When I was a baby, I knew how to hide in the space between electrons.
People saw me bouncing and laughing, but they had no idea where I was hiding. Even today when I go there, I can’t find any me.
But it’s not an escape, because this infinite space is everywhere.
Didn’t we all dwell in boundless Satsang once, before the technicians of the finite, whom we call adults, drove us out of God’s garden? Now we measure eternity in hours and micro-seconds. We divide our vastness into inches. We have become measurers, which we call being educated. The truly important questions, the vast questions, the simple questions, have been educated out of us: “What are we measuring? Hours of what? Inches of what? ”
We have no idea what the world is actually made of. All day, we stumble through our duties without knowing what anything really is.
Sir Arthur Eddington, one of the founders of quantum physics, wrote: “All through the physical world runs that unknown content which must surely be the stuff of our consciousness.” Einstein developed the theory of relativity after a daydream: fantasizing what it would feel like to ride on a sunbeam.
But in our age of so-called reason, few of us listen to the child-like questions that true geniuses like Eddington and Einstein ask. We just go back to our measurements, counting and spending.
My dear friend Ann recently said, “A six month old was sitting next to me in a restaurant. He was just laughing and smiling and kept looking my way. He was so joyful, I couldn’t help but feel blessed. He is the new screen-saver of my heart.”
We all have memories of being that child, intuitions of a life more graceful.
Babies get it. The stuff of the universe is the bliss of no-thing. Zero hugs all numbers. Silence embraces all words. Stillness bears every achievement. The world is a lightning bolt of love, flashing out of the void.
So when you notice a baby laughing at what seems to be nothing, eyes twinkling with delight for no apparent reason, please remember that the baby is gazing between the electrons, into eternity, at God. That baby is not one moment old. And neither are you.
~January 7, 2012, my birthday.
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