There were about 30 of us out at Harmony Hill last week in our GTC program. Spring flowers and snowy mountains popped in the warm sun, surrounded by blue sky and water… and dollops of old growth forest with nesting eagles. Inside the cedar and glass buildings, we open minds, reveal souls, and take down the false, subtle walls – to fluid, permeable, shared consciousness. Throughout this program, “I” dissolves repeatedly until eventually, any search for a definitive or particular “I” is futile.  Yes, we can find an “I” in each person, can find a particular set of gifts, talents and resources which make each person useful and needed and valuable in the world.  And yet, what seems to be revealing itself ever more clearly is an experience of many aspects of one, being itself, through many, being themselves as the one. Each being is gorgeous, shimmering with strengths, weaknesses, perspectives from and about being human. No two are alike.  And yet each is another of the same self.  Each ultimately can see him or herself in the other and the other in her self….til eventually, the question remains: Where is the separation? At the same time, of course, the definition I make between myself and you is what allows human relationship, human health, and human responsibility for universal care.  So there is a particular self, and it is the self that experiences attachment and abandonment, love and loss, vulnerability and tenderness, pain, sorrow and joy – those qualities that the angels and god long for – and so here we are.

As a “facilitator” of these experiences, I find myself less and less important, find myself in reverence to some mystery so far beyond “I” that  i cannot tell you who the Facilitator is.  I can say that the experience gives me chills right now as I write this. When I am in the room, experiencing aspects of the unfolding magical presence, I am transformed and in awe. I am no longer “me”.  I am That, unfolding as various aspects, perspectives, inclinations and impulses through the many…and there ceases to be one I, even though I hold myself responsible for the experience. It seems that others also feel as if we all are part of one organism, seeing, being and loving itself as its Self.  The Beauty that prevails, never fails to find its way to the surface, no matter what truths are present or emergent. The shadows and light dance as one another, depending on the way one is viewing the scene. From one angle a thing is shadow; from another it is light. And simultaneously we are at once, all of the shadows and all of the light.  From these ways of seeing, all is integrated into This.  The horror, pain, and suffering, the longing, the conflict, the deceit, the honesty, grace, generosity, vulnerability, tenderness, humor, the tremoring, the stillness and on and on and on…all aspects of the Human Condition.  As father Thomas Keating asks in his book of the same name: Where Am I?  and Who Am I?  Eventually the answer to these questions is futile.  For I/We find the same Self in and as everyone and every thing, transformed and transforming. Never the same, yet beautiful in a constant stillness, shimmering.