve had countless experiences, as have hundreds of trustworthy people I know personally and millions whose encounters with the Unseen have been recorded via IANDS, IONS, at UVA, UAz, in consciousness labs around the globe, and in the writings of mystics through the ages.

A while back, I read the story of one of the serious consciousness researchers whose entire career had been motivated by a single experience he had in meditation in his 20s. One. He spent decades thereafter trying and failing to recreate it for himself, but devoted his life to testing out and recording the stories of others, because that one short fracture in the accepted reality changed him forever.

I find that immensely humbling, because my own experiences are beyond number. And still I want more. Oh the humanity, yeah? It’s laughable much of the time, but still there’s that longing.

One of the things I hear from people almost daily is, “nothing is happening, I’m not connecting.” And so back to Liz Gilbert. “…Keep trying…keep seeking…sometimes when least expected, it happens.” And trust William James: one white crow disproves the theory that all crows are black.

It doesn’t even have to be your own white crow, though of course we want it. A breakthrough for one of us is a breakthrough for all of us. Irrefutable evidence of something beyond this world is already here. As Anita Moorjani says in one of her beautiful meditations, “you can relax now.” And that may be the biggest gift of all, whether seeking connection in meditation or inspiration in art. It may not be our preference, but achieving a particular goal is not really the thing. The thing is simpler. Relax. Breathe. Just keep going.

“When it all comes together… you have been granted an audience with the divine.”

And in the off chance it doesn’t come together, if you decided for this lifetime that your wished-for experience would be to remain entirely unAware, keep going anyway. Though it often, perhaps always, feels like it, we are not seeking something outside of us. What we are really looking for is the conscious Awareness of what is already here. Right here, right now.

And meanwhile, white crows are everywhere: in books, videos, podcasts, at conferences, probably among your friends and family, because lots of folks are hesitant to share what sounds like lunacy.

So to the suggestion above ~ relax, breathe, just keep going ~ let’s add one more thing: Trust. In 12 step programs, to the disbelievers in any kind of Greater Reality, there’s a common suggestion: believe that I believe until you can find it in yourself.

To paraphrase Liz G’s quote just above: When it all comes together, as it always will, whether in this human life or after, you will have been granted an audience with Your. Own. Divine. Self. You will be welcomed Home, and you’ll recognize that you never really left that Holy Place at all.