The story is often told about the 3-year-old girl who asks her parents if she can have 5 minutes alone with her newborn baby brother. The parents wait outside the room to listen to what is going on and they hear their daughter ask her brother “Can you tell me what it is like before being born; I’m beginning to forget.”
It seems that from an early age, we start to forget who or what we really are. We create our own idea of who we are (our ego) through the great gift of thought. Our consciousness of those thoughts is what we identify as our world and this in turn creates our perception of who we are and what our purpose might be in the world. This is all wonderful, and it would appear, a necessary part of being human and growing as a person. The problem with this is that we soon forget the connection we had to the energy of life before we were born. We forget or don’t feel that connection after we are born. And yet it is not true that we completely forget or completely lose the feel for this connection. We are driven to rediscover this connection. We cherish the small moments when something inside of us remembers that connection; anything from a loving hug, a shooting star, a magnificent sunset, or a smile from a baby; all serve as reminders that there is something more to being human than just the thoughts we have and our consciousness about them.
Living our lives as if this connection to something more than just our individual selves does not exist, is ultimately a frustrating experience: A) because deep down something in us, some part of us knows this connection exists and B) this part of us that knows we are connected, acts as a kind of homing beacon to bring us back to who and what we truly are.
It brings us home to ourselves.
The difficult part for most of us is tuning into this homing beacon, tuning in to the signals of how much more there is to us than the perception we have created about us. The interference that prevents us from tuning in is normally the busyness of our lives and always the thinking that seems to constantly occupy our minds about the challenges of daily living as well as the challenges of future living and the guilt or regrets about past living. In other words, we are so rarely truly present in the quiet moment of the now that we miss the call of our homing beacon. We do not know of its existence because life has made us forget we were ever connected to something so wonderful as the divine creative intelligence of life. Our relationship with our thoughts convinces us more and more that we are who we think we are, we are who our ego says we are. But the call of this “always on” connection to something greater than who we think we are is so incessant that we always have this restlessness until we are resting in the knowledge and feeling of our divine connection.
Like the little girl talking to her new-born sibling, we know we are forgetting about this wonderful connection, and we know we will never be truly happy until we feel the beauty and love that emanates from this place, this knowing, this fact of connection to the divine intelligence of life.
