Nothing Else Going On

Every life event, beginning with each breath and extending even to nuclear holocaust, painting our toenails and eating a carrot, has but one purpose: serving our soul’s evolution to conscious union with all of existence—God, in other words.  There ain’t nothing else going on, so far as I can tell.

I’d be amused to know how many times I’ve conveyed that sentiment in one form or another over my 80 years.  Amused but not surprised.  You see, like most of us I bet, I need all the help I can get keeping that truth reasonably front-of-mind.  And since there are monks who spend years in meditative solitude for just that purpose, my continual repetition—in written and spoken words, in drawings, in stone sculptures I build and photograph, in how I attempt to order my day—compelled by the passion to remember, makes sense to me. 

Indeed, I often find it absolutely necessary considering the clamorous urgency our ego nature screams and yells and dances a jig about when it comes to all sorts of questionable views—such as we’re human beings who need this, that and the other thing in the phenomenal world to change (or not) in order for us to be happy.  

The notion that such thinking is a form of ignorance preventing us from realizing our True Nature, a soul, manifestation of God, is sometimes barely on the horizon of consideration, speaking for myself.  Those moments when I cling to the thought of God Alone the way a starved dog protects a juicy beef bone are among the incomparable treasures of my existence.  So is when the pain of my less-than-sensible choices reminds me that I’m fighting for my life, my real life, my only life, my soul—my True Self.

Continually expanding in love, you might say, what some call the highest and holiest action because it always contains that which is not love within itself, it always and ever moves to include the unloving. 

Every life event, no matter how seemingly horrific, sublime or bizarre, is a servant to that end.  And as such, surprise!—it too is a manifestation of God.  There ain’t nothing else going on, so far as I can tell.

…every soul is a young eagle soaring higher and higher, 

gathering more and more strength til it reaches the glorious Sun.

~ Vivekananda