One summer I took my children camping to a place in the Pyrenees where there’s a man who is in love with the stars. He has installed a huge telescope in the middle of this valley and managed to negotiate an agreement to keep this place free of light pollution. With some other families, we booked to spend two hours looking at the universe through his telescope. To me the most beautiful thing was to see his passion; it was clearly beyond just a job. On this clear night we were able to see galaxies. I remember being struck by the fact that we are made of the same elements as these stars. The miracle of the whole pattern of life, from just being energy for millions of years and then cooling down bit by bit and becoming this smaller mass on Earth, then dissolving back into the universe. It was not possible to observe the sky without relating to the mystical experience. There we were all together, kids and adults, having this experience that is so immeasurable that we cannot really understand it, the scale, the millions and billions of galaxies.
What happens to us when we look through a telescope is similar to what happens to us in the meditation hall. We come to meditation with a narrow mindset and yet at some point we get to understand that we can only experience it when a quantum leap happens, a falling into. The more I walk this journey, the more I see it’s as if the only thing that’s in my hands is to be open to finding a path back to what there was before I existed. Of course, we have daily situations that we struggle with and we are part of this coming and going of everyday life, but if we see everything that we are asked to live in the light of the stars, then it is a completely different experience. Many times we hear this as if it means that there are no problems. We move between the ultimate and the relative quickly as if it’s black and white. But how can we fully embrace the relative? How can we fully embrace the ultimate? Can we find a place that links everything, when we see these ups and downs not as fixed but as waves in the sea?
The goal is not to stop the waves but to allow them to be. To allow this is love, love itself.
Extract from the book There is Light and only Light: Teachings to illuminate your inner wisdom by Gemma Polo Pujol. Watkins publishing.