Enlightening Nonsense

The park seemed to have a strange hush over it, as if God himself had shushed it like an unruly child. As I looked down the steps at the expanse of the night sky and the Bethesda Fountain and the lake reflecting the lights from The Boathouse, it was hard to tell if I was looking at a picturesque view of nature or a natural view of a picture.

When I got to my tree friend, I greeted him in the usual manner and leaned my back against him. He wrapped his arms around me and embraced me in a vacuum where the silence was deafening. It was as if I had entered the Creation of the universe and was at the “In the beginning…” part of the story.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.

And then suddenly my tree friend became God and said, “Let there be light” and a planet that was pregnant with possibility gave birth to Life. He pointed his conductor’s baton upwards and a slight wind arose and the rustling of branches broke the silence. Next he aimed his attention at the lake and a duck added his instrument to the music of the night. He then directed his stick into the distance and stirred awake the motor of a car. One by one he invited the musicians to join in and music started to fill the air and soon the once tranquil park was alive and thunderous with a full orchestra.

My tree friend was showing me how our ears have become deaf to the melodies that consistently play for us. By stopping the music altogether and then by adding one piece at a time to the ensemble, I could not only appreciate the song as if for the first time, but I could also discern each player who played their part in the Universal Company and what formerly sounded to me just like noise, now was a beautiful composition of harmony.

Each day we melt down individual contributions to the whole like crayons from a 64-piece set until they are a uniform brown mess. Lacking an appreciation for the coloring that each individual piece adds to the box, our drawings become nondescript. We seek Oneness yet in that Oneness we blind ourselves the ability to discern and appreciate our incomparable…and beautiful…differences.

And so we seek to limit the multitude of expressions of the spectrum—from Aquamarine to Denim to Navy to Turquoise—to only one ray of color that we call “Blue.” What was once a rainbow of manifestation now has become a uniform white light. And we are told that this is the ultimate goal, to come together and dissolve our uniqueness into blandness.

Without the individual trees, you don’t have a forest. Without the mountains and the sky, you don’t have a vista. And without the individual, you don’t have the whole.

My tree friend showed me that it is only when we honor each separate being as a part unto itself by listening to his music without trying to change his instrument or melody, that we can unite into a collective unit whose multitude of hues and shades and musicality can combine to draw any picture or play any song we can imagine from the infinite Source of our creativity.

He showed me that we are God and perhaps we have forgotten to start “In the beginning” and are trying to color our world with a brown piece of collective wax we call Oneness and instead of conceiving a paradise, we are creating a world of mediocrity.

“It is through the contrast of living in separate vessels that we [understand] our Divine connection more exquisitely.”

2012 Atlantean Revelations by Sri Ram Kaa & Kira Raa

I had to squint to see the beautiful Emerald as the light reflecting off its many facets caused my eyes to water. From where I stood, she seemed flawless. I dreamed of holding her, possessing her, gazing forever into her Emerald eyes.

And then I saw the rare Ruby that had only arrived today. I had briefly read about her in print years earlier. A mysterious disappearance…thought to be stolen…gone forever…only resurfacing this year.

She was pulsating with vibration and glowing with light. The closer I got to her, I could feel my whole body start to tremble. I asked the attendant if there was some special sound system used to cause this throbbing effect that penetrated to my bones like the heavy bass booming through a dance club’s speakers. He told me that the vibration came from the Ruby herself and that there was no additional amplification that created the effect.

“How about the glow?” I asked. “Clearly that is done with some kind of laser.” He told me that no external light was added, that her luminescence came from within.

I had gone to exhibits around the world and held many a precious stone in my hand, but this Ruby didn’t look like any other gem I had ever seen. Yes, she was somewhat circular, and somewhat shiny, but that was where the similarities ended. She wasn’t just a pretty stone—which they all were. She contained a life force that you could palpably feel when she was in your sight.

I brought my face right up to her display and could see my own reflection shining back at me, more handsome than any mirror had ever shown it. She seemed to make me look better than I was and I started to feel better than I had been.

This gangly, awkward, street kid that most had shied away from, thinking me dangerous or strange, had grown into a man in a suit. But my appearance never seemed to bring me any respect. No matter how much I tried to fit in, I was never accepted. But when she shone her light on me, in that instant I stopped being a man and became a brilliant gem myself. Staring into her face I became lost in her light. I don’t know how long I stood there motionless and I would have continued to be standing there like a stone if the man behind me hadn’t tapped me on the shoulder.

“She’s a beauty, eh sir?” said the man, snapping me out of my trance. He called me “sir,” a term of respect that I never seemed to get until she had lit up my own inner glow. I felt in her presence that the whole world was available to me, for now my dark shadows had melted away with the light she had lit inside of me.

And then I thought that perhaps this was the key to her beauty, that she focused her light on everyone who was around her, making us all glow a little brighter; from her container we were the precious stones.

I went back to where the Emerald was kept. And now I no longer had to squint to look at her, for once my eyes adjusted to the intense glow of the Ruby, the Emerald looked almost dim by comparison—still a beautiful piece, with shapes and curves, cut to perfection. But she didn’t make my heart come alive the way the Ruby did.

I realized it was my own light that was making the Emerald look so bright and when I no longer shined it on her, she looked just like an ordinary stone. And now my desire to make her my own was gone.

I went back to the museum every day. And the same lines I used to wait on eagerly to see the Emerald, now seemed to make me impatient. And so I said to myself that I would gladly see her if there was no line…but there always was. And soon I didn’t even try.

But I would wait for hours if need be to stand face to face with the Ruby that had not captured my heart, for she would never encase me with her love, but left it in my chest to beat faster when just thinking about her.