• We Are Known

    • March 25, 2020 9:57 am


     Dearest Readers,

    I would like to wish you all a very Happy New Year. Can you believe it’s been twenty years since Y2K? Astonishing.

    Maybe I’m slow but it only occurred to me very recently that 2020 is a play on ’20/20′.

    ’20/20 vision’ and ‘hindsight is 20/20’ bring to mind a more clear way of seeing. How could we move into this new decade with a new kind of clarity? Perhaps by seeing ourselves not simply as individuals but as component parts of a Cosmic Oneness. Whether you are religious and believe that we are all Children of God or spiritual and believe that we are All One or secular/scientific and understand that we all share the same DNA, the fact remains: we are all intimately connected. We are not separate from one another.

    This fact was brought home to me again and again when I attended an amazing conference in San Jose, CA called Science and Non-Duality (SAND) this past October 2019. The organizers of the conference are a dynamic couple who had a desire to share with others their mutual love of science and mysticism and set about creating a conference where folks could come together to celebrate the mysteries and wonders of both.

    The pairing of science, with its fact-based approach, and spirituality, with its wisdom-based knowing, excites me almost like nothing else. When I was very little, I used to fall asleep by pressing my fists into my eyes so that I could view the kaleidoscope of colours that the pressure produced. When I did this, I somehow felt not only that I was seeing God but that God was living inside of me. In other words, my very first experience of God looked something like this:

    A number of the guest speakers at the SAND conference were scientists who spend their research time asking the question ‘Is the Universe conscious?’ In other words, does that kaleidoscope of colours have a consciousness? Does it know itself? Does it know me? Does it know, period?

    For me, the answer to these questions is a roof-top shouting ‘YES’. For how can the Mechanism Behind Consciousness not have consciousness itself? (The ancient yogis believe that ‘God’ is Consciousness itself.)


    Science cannot yet explain consciousness (why we have it, where it comes from, what it even is) and so it remains the greatest mystery. Religion and spirituality fill in the answers. We get to decide for ourselves.

    Einstein supposedly said something like, “Either everything is a miracle or nothing is a miracle.” To that end, either everything has consciousness or nothing does. Either the Universe is conscious (of itself, of me and you and all that is) or it’s not.

    Living life as though the Universe is as conscious of me as I am of It makes life pretty interesting. It also addresses existential loneliness or the feeling that I am alone and unloved.

    On an evening walk some years ago, I was stopped short by a large scattering of wood chips on the sidewalk. I looked up to see what had caused the mess and saw perfect, round holes in the tree, as if a large drill-bit had punched in and out of the bark. The very next day, when I passed the same tree I saw a woodpecker hammering its head in and out of the tree at rapid speed. I actually laughed out loud. No wonder an animation artist had invented Woody the Woodpecker, a comical, ridiculous bird!

    I don’t know how long I watched that woodpecker. It had me completely mesmerized. I was transported by the power it had in its little head to bore holes in trees, by its determination to feed itself, by the absolute phenomenon of its being. By simply by observing the humble woodpecker, I had been awakened to something far greater than my own self-centered thoughts.

    The amazing thing is, Woodpecker has continued to show up in my life, seemingly just when I need it. On more than one occasion, when I’ve been in a funk, the bird appears. Just this past July, when I was feeling despair at the state of the world, criticizing myself for being imperfect, tired of life in general, Woodpecker stopped me as I walked through a ravine to get to my destination. I first heard the rat-a-tat-tat of the beak-against-trunk and then saw it, high in a branch of an old maple. “I’m here,” it said. 

    I wrote the above paragraph about five days ago. Two days ago, I was walking on the grey streets of the town where I live, feeling extremely melancholy. My mood had dipped, as it does, and I was heading to the shores of Lake Ontario for a boost. I caught a flash of a bird flying by and looked to the tree where I saw it land. Woodpecker. “I’m here,” it said.

    Call these encounters coincidence. Call them nothing at all. Or call them a form of conscious contact from a Conscious Universe. When I choose the latter way of seeing I am bolstered by the notion that every conceivable thing is fused with Knowing. That means that I am Known. And You are Known. And We are Known. Kind of radical, know?

    May this Knowing be the foundation of our 20/20 vision.

    From the fires of love,

    Celia

    We’re Alive!

    • February 12, 2019 6:51 pm

    Dearest Readers,

    After retiring from showbiz a number of years ago and then weaning myself off the dubious pleasure of award shows, I recently found myself catching snippets of the 2019 Golden Globes while staying with some friends. The happy couple was ensconced in their den and I, busy with other things, would come and go from the room to chat with them while the stars of Hollywood made their speeches and showed off their formal duds on the TV.

    During one of my brief stop-ins to the den, Jeff Bridges was called to the stage to receive a lifetime achievement award. He was suitably humble and excited and after the requisite thank-yous to his agents and lawyers and colleagues and family, he shouted out his exuberance for life, waving his award in the air while saying, “We’re all alive, right here, right now, this is happening. We’re alive!” (You can jump right to 3:49 for that particular moment.)

    Bridge’s words came out so joyfully, in such an unaffected and sweetly, awkward manner, that my friends and I could not help but laugh. Who does that? This wasn’t an arm-waving celebration of personal victory (for many before him have done that little dance with their newly-acquired statue) but a celebration of our aliveness, the astonishing, undeniable reality of our Being.

    His jubilant affirmation reminded me of a spoken-word poem I’d written in the 90s, listing all the times I could have died and ending each account with the words, ‘I’m alive.’ One of the concluding stanzas goes like this:

    i was born
    i was given this gift
    this life overwhelming
    this blessing this hope
    i’m alive

    And the final stanza:

    we’re alive
    you’re alive
    i’m alive

    The poem remains my own hand-waving exclamation of childish wonder at the miracle of our inexplicable existence. Like Jeff Bridges, I am in total awe that This is Happening, right here, right now.

