God's Eye View

Here is a powerful meditation I like to practice.

Imagine you are the size of the Milky Way Galaxy, and you look inside
yourself and you see a tiny, beautiful blue stone glowing next to a
yellow star. When you examine the blue stone you see all sorts of
beings living on its surface. You see storms and clouds and waves
crash. You see wars bloom like flowers and die like flowers. You see
fires burn out, the smoke dissolve into the air and the ashes into
the ground.

And you are there to watch it all happen, watch all the
beings crawl and cry and grow and love and laugh and kill and cry some
more, and you do the same, feel the same feelings that ripple across
the surface of the stone. And you look at this tiny stone in your body
with infinite compassion, infinite love, infinite acceptance, infinite
forgiveness, because you know that all of it is in you, and you are in
all of it.

If you stand back far enough, you can see this earth as a beautiful
blue stone covered in flowers, blooming and dieing. Hold that stone
like a precious jewel found nowhere else in existence, and have
compassion for it, for what else can you do, really? Slowly place the
living jewel inside your heart and see how it generates a love without end.

When I emerge from a dream or visualization like that one, I really feel a new urge to
embrace this world with all my heart; to appreciate all of it, even
the pain. To let my heart beat and break. Let it break, because this
is the only chance I might have to even have a heart. The fantasy
actually changes the quality of my life. It reminds me (re-minds me) that I
must use this time I have here, this precious, limited time I get to
witness this incredible play of forces and forms and feelings, to help
others, to love others, to help others see just how beautiful they
are, because they are so beautiful.

There could have been none of this stuff, so all of it is a gift. The
multiplicity, the variations, the infinite diversity—no two leafs are
the same, no two rocks, no two insects, no two people. Atoms might all
be the same. I don't know. I can't see them (I don't even know what
the hell they are! Clouds of probability?). There could be a single
energy running beneath all these multiple forms. Makes sense. But,
forgetting that "unifying essence," just looking at all the diversity
is enough to conclude that this is a universe of infinite creativity,
a truly magnificent design, even if it is just a hologram, an
illusion. Even if it is a dream, it is a glowing, luminous dream, full
of feelings and beings and depth and diversity. It is vibrating and waving. This world and this mind is
infinitely deep, infinitely diverse, and so infinitely divine, and infinitely here.
Behind it all may be the Great Unformed Abyss, the same Nothingness
that was there in the beginning, but it doesn't matter in the least,
not when I am looking at the stones along the riverbed, each one a
different color, a different shape. Or when I look up at the clouds.
Or at the distant mountains. It doesnt matter at all when l look at the people, and I can see diversity,
and therefore, I can see infinity.