Monday, May 10, 2010

SOUL LEVEL

What do people carry in with them when they close the curtain of the voting booth? They carry their political convictions, whether they align with the right or the left. They carry their sense of civic duty. They carry their emotions. But deeper down, aren’t they also carrying their whole lives? If living in the moment means anything, it means that each moment of existence is a point that contains everything. In a mysterious way, to act is to express the universe, and like the still point of the revolving world, each act is both in time and outside it.

Spiritual people aspire to be in both places, timebound and timeless. In India this is sometimes expressed as “the lamp at the door” – your soul is poised, as if on a threshold between the everyday events that occur in time and the background of the unchanging, infinite absolute.

The reason this is important is it doesn’t really matter what actions you take. The important thing is how much consciousness you add to the whole of human existence, for that is how eternity expresses itself, like a lamp shining in through the window of eternity.

A great soul like Buddha or Jesus wasn’t just a lamp at the door; they were beacons. You and I may feel smaller than Buddha or Jesus, yet that is an opinion formed by our egos. Spiritually, all the light being expressed through a human being is equal, at least in terms of quality. Why? Because light is a metaphor for the power of consciousness.

Everyone’s consciousness draws from the same underlying reality. But it doesn’t really matter if history will remember you as a great soul. At this moment you are expressing the entire universe through your consciousness.

The cosmic plan, whether we call it divine or not, doesn’t need you or me to reach fulfillment. Yet the parts you and I play are unique. No one can duplicate them; we make our own cosmic history every second.

Adapted from: Peace Is the Way, by Deepak Chopra (Harmony Books, 2005).

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