Deep Calls Out to Deep.

I had something like an enlightenment experience the other day.  I'm choosing the words "enlightenment experience" simply because the light of my own consciousness touched something that was previously unknown to me.  The words I've written below are an attempt to describe the revelation within the experience:

A human heart beats to a contracting rhythm of in and out, honoring the pattern of union and separation and union again.  Cells do this same dance when they divide from one another, in order to only return to each other again.  We remember to let our lungs fill up again with our breath only because we first notice how it has gone out.  I marvel at these movements and wonder if this is the whole creative pattern of the Universe.

Love once told me that it disconnects from Itself in order to get an experience of Itself.  And of course it would!  Love wouldn't be Love if it didn't want to Love itself too.  Similarly, John O'Donohue once reminded me that one of the real excitements of being a human is that we are the place where the Universe can become conscious of Itself.  The alchemists seemed to understand this when they tried to channel this precise dynamic in order to turn base metals into gold.  Plato, too, suggested that a similar psychological movement pattern would increase our own awareness of ourselves.  And God told us it was Good when He parted Day from Night.  Perhaps Adam and Eve had to experience their own shame in order to encounter their True longings.  What then, really, is shame?  Perhaps shame is simply BELIEVING that our separateness is fixed instead of mutable.  

Maybe we have also been given the same set of initiation rites as our ancestors in Eden.  If so, it might be helpful to recall how their redemption arrived through a being that could remember his full Divinity and full humanity too.  Perhaps we too must be initiated into our own sense of separateness, experience our deep longing to return, in order to find our own authentic way back to this remembering.  

But, why all this trouble?  I have no idea.  Nonetheless, this experience of disconnection and reconnection appears to be the life-generating movement pattern of the cosmos.  Perhaps it's like this:  by the time we start remembering our connection, we've already been deeply initiated into the experience of our separateness, which enables us to become powerful messengers of the Truth of both realities.  I think John O'Donohue was right about one of the real excitements of being a human. We really can learn how to be the place where the Universe can become conscious of Itself.