In the beginning, many people don’t fully understand the power of meditation. The power of meditation lies within the power of the mind, and through meditation, you can reach parts of yourself you may never have known existed otherwise. Meditation allows you to access parts of your mind that can teach you things you could never learn by seeking it outwardly.
If you spend any time on Facebook or Tumblr, you’ve probably seen inspiration posts comparing humans to “starstuff” saying that we’re all made of the same things, and that we are just as beautiful and full of light as the stars and galaxies. While I now know that those sayings are actually, in fact, totally true, it seemed at the time like just a way to make us all feel a little better about ourselves. I thought to myself that I’m clearly a human made of skin and bones and muscle and fat while the universe is made of beautiful stars and planets and giant balls of fire and amazing lights and the amazing unknown. It wasn’t until recently that I realized that we are all actually made of the same elements that make up those beautiful stars, or “starstuff.” Matter can never be created and destroyed, so the atoms in our bodies were all once floating around somewhere in the universe forming a star or within an amazing galaxy. The hard part is trying to compare one single human being to the entirety of the infinite universe. It’s a comparison that’s impossible to conceptualize, much less to understand.
Then one day, I found an amazing guided meditation on YouTube. One that didn’t have too many distracting background sounds and with a soothing voice that I could drift away to. It started out just like any other guided meditation I’ve used. It began with having me picture a small ball rolling along the skin of my body, massaging away the tension and stress as it went. My awareness shifted to every tiny part of my body all at once and I couldn’t really even differentiate between a sensation in my hand and a sensation in my stomach. I felt myself become a part of the bed I laid in and the pillows and blankets and the walls and the room around me.
I don’t remember exactly at what point the meditation took a turn and I don’t even remember how long it was. It could’ve been ten minutes, but it also could’ve been an hour. Eventually, though, the voice started telling me to picture the universe. I pictured my ceiling opening up to reveal the thousands of stars and I imagined myself floating up into space, next to the stars and galaxies and planets. Picturing the universe is an extraordinarily strange thing to do. There’s nothing you can compare it to because it’s insane and infinite and ever-expanding and completely beyond human comprehension. So of course I just pictured it the best my mind would allow me to. It told me to imagine traveling through the universe, going through the stars, passing galaxies and planets and suns. As it turns out, my mind is incredibly powerful and can produce visuals behind my closed eyes that I had never even dreamed of. I felt like I was really out in space and exploring parts of the universe and existence that I could never possibly see. For all I knew, I could’ve been.
The thing that makes meditation so indescribable and crazy to me is that it’s almost like dreaming, but lucid dreaming. I lay there with my eyes closed while my brain takes over my visuals because all I’m really looking at physically is the darkness of the back of my eyelids while I’m thinking about my the expanding and contracting of my lungs or the blood pumping from my heart throughout my body or somehow traveling through the universe. Everything my imagination produces becomes as real to me as waking up in the morning to see the sun shining through my window or the birds chirping outside. It’s just like an amazing, real dream, but I’m aware and in the most peaceful, calm state of consciousness. It’s like lucid dreaming in the way that I know it’s not real and that I’m really laying in bed and that what I’m seeing is not at all true, yet it’s real to me and I can interact with it however I want.
If you think about it, it is real. Just because what you’re seeing is not what’s in front of you physically when your eyes are open, doesn’t have to mean it’s not real. Just because someone else can’t see what you see, doesn’t mean that it’s false. Your whole life and your whole reality is basically just what you sense. Whatever you see and feel is your experience and your reality within the universe. If you see something from a different perspective than someone else, it doesn’t mean that one of you has to be wrong. Neither of you are seeing the “real” thing and neither of you are seeing something that isn’t “real.” You’re both having a different experience based on your differing perspectives.
Whatever you see or feel is real even if it doesn’t exist to someone else. Your perception creates your reality and everyone has a totally unique perception, so everyone has a unique reality. We all live within the same infinite universe but we also all live within our own universes (our lives) with our own ideas and perceptions of the universe and about the purpose of life. Every person has a unique perception and reality, and everyone’s realities (lives) collide with each other and overlap in certain places, yet no two people could ever possibly have the same reality or the same life. Every perspective is unique and every unique perspective creates a unique person.
This meditation brought me to place in my mind from which to view the entire universe or at least any small section of it that I pleased. It brought me to a state of mind where I was completely at peace and aware of my entire body. I was equally aware of my big toe touching my next toe as I was of my chest rising and falling or my head resting on my pillow. Then the voice in the meditation told me to picture that I am the universe. It said to picture that I was no longer a human in a body, but rather that I was the infinite universe. You don’t have to tell me how crazy that sounds. Just become the universe, just picture that you are the ever-expanding, infinite universe and all it’s galaxies and black holes and who knows what else is out there millions and billions of light years away. So I did. Because in that meditative, totally calmed and open state of mind, it didn’t seem like an outrageous request. Just become the universe. Okay, if you say so. So I let my mind and my senses expand indefinitely, which is an incredible and mind-opening experience, to say the least.
Obviously, I am a human. I am not the entire universe. What I learned was that the entire universe is also within me. I am a very small human on a very small planet in a small solar system in a small galaxy in the gigantic, never ending universe. Yet somehow, as I pictured the universe and I pictured that I was the universe, it was almost like my body floated away and I was just left with my soul. I was just left with the love and energy and vibration of my pure soul. I was no longer aware of the feeling of my toes touching or my chest rising and falling or my head on my pillow. I felt like I went on forever and I had no real form or shape. I felt nothing at all but at the same time, I felt everything. I pictured that I was the universe and I expanded in every direction and I went on forever and ever and ever. So this is what I saw. My eyes were closed but as I thought about it and pictured it, my brain easily provided the image and made it real, creating this new reality right in front of me and all around me, except there was really no “me.” I wasn’t just picturing it, I was actually seeing it. My reality became the universe. I had no sense of my life or my body or any other thoughts or feelings. Everything I ever knew or felt just kind of floated away and I forgot that it had ever existed to begin with.
When I came back to my worldly self, although I don’t remember exactly how, I thought to myself, “I became the universe. I am the universe.” I woke up with a totally different perspective about the world and the more I thought about it, the more it started to make sense. While my body is limited to the physical world, my soul is not limited by my body. My mind and spirit are not limited by my physical body or the physical world. Even just writing about my experience and trying to picture what I saw and felt is almost like experiencing it again. Almost. It’s mind blowing to even think about it and to see my whole world and my whole reality in a totally different perspective and realize that there are no boundaries to my potential and there are no boundaries to where my soul and my mind can travel or what I can experience.
Right now, I’m in my bed. I have a knitted blanket around my shoulders and even though I’m looking at my laptop screen and can feel my fingers typing on the keyboard, I can see the walls of the room around me, the bright orange sheets underneath me and the light coming from the desk lamp in the corner. This is my reality at the moment. For all I know, the entire universe could not even exist outside of the confines of the room I am currently in. But as soon as I walk out the door to the kitchen or leave the building to take a walk, my reality will expand to those places. Everywhere I go and everything I experience expands my reality to another place or another point of view, all combining to create my own unique perspective and my own unique reality. While our universe is supposedly expanding, so are each of our realities and there’s never any possible endpoint. Our minds and lives expand infinitely with every new person we meet, every new place we visit, or every new idea we are introduced to. We can never go backward, we can never close our minds to things we’ve experienced, we can only grow and expand and open our minds.