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Audio: Oneness is a Verb
Sometime ago, I made this statement: Truth is the omnipotence of God expressing as the spiritual essence of every individual. As you consider this idea, you can see that the word expressing implies action or a process. Though God is expressing as us, the individual, we may often feel as if nothing could be further from the truth. It’s a nice idea that we accept in theory, but it doesn’t carry much practical weight.
I ran across a helpful analogy this week. I mentioned that my telescope had fallen out of alignment. This means that the primary and secondary mirrors needed to be collimated or aligned. Light enters the scope, reflects off a primary mirror to a secondary mirror, which is then directed to the eyepiece. If the primary and secondary mirrors are out of alignment, the image you see in the eyepiece – a star, for example – will be blurred. All attempts to focus the telescope and make the star a fine pinpoint of light will be in vain.
The word collimation means to make parallel. To collimate the telescope is to make the two mirrors parallel, thus allowing the eyepiece to focus. Now, think of the primary mirror, the one that receives and reflects the original starlight, as the soul. Think of the secondary mirror as consciousness, our belief system. If our consciousness is not in alignment with the true light that enters the soul, our spiritual vision will be blurred. In this case, prayer, our attempt to focus on some solution, is not achieved. James says we pray amiss. God is no less active than the ever-present starlight. It is our consciousness that is out of alignment with the soul.
We can think of meditation as the process of collimation, making the consciousness parallel with the soul. Prayer is the act of focusing, which is successful to the degree that soul and consciousness agree, that they are aligned in oneness. Just as the open telescope always receives starlight, we are in a perpetual state of oneness with God. Experiencing this oneness requires an active alignment, a letting go of life as we think it should be so we may behold the light of God as it is. It is then that our world comes into focus.