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Nothing but thought

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

 

During the recent December holidays over the New Year.  I went on a trip to Sutherland in the heart of the Karoo.  As a child, I spent a little bit of time there, and one of my most amazing memories of this place was the night sky.  I remember walking outside one evening and looking up at an incredible sky filled with stars.  There were so many and so bright, that it felt as though I could just reach up and pick one out of the sky. 

 

My recent trip happens during a ‘Blue Moon.  As a result of the blue moon, the moon dominated the sky.  It was truly as though the light was turned on, so the stars were not visible at all. 

 

I lay on the grass looking up at the sky, I remembered the awesomeness of the millions of stars I saw that night, comparing that memory to the evening of the Blue moon, and noticing just how few were visible.  I could look deeply into the nothingness of the night sky.  I realized that what I was looking into was space, the universe, I closed my eyes and allowed my awareness to travel beyond the place where I was laying, I felt myself lift off the ground as I imagined what it would be like to be up there, in all this nothingness.  As I moved up higher and higher, and as everything below me became smaller and smaller eventually it completely disappeared, I started to feel alone.  I was aware of absolutely nothing around me.  I even became aware that during this meditation, I had left my body behind, and all I could identify myself with was a single thought that I was floating around the galaxy somewhere, not as a body or a person, but just as this thought.

 

The thought was simply that somewhere down there, there was a physical manifestation that I occupy, and at this moment, if felt so far away, it was insignificant.   The more aware I became of the nothingness around me, the less connected I was to everything that I experienced as Rozelle.  At that moment, it was the most liberating experience.  I realized how comfortable I was in this space of absolute nothingness, I started to realize that just as I – at that moment in time – was just a thought, so was everything else that I conceptualize in the physical. 

 

With this idea, I became aware that the reason I experience the world as physical was that this is the only way I can experience myself.  Without the physical world around me, I am nothing, I am just a thought.  I can't experience myself to my full potential without other, ‘thought’ around me, without, the interconnectedness of other ‘thoughts’ creating this consensual reality that we all occupy to experience ourselves to our full potential. 

 

I then started to reconnect with my body, started to re-identify as this person I call Rozelle, and as this started happening, I started becoming aware of more and more objects around me.  Planets, stars, mountains, trees, people, starting to feel the sensation of my body laying on the grass.  I also realized that as I reconnected with my body, I started filling with emotion.  It dawned on me, that emotion was part of being physical, and it is triggered by things and people within this consensual reality that we all create.  I also realized that emotions are what make me feel alive.

 

I have often heard it said that we create our universe, and everything in it, even ourselves.  It was at this moment when that idea/philosophy became very real to me.  I started looking at aspects of my life that triggered both undesirable and desirable responses, and felt, wow, this is all mine, I am nothing without it.

 

Being empowered by taking this responsibility for my existence and all the ‘stuff’ I bring with it, has created a new sense of enjoyment for life within me. 

 

It is this realization that brought me to an understanding of why I was here, incarnated on this planet.  It was just to EXPERIENCE myself most awesomely.