FROM ZERO TO ETERNITY

(FROM A WEEKEND NOTE, THE EDITOR'S LETTER IN STYLE WEEKEND, AUGUST 10, 2007. STYLE WEEKEND IS PUBLISHED EVERY FRIDAY AS A MAGAZINE INSERT IN MANILA BULLETIN)

What if God were all this space, including the space we occupy? It makes sense because then it’s not quite hard to imagine God to be omnipresent, omniscient, and therefore omnipotent. If He is all there is, then He is, knows, and has power over everything. Growing up as a Catholic, I couldn’t quite make up my mind how God could be everywhere, if, like me, He had a body, with only a pair of eyes to see everything that was taking place in an infinite universe.

Limited in his nature, infinite in his desire, man is a fallen god who remembers heaven —Alphonse de Lamartine

I have always taken it for granted that space is infinite, but then, now that I am thinking about it, how do I know that? Did I get that from science books or from my religion classes? Who has ever gone to the edge of the universe to determine that there is no such thing and that this vastness just goes on and on and on, ad infinitum?
But then over the past decade, in my search for more out of life, I’ve had many opportunities to explore what the enlightened call the infinity within. From Days with the Lord to PSI, from year-long weekly sessions with renowned counselor Dr. Lourdes Lapuz to feng shui consultations with the late Paul Lau and now Hong Kong geomancer Joseph Chau, from reading (and watching) stuff like Star Wars, Neale Donald Walsch’s Conversations with God, and James Redfield’s The Celestine Prophecy to meditation classes under Nouel Resella, I’ve come to believe there is more power in this space than I can imagine.
Sometimes, I try to simplify the whole concept of infinity, a concept I often interchange with God, by imagining the universe or God as a blackboard, minus the borders, of course. In its emptiness, it’s just a blackboard but in it can emerge other concepts, from letters to figures, and all you need is a piece of chalk. Draw a cat figure on the board and the board disappears into the background. All you see is a cat, a concept that can exist purely on its own or at least pretend to. The material on which it exists is, after all, often perceived as irrelevant, so that if I were to ask you what it was, you would probably just say, “It’s a cat!” rather than a cat on a board. But without the board, will this cat exist? Better yet, isn’t the cat just a part of the board, a part of the board that has now found a new meaning, perhaps a new purpose, as a cat? Which is not to say that the blackboard had no meaning before somebody drew a cat on it. On the contrary, the blackboard always has the power to be anything and everything. It is, to put it simply, a universe of infinite possibilities.
Sometimes, when I meditate, I try to focus on the vastness within me. It can be an empowering tool to imagine yourself plunging deep into the core of the earth or soaring to heights in the infinite space. For most schools of meditation the practice is reconnecting to or establishing oneness with all there was, all there is, all there will ever be. In most cases, it entails emptying yourself out or focusing on the immensity of space, devoid of any extraneous elements, including your own thoughts, or the emptiness of silence, devoid of even your own voice, which, in a chanting meditation, you tend to lose, exactly the point of endless repetition.
Now that I’m no longer sure if the universe is truly infinite, then I believe that all that space the wise ones keep leading us to can only be God. After all, what else is there, from here to eternity, that can be all there was, all there is, all there ever will be but God alone? The question is, when our religious leaders said we were created out of the image of God, did they mean this physical body, meaning eyes, ears, nose, ears, arms, legs, and all? Or is the image after which we were patterned the infinity within, what many call the True Self, that quiet vastness that is boundless, borderless, and edgeless, inside all of us? No wonder, meditation, like prayers, often requires us to close our eyes.

A
post me at aapatawaran@yahoo.com