We are not alone...

Yesterday, a friend of ours came back from a couple of weeks' retreat, and what an experience it was just listening to her speak about it. She had been part of a large number of people who had gone away to study, meditate, discuss, and study some more; our friend had come back visibly transformed. Was it the rest, the tan, the chance to get away for a while, or something more? She gave me such inspiration, not just because of how she was, but because of the way I felt about how she was.

We all live our thoroughly modern little lives in our thoroughly modern little silos, blinkered and bunkered with our own fears, hopes, and petty likes and dislikes about ourselves and the world around us. If by some twist of fate we find we are no longer happy to accept our sorry lot, and, stumbling and groping in the murk of our modernity for glimmerings of what seem like knowledge and truth, then we are still left with one further mountain to climb: how are we supposed to really change anything, ourselves or our world, when there is just so much to change, and so little time in which to change it?

Our friend seemed to be showing me a way: don't think you can do it alone; don't even try.

We live in a world that seems, almost by design, to be driving us apart with its every attempt to bring us together: Religion preaches brotherhood, yet practices fratricide; Politics promises unity, yet delivers division; and Science offers answers to questions it clearly does not even understand.

Life seems to constantly provide us with only microscopes that, as one poet wrote, ‘deify one razor blade into a mountain range’; yesterday, our friend seemed to be showing a way to transform life's mountain ranges back into mustard seeds.

If we have spent all our lives thinking it's just oneself that we can rely on, just number one that we have to look after, just me here all alone, then, understandably, we may find it hard to think there is anything outside of our own intellect and effort to which we can turn to achieve anything.

Western philosophy has perhaps put too much store in the gnarly old epithet: "I think, therefore I am", a phrase that sounds less brilliant and more desperate with every passing war, technological disaster, and economic slow-down.

If we stopped thinking about ourselves for just long enough to look at each other properly, then we may be part of the way to getting ourselves out of our solipsistic little holes. After that, what if we could take the best of what we saw in others and make that part of our own make-up? What if we could then pass that on to others too?

Our friend, after spending a few short days in the company of other enlightened and illuminated souls, was able to bring back some of that light and illumination for me, just by being her own enlightened self. Everything seems possible when you are prepared to accept that you are part of something bigger than any mountain range in your way, and that the people around you are lighting the path to your own illumination.