    And yet not too many of us are gleefully whooping about the mind-blowing fact of our actuality. Humans can go through hours, days, weeks, months and years utterly asleep to ourselves and the absolute mystery and phenomenon of It All.

    Not only that, many people feel that being alive is not a miracle to be celebrated but a sentence to endure. I know that feeling well and understand that it can be a quantum leap to get from ‘I’m done’ to being amazed by the fact that I am a breathing body with trillions of cells, held to the earth by a puzzling gravitational pull, traveling around the sun at unfathomable speeds in a universe that may or may not have had a beginning and may or may not have an end.

    But this is one way to make the leap: Be amazed.

    Be amazed by the breath. This constant companion, always there, coming in and going out of the body, whether I pay attention to it or not. There. It. Is.

    we’ve got lungs cleansing breath is the life force giver
    we’re alive

    Be amazed by the weather (even while you’re complaining about it). How does snow fall from a cloud? How does a lake freeze over? How does the sun warm the skin even in frigid temperatures?

    we’re rich without a penny
    we’re alive

    Be amazed by others. That person I’m judging has an entire story, a family history, a complex emotional life, common fears, desires and needs. That person is trying, just like I am and just like you are, to meet the challenges life brings.

    we’re alive

    Sometimes, when I’m riding on a bus or a train or sitting in an airplane, I will take a moment to open myself up to all of the people around me, imagining their individual lives, realizing that each of them has the same, full, rich complexity of human experience as I do. With this exercise, these easily-ignored strangers become my human family, fellow travelers on the Path of Life.

    And I am amazed.

    I provide spiritual care for dying people and being so close to death on a daily basis makes me cherish my aliveness. A dear friend of mine recently died in the middle of his own fantastic life and his sudden death now infuses my aliveness. Death is the unmentionable reality informing our lives. Let us all be amazed by that fact. And let us remember, as often as we can, that we are here, This is Happening. Right now. We’re alive!

    From the fires of love,

    Celia

    This and That

    • February 7, 2019 7:20 am

    Dearest Readers,

    The other night I was getting ready for bed with my 7-year old nephew who was visiting for the weekend and we had the most profound conversation while brushing our teeth in front of the mirror.

    “Isn’t it amazing how we can look into a flat piece of glass and see ourselves doing the exact thing that we’re doing right now in perfect clarity?” I asked him.

    “Yeah!” he replied with delight, “And how do our eyes even see everything?” he asked with genuine amazement.

    “I don’t know!” I exclaimed.

    “And who even invented words?” he went on.

    “I don’t even know!” I replied.

    “And how is this flat glass,” he said, motioning to the mirror, “Made from sand? How do you heat sand and get glass?”

    I laughed and shook my head. He ran his electric toothbrush through his grinning mouth. We were both in a state of awe about How Things Come To Be.

    What a joyful state. Taking time to experience this kind of childlike wonder is one of life’s great pleasures. It is truly a spiritual experience.

    As an interspiritual person, I draw my inspiration from a number of traditions to get that kind of joy. One is astrophysics and I am a big fan of Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist and television host, and am currently reading his book Astrophysics For People in a Hurry. It is full of hard-science facts like, “Every one of our body’s atoms is traceable to the big bang,” [p.33] and humble admissions such as “astrophysicists have no idea how the cosmos came into existence.”

    [p.32, p17]

    In Tyson’s broad-minded view, “accepting our kinship with all life on earth is a soaring spiritual experience.” (Cosmos, Episode 2, 27:25)

    I also follow Thomas Keating, a Trappist monk and brilliant spiritual teacher whom I had the great pleasure of meeting at St. Benedict’s monastery in Snowmass, Colorado. (As I write this, Fr Thomas is very close to death.) He, too, is a lover of science and feels strongly that religion has to listen to science because science is giving us up-to-date information about who and what God is. By Keating’s definition, God is “Is-ness”.

    Yogic philosophy also informs my spirituality. I teach yoga and bring the spiritual teachings to my classes as well as sharing the physical practice. This weekend I will be leading a workshop called Yoga, Meditation and Self-Realization. Self-realization is waking up to who we really are. “We are stardust brought to life,” writes Tyson [p.33]. Our very essence is Cosmic. Whatever you choose to call that Essence, be it God or the Universe or All, It is the very nature of who we are. I Am That.

    But even though I Am That, I still have to be this human being. I still have to be Celia on a daily basis. I am a person with a busy mind and an imperfect body. Self-realization, or enlightenment, in my view, doesn’t mean sitting on a cloud. It means understanding that even though we may not be our busy minds and imperfect bodies we nevertheless have to live with them both.

    How do we do that? How do we hold both truths that we are human and we are this Cosmic Oneness?

    It takes practice. And willingness. It’s easier to shut down the truth of who we are and just grit the teeth and get this business-of-being-human over with. But look how much we’re suffering. When we bring the reality of our inter-connectedness into our individual realities our perception will change. If we are not separate from one another or from the Creative Force of Life then why would we ever hurt each other? We would only be hurting ourselves.

    “How do our eyes even see everything?” When my nephew asked that question with such sincerity and openness, he was in a state of wonder. He was also self-realizing. There is something else going on here. We are participating in an astounding phenomenon we call Existence. And we are not doing so in isolation from one another. The more we awaken to this truth, the deeper our human healing will be.

    From the fires of love,

    Celia