BIRTHING....
Remember remember
years and years
echoes within echoes
secrets bursting into tears
We are ancient children
we have lived forever
Can we remember the beginning?
Never
We all share this subjective sense of the beginninglessness of our life, even if we remember being in the womb. It’s a hidden emblem of our eternality.
888
The dark had gone on serenely for a brief forever and nothing was happening. It got my attention to suddenly travel down the birth canal: The first e-vent, ad-venture, op-port-unity, the great venting and opening the portal. Birth within the beginningless.
When I was born I glimpsed above me the corner of the ceiling, a symbol, I now see, of all phenomena emanating from that No Thing point, and of everything heading again towards a drawing together.
When I was shockingly placed in an isolette, like all the other crying infants, my grandfather looked through the nursery window and I felt this Consciousness recognize me. He appeared to me as a swath of phosphorescent white standing in darkness. I didn’t see the form, but communed with this soul and was comforted. Fifteen years later, Grandpa told me how he’d picked me out and we’d gazed at each other.
Our memories tell us teaching stories: The first hour of my life was crowned by Sacred Relationship within Oneness.
888
The neonate feels defenseless and also omnipresent, at the center. So each of us brushes up against the hidden truth.
The baby, even the schoolchild, does not know what he does not know, and cannot even vaguely imagine the qualitatively different life of the adult. When we reach a higher round of awareness, we enter the exhilaration and free-ranging possibility of another not-knowing, a baby in the next world.
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This third section deals with how and why the universe was formed, and how we grow up. We return to more immediate, heartfelt matters in the next part. To study the everyday work, you might skip ahead to part four, and read this later. Yet when we’re in pain, and ask what it all means, this is a most practical question. If we know where we came from, and the ways of our development, this overview greatly strengthens our set of principles for meditation.
To plot our course, remember our Birth.