The Infinite Gets to Be Particular

On embodiment, forgetting, remembering, and the strange beauty of being here

What if what we are trying to remember is more particular than the familiar idea that we are spiritual beings having a human experience?

What if we did not come into these bodies to become infinite?

What if we came into these bodies because we are infinite~

and embodiment gives the infinite a particular place from which to listen?

I keep returning to this.

The body is how the infinite becomes particular.

For a time, we have been lent these bodies.

And through them, something without edges gets to experience edges.

We get these eyes.

These hands.

This breath.

This particular heart.

We get to occupy this exact moment in time and experience life from one precise point within it.

It’s quite possible these bodies are temporary instruments of infinite consciousness.

And even more beautifully~

maybe they are listening instruments.

Through them, we experience sight.

Sensation.

Grief.

Love.

Relationship.

Touch.

Longing.

Loss.

Place.

Time.

We get to listen in a particular way.

Love in a particular way.

Learn and feel and touch in a particular way.

We become immersed in this incredibly precise landscape of living.

And through it, we enter into relationship with everything.

With another person.

With the Earth beneath us.

With beauty.

With uncertainty.

With longing and loss.

With our own bodies.

With time itself.

With the mystery of being here.

The infinite enters form

I wonder if there are things that can only be known from here.

There are ways of loving that require another person.

Ways of knowing that require uncertainty.

Ways of feeling that require a body.

Experiences that require time because they need a beginning and an ending.

There is a particular kind of love that comes from knowing we cannot keep something forever.

A particular tenderness that arises because a moment will pass.

A particular intimacy available to us because we are here, together, now.

This is what form gives us.

The infinite gets this body.

This lifetime.

These eyes.

This exact moment in history.

This particular way of loving.

This particular way of listening.

And only for a while.

The infinite may be what we are.

This expression of it is finite.

And the more I feel the truth of that, the more precious this life becomes.

We agree to forget

There is another part of this that I have been listening into.

What if forgetting is part of the experience?

What if, in some way beyond our full understanding, we agree to forget so that we can participate in remembering?

We enter the particular.

We take on a name.

A history.

A body.

Relationships.

Longings.

Losses.

A place in the world.

We become immersed in the experience of being someone.

And slowly, the circumstances of the experience begin generating an identity.

Our history tells us who we are.

Our bodies tell us who we are.

Our age.

Our relationships.

What happened to us.

What we have.

What we lost.

What we achieved.

What we failed to become.

We become so immersed in the particular that we can forget the consciousness experiencing through it.

And then, somewhere inside the living of a life, something begins to stir.

Something recognizes itself.

Oh.

I remember.

Listening brings us into remembering

I wonder if this is part of what listening is.

A way of becoming available to what has been here all along.

The deeper we inhabit these bodies, the more available we become to what we came here to remember.

The gift of the body is that it allows the infinite to listen from here.

Through this exact life.

Infinite consciousness can be everywhere.

Embodiment allows consciousness to be here.

One breath rather than every breath.

One heartbeat.

One encounter.

One life.

There is something astonishing to me about that.

We spend so much of our lives imagining spiritual awakening as an expansion beyond the boundaries of the self.

And what I am feeling now is something profoundly intimate:

Awakening is remembering the infinite while inhabiting the particular.

The remembering brings us more deeply here.

Into the body.

Into relationship.

Into this living moment.

Remembering changes the way we touch what is here

And this is where the idea has begun to change something in me.

Because the more I remember the infinite nature of what we are, the more responsibility I feel toward this finite experience.

Remembering what we are changes how we touch what is here.

We begin to meet our bodies differently.

We meet another person differently.

We tend what is alive differently.

Because we are living bodies within a greater living body.

We are in relationship with everything.

What moves through us enters the field around us.

How we participate matters.

How we listen matters.

How we love matters.

How we touch this life matters.

Remembering our infinitude can deepen our devotion to the finite.

Because once the particular becomes visible for what it is—

this astonishing, temporary expression of life—

the particular becomes sacred.

And our responsibility begins to feel less like an obligation and more like an ability to respond.

To become increasingly available to what is here.

To ask:

How will I use this particular life?

How will we listen through these ears?

How will we love through these hearts?

How will we touch another person?

How will we tend the Earth beneath us?

What will our particular expression add to the living field we share?

The paradox of awakening

Maybe this is the paradox I have been trying to name.

We come as infinite into finite form.

We become immersed in the particular.

We experience the extraordinary feeling of being a body—

of listening, loving, learning, losing, touching, grieving, becoming.

We agree to forget.

And through this precise landscape of living, we are given the experience of remembering.

Oh.

I remember what I am.

And in remembering what we are, we become more available to where we are.

More intimate with this life.

More awake to one another.

More responsive to the living Earth.

More capable of loving what is here while it is here.

For a little while, the infinite gets to be particular.

This body.

This breath.

This exact arrangement of people and circumstances and joys and heartbreaks.

This particular way of seeing.

This particular way of listening.

This particular way of loving.

This one life.

An Invitation

This is the territory of my work ~ listening through the body, remembering what we are, and exploring how that remembering changes the way we live, love, and tend what is here.

If something in you recognizes something here, I invite you to come closer.