Last night I dreamed that I was wearing a silver-colored breastplate that fitted closely to my body. I knew it was a breastplate made with everything I had learned throughout my life: thoughts, reflexes, defenses ..., even my sense of humor was locked in my breastplate. I thought that to navigate the world I needed it.
I got home, unzipped the cuirass like cloth, and laid it on the bed.
Ah! What lightness! How simple it seemed to me then to speak and understand everything around me! There was no distance between me and the world. We were one, seamless, as if everything around me had become fluid. I enjoyed and connected effortlessly. I was able to understand, forgive, accept. What a serene and complete moment!
The Greek philosophers would not have been surprised by my dream, and less than anyone else by the brilliant Heraclitus, one of the most visionary thinkers in ancient Greece. He reminded us that we live in a world of opposites, fragmented, divided between matter and spirit, and he invited us to leave that limited scope and look for another perspective, to be part of the dynamism of the universe: "Everything flows, nothing is still," he said. . To do this, Heraclitus wanted us to go beyond what only our limited senses perceive and to develop a broader, more cosmic consciousness. From the universal consciousness that Heraclitus called logos, life is one, it is united and it is positive.
How do we access this broader consciousness? Heraclitus warns that if you only live based on your desires, you darken your conscience; But if you only focus on living according to reason and reason, then you dry up your ability to perceive the mysterious and amazing world around us. The way, he says, is to get in touch with the logos, to see things from a different perspective, "from above."
Astronaut Edgar Mitchell recounts that he was on Apollo 14 returning from a mission to the Moon, and that looking out the window of the ship this happened to him: «We orbited perpendicularly to the elliptical (the plane that contains the Earth, the Moon and the Sol) and we rotated the ship to maintain the thermal balance. Every two minutes, a photo of the Earth, the Moon, and the Sun, and a 360-degree panoramic view of the sky, appeared before me, in the window of the ship. And, thanks to my astronomical training at Harvard and MIT, I realized that the matter of our universe was created in solar systems, and therefore the molecules in my body, and in the ship, and in the body of my mate, they were built or manufactured in a generation of ancient stars. And I was sure that we are all part of the same, we are all one. According to modern quantum physics, this can be called interconnectivity. This unleashed this experience in which I said to myself:
"Wow, those stars are mine, my body is connected to those stars." And it was all accompanied by a deep experience of ecstasy, which was repeated every time he looked out the window at home. It was a bodily experience of the whole.
When Mitchell landed, he tried to understand what had happened to him: “I started looking for information about what I had experienced in the scientific literature and couldn't find anything, so I asked some anthropologists at Rice University. They answered me with a Sanskrit term, samadhi: it is the experience of seeing things and people separated, but experiencing them as a unit and at the same time feeling ecstasy. And I said: "Yes, that is the experience I had" ».
As he continued to investigate, Mitchell discovered that in virtually every culture in the world, and especially ancient Greece, there was a description of similar experiences. Two years after the Apollo 14 mission, Mitchell founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences, (noetic.org), an institution dedicated to the exploration and expansion of human consciousness: "Now I am a convinced pacifist, and I believe that war , killing oneself by borders and by who has the best God, is an absolute abomination ... If our politicians could meet in space, life on Earth would be very different, because you cannot continue living as we do once you have seen the broader perspective ».
Small revolutions of the readers
MARÍA STARDUST: «When things are not going well, something that helps me is to go up somewhere high, lie down and watch the stars for hours (it is usually the roof of my apartment). That helps me accept things as they are. See again the constant change of everything. And it is that the mere fact of hearing nothing but the breeze, feeling the heat of the ground and seeing how calm and great everything is out there (in space) gives me peace. It comforts me, makes me connect and disconnect at the same time.
Connect with the earth below me, disconnect from everything that is not really important. Go to the basics, to what is only necessary, which is at that moment to breathe, observe the sky and feel.
»I am not a particularly religious person, although I do try to nurture my spirituality, my mind, my whole body, in the best way I can. But I do believe that everything is connected to everything.
All of our atoms previously belonged to that universe, and that makes us a stellar traveler made up of atoms that have endured millions of years of contraction and then expansion, interstellar explosions, brutal meteorite collisions with planets, black holes and stars. , of lethal gases and extreme temperatures ... And if that doesn't give me strength and courage, I don't know what else will. And suddenly the whole problem becomes small and it doesn't seem so important anymore.
"I think the universe helps us, whatever the meaning that may be given to that phrase."