The summer I graduated from high school I was involved in a car wreck that left me with amnesia. I could not remember what had happened that day. I looked down at my clothes trying to remember who I was and what had happened that day.
Far from being an unpleasant experience, my brief encounter with amnesia was mildly euphoric. I looked at each person and each object as though I had never seen them before. I looked at street lamps as radiant art objects in a museum. Without a context, every thing I looked upon seemed strange and fascinating.
The insight I gained from that experience was captured in the words of French writer, Marcel Proust, who once said, “My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.” My car accident had been a free master class in meditation. I had begun to realize there is a vast empty space between our thoughts and that when we look out at the world from that still spot we experience everything is miraculous.
My memory of the time I forgot now informs my understanding of religion:
It seems to me being “born again” is no further away than when we stop looking at the present through the lens of the past. Religion is not trying to recapture a mythic past, just to enter THIS moment fully.
“Be still and know I am God” now says to me that the sacred is never further away than a quiet mind and heart.
The words “you are the light of the world” now say to me that each of us is the universe come to life. Our awareness itself, not our sectarian dogmas, illumines our world and allows us to share the life together.
In you, the reader of these words, the universe has come to consciousness. You do not need to look for a miracle more wonderful than that. If you but look at the world with new eyes your search for meaning will be over. You will realize that you and everything around you are the miracle.