Consciousness and devotion

I still remember the amazement, when I read in a large daily paper in 2001 an article reporting on a study, which had been published in the medical journal „The Lancet“ a month before. The study had the title „Consciousness outside the body“, and this study was presented here in an accessible way to the public.

This kind of stuff is generally something for people interested in spirituality - but here this kind of discourse had left the realm of religion and/or medicine and moved over into the public.

For anybody who is aware of Spirit, God,  this kind of publication is in a way old hat: The reality of Spirit. Has not already the entire Bible taken a strong stand for an immense, intelligent, wonderful consciousness calling itself „I AM“? Isn’t already the record of creation portraying this supreme Being as „creating by speaking“? And didn’t Christ Jesus teach us the oneness with this being, with Spirit, in the most accessible and dear way? Yes, yes, and another yes.

In the memoir „Devotion“ by Dani Shapiro, which came out nine years after the Lancet’s pathbreaking study, authentic and autonomous insights are shared, which for example go like this:

"There’s nothing trickier than trying to talk about personal belief. Add on top of that trying to talk about personal belief with a very smart atheist. But I had some things to say. And wasn’t that the whole point, really? To opt back in? To form — if not an opinion — a set of feelings and instincts by which to live?

“I would say yes.” I took a leap. “I believe in God more than I did a couple of years ago. But not the God of my childhood. Not a God who keeps score, and decides whether or not to inscribe me — or anybody else — in the book of life.”

“So what exactly do you believe, then?” She sipped her tea and waited for a better answer. I wanted to tell her that exactly and believe don’t belong in the same sentence.

“I believe that there is something connecting us,” I said. “Something that was here before we got here and will still be here after we’re gone. I’ve begun to believe that all of our consciousnesses are bound up in that greater consciousness."

When in search for missing pieces of a larger collection and in need of finding them, I paused to pray and listen and feel the presence of Spirit, rather than confusion. I was sitting on the floor of my home cross-legged and very quiet. My spiritual sense knew that I could know what I need to know every moment - my spiritual sense knows that „for God to know, is to be“, as Mary Baker Eddy has it. This sense in my experience is truly a sense, it is intuition, an inkling, it is a feeling, too. I realized after a while that my surrounding looked different, it was filled with substantial thought - this sounds more mystic than it was, it was the most natural thing to happen. In this moment I wasn’t struggling for a relationship with Spirit, it was for real. (Later I thought: How funny it would be if a ray of light were struggling for a relationship with the sun; this continues to give me lots of food for thought, by the way).

I now knew where the missing pieces were - in an open box on a lower shelf, where I certainly hadn’t put them but somebody else, somebody really small (two years old, at that time). This moment opened up something important for me: There is so much more to see and to know - and life is so much easier if we accept that we are not alone. That we live in this greater consciousness. This consciousness is not the result of millions different consciousnesses - it is the I AM, a tangible presence, a real I Am. So it is fair to say, I believe: Consciousness is not in us, we are in Consciousness, in the intelligent Centre of it all, in the Being with a brilliant plan for its entire project: Creation.