We paved paradise and put up a parking lot

Imagine paradise.

Not the regular paradise of hammocks and sunsets and pina coladas.

But a paradise way way beyond that, a melting. merging energetic intensity, formless and fluid. Abstract as love. Eternal as infinity. Indefinable as space. The abundant, creative source of everything. Real, permanent, constant and absolute.

Imagine that this paradise is you. It is all you know, all you have ever known. It is who you are, there is no part of it that is not you.

There is no place where you stop and something else begins. There is no other. It is all of you and you are all of it.

Paradise has only one problem.

It cannot know itself.

As an absolute with no relative or comparison, it cannot experience its perfection. As the source of all creation it cannot know its creative power. As everything, the understanding of infinite abundance is inconceivable. As nothing but love, it is impossible for it to ever experience love.

What’s the point of magnificence, if experience of magnificence is impossible?

Paradise yearns to experience itself.

So paradise, takes action. It moves from the formless into material form, changing constantly as the merging melting energy of paradise undulates and ripples. Minerals, plants, animals, humans appear as do everything created by those forms: diamonds, flowers, nests and parking lots…

Two of these forms are given consciousness of ‘I’ .

You and I, both paradise, both arising from the same energy, identical, the same thing, come into form as separate human beings.

Remember that the sole purpose of each ‘I’ is to get as close as humanly possible to the truth that gave rise to the ‘I’, the original everything-ness. The 'I' cannot, while it has any belief in its human form go the whole way there because to realise it fully is for the ‘I’ to disappear altogether. Enlightenment and death are the same thing.

And the only way this experience of other-ness can work is if these ‘I’s momentarily forget that they are paradise.

The ‘I’ uses its human experience to explore, witness, experience and remember its spiritual nature. It lives in form with the gift of awareness to do just that.

The ‘I’ notices how those moments when it seems incapable or when it feels hatred or isolation or inadequacy or when it feels unloved or falls out of love with someone seem to contradict its very soul.

And it notices with overwhelming clarity how those moments of deepest love, soaring creativity, unbridled joy chime perfectly with what it knows to be true.

Like in the children’s game of ‘hotter, colder’ the ‘I’ moves further away from or closer to its truth and its feeling tells it in which direction it is moving.

The ‘I’ seeks that feeling everywhere, that sense of being at home. All other apparently ’separate’ forms that paradise has created are used in an attempt to recreate the feeling. There is not enough of any form in the universe though to create the depth and truth of feeling that the ‘I’ is seeking.

The ‘I’ has glimpses and realisations of its nature. In each glimpse is the clearest confirmation of its wholeness, its potential, its love. And then, because the ‘I’ is an ‘I’, this glimpse must be forgotten.

Often the ‘I’ gets confused between what is real and what is not. The ‘I’ tries to use these glimpses into the magnificence of its spiritual nature to be a better, more successful ‘I’. But this is to have it all backwards.

This is trying to use the fact that the ‘I’ is literally the same being as every other ‘I’ in order for the ‘I’ to be different....

Getting better at an illusion is still an illusion.

All it takes is for the illusion to shift, which it does all the time because that is its nature and the ‘I’ begins all over again. It makes no sense.

What does make amazing, mind-blowing sense though is to use the material world to remember our spiritual nature. We are the child on the beach with the castle-shaped bucket, sand as far as the eye can see. We are a being designed to love and, would you look at that, along come 7.3 billion people, wanting to be loved.

The only point of 'I' is to have it all - the gift of human form, the gift of a world to explore with the knowledge that it is all of us, that we are unlimited creative potential, that we are pure abundance, that there is never a moment when we are not connected and whole. Everything we create is a celebration and a remembrance that we are the origin of everything. Everything we do with the physical body is a reminder of what has been created in order for us to experience life. Every moment of intense, pure connection take us to the loving nature of our reality. Every breath is a reminder of the truth of our abundance.

Having it all, we move into the very heart of our existence. We balance between illusion and truth, truth and illusion. We live out the paradox of being simultaneously both ‘I’ and ‘not I’. The more we see this the more our existence continually contradicts itself. We realise that the secret to not being angry, insecure or scared is to know we are here to be angry insecure or scared. We know that the secret to engagement is to know there is nothing to engage in. The secret to spectacular relationships is to know that relationship is an impossibility. We win when we know that winning and losing are the same. The secret to change is that nothing needs to change.

Looking through our human eyes, listening with our human eyes, touching with our human hands and seeing the paradise of who we are reflected back to us in every sight, sound, texture.

We paved paradise and we put up a parking lot.

We remembered, briefly, why we did that.

Forgot it again.

Magnificent.