Reaching
Peace
“May
your soul teach you how to fly and when you begin to soar may God
laugh in surprise and say, 'Who taught you the secret of the Upper
World?' Amen.”
Naomi Levy
(Einstein and the Rabbi, p. 179)
American rabbi, Naomi
Levy, wrote this blessing for her readers. Her book, Einstein and the
Rabbi, is subtitled, Searching for the Soul. In it she writes about
how Albert Einstein's description of the human relationship to
the universe brought to life all the mystical teachings she had been
studying for years:
“A human
being is part of the whole, called by us 'Universe,' a part limited
in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings
as something separate from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of
his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is
the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish the delusion but to
try to overcome it is the way to reach attainable measure of peace of
mind.”
Being part of the whole,
accepting our time-limited place in the great expanse of the cosmos,
is something that should bring us peace of mind. In the words of Max
Ehrmann, “no doubt the universe is unfolding as it
should...therefore be at peace with God.” (“Desiderata”) We
often experience ourselves as more important, or less important, than
anything else, and our time here as all important in the great scheme
of things. The truth is that we are exactly as important as
everything else in the universe. We are here trying to advance the
evolution of human consciousness, and sometimes we serge ahead and
sometimes we fall backwards. We are not the whole, but the whole
universe is within us, and all around us, and we have a role to play.
To the extent that we can
draw peace of mind and happiness from that understanding, to the
degree that we can bless one another from our hearts, we will escape
the bonds of our finite existence, and soar. That constitutes
joy! We can stop sweating the small stuff and live our lives in
gratitude for this crazy, mixed-up human existence. The universe
continues to expand, and we can expand with it. The world of
separation, the notion that we are somehow separate from the rest of
creation and vastly more important, is simply a delusion from which
we are called to awaken.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